Wei_Dai comments on Fair Division of Black-Hole Negentropy: an Introduction to Cooperative Game Theory - Less Wrong
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Comments (34)
You're the second person to not like to black hole example. It happens to be something I was thinking about, and found a solution for in cooperative game theory. Maybe it's not ideal for pedagogy, but it does have the advantage of being a "real-world" example.
For other examples, as well as the theoretical considerations that led to Shapley Value, see chapter 5 of the book I linked to, or the Wikipedia entry on Shapley Value.
Harvesting negentropy by dropping mass into black holes is not a real world example, it is a far future sci-fi example.
I'd have to disagree with that. It's a far-future science example and an obvious default one given the current model of physics for anyone who understands thermodynamics. Okay, it may take some explaining before it's equally obvious to everyone, but it is, in fact, obvious. Especially if you want value that scales nonlinearly with material. I find it difficult to put into mere words just how obvious this is - it far exceeds the obviousness of, say, using gold to talk about inflation, when the choice of those particular atoms is completely arbitrary in a grand physical sense.
Yes, in some sense it's an obvious default, which seems to go largely unrecognized (even by those who understand thermodynamics), maybe due to a bias towards thinking that value scales linearly with material. But I don't want to claim too much. There are a number of caveats I didn't mention in my post:
That doesn't seem like a partly useful meaning of "obvious."
The real issue is that most people don't believe in the future. Do you want that as a prereq for game theory? does it have positive propaganda value? (I'd guess that it has negative propaganda value, but I'd also guess that the people complaining are incorrect about how distracting it is.)
Obligatory "obvious" joke: http://www.basicjokes.com/djoke.php?id=803
Beat me to it. Link.
See also: "Trivial".