Warrigal comments on Against picking up pennies - Less Wrong

-1 [deleted] 13 December 2009 06:07AM

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Tags: opportunity_costs standard_biases scope_insensitivity principles risk

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Comment author: Daniel_Burfoot 14 December 2009 06:46:30AM -1 points [-]

This is bullshit. It doesn't matter what the absolute risk of picking up the penny is; what matters is whether not picking up the penny is less risky than picking up the penny. And, in general, there is no particular reason to believe that there is any difference in risk between picking it up and not picking it up.

This is a deep and subtle fallacy. A course of action (or plan) that involves picking up a penny is more complicated than one that does not. Complex plans must be penalized in the same way that complex theories must be (a plan is really just a theory that a certain course of action will lead to a good outcome).

One of my strong personal beliefs is that people drastically underestimate how much complexity hurts.

Comment author: [deleted] 15 December 2009 03:31:25AM 2 points [-]

Complex plans must be penalized in the same way that complex theories must be (a plan is really just a theory that a certain course of action will lead to a good outcome).

Mm, no. Theories are mutually exclusive. The thing that makes a complex theory unlikely is the fact that it has 10^N, for large N, other theories to compete with. By your definition of a plan, plans are not mutually exclusive, so this analogy vanishes. Of course, you could define a plan as the theory that a certain course of action will lead to the best outcome out of all possible plans, in which case your statement would be true, but wouldn't apply: the agent that finds the best possible plan before acting starves to death, decays, and is forgotten long before ever eating the food in front of it.

Comment author: Daniel_Burfoot 15 December 2009 02:02:39PM 0 points [-]

I find this comment confusing. Represent a plan as a list of discrete actions. Then "X,Y" is different from "X,Y,Z" where X/Y/Z are actions. Picking "X,Y,Z" means you did not pick "X,Y". The number of plans is also exponential in the number of actions, so a more complex (longer) plan has an exponentially greater number of competitors.

Comment author: [deleted] 16 December 2009 05:58:08PM 0 points [-]

You defined a plan as a theory that a certain course of action will lead to a good outcome. Picking "X,Y,Z" does not mean you don't think "X,Y" will also lead to a good outcome. Therefore, they aren't really competitors.

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