David_J_Balan comments on Rooting Hard for Overpriced M&Ms - Less Wrong

4 Post author: David_J_Balan 28 November 2009 07:10PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (34)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 November 2009 10:06:09PM 0 points [-]

Oops, the above should be, "total wealth differences in the region of $4", not "total bank account wealth differences". Hm. This is an interesting problem in approximate rationality - if your estimate of "bank account + wallet" and "bank account" is pretty much the same total number, and you learn how much money is in your wallet, what have you learned?

Comment author: David_J_Balan 28 November 2009 10:16:58PM 0 points [-]

It seems to me like you've learned only how much what's actually in your wallet deviated from your best guess about what was in there. If non-wallet wealth effects can be safely ignored, then learning of an $X dollar deviation can be taken as a shock of that size to your total wealth.