Morendil comments on Reacting to Inadequate Data - Less Wrong

-3 Post author: MrHen 18 December 2009 04:25PM

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Comment author: MrHen 18 December 2009 07:38:14PM 0 points [-]

Your usual sensory information is inadequate data. You're dealing with that every day. This seems a good starting point to generalize from; brains in vats seem like overkill to approach the question.

Agreed. Brains-in-vats was one of the original questions that I was pondering and the specific questions were narrowed into goofy sensory data. Narrowing that down provided the two scenarios.

Should they act differently ? There's nothing in the information you've provided that seems to break the symmetry in uncertainty, so I'd say no.

What I find interesting is that Bob has more information than Alice but is stuck with the same problem. I found it counter-intuitive that more information did not help provide an action. Is it better to think of Bob as having no more information than Alice?

Adding a memory of Blue to Alice seems like adding information and provides a clear action. Additionally adding a memory of Red removes the clear action. Is this because there is now doubt in the previous information? Or... ?

Should they circle more than one color ? ... And other variants - you've given no reasons to prefer one outcome to another, so in general we can't say how they should act.

Why wouldn't Bob circle both Red and Blue if given the option?

Comment author: Morendil 18 December 2009 09:23:02PM 2 points [-]

What I find interesting is that Bob has more information than Alice but is stuck with the same problem

Yes, it seems that Bob has more information than Alice.

This is perhaps a good context to consider the supposed DIKW hierarchy: data < information < knowledge < wisdom. Or the related observation from Bateson that information is "a difference that makes a difference".

We can say that Bob has more data than Alice, but since this data has no effect on how Bob may weigh his choices, it's a difference that makes no difference.

Is this because there is now doubt in the previous information ?

"Doubt" is data, too (or what Jaynes would call "prior information"). Give Alice a memory of a blue ball, but at the same time give her a reason (unspecific) to doubt her senses, so that she reasons "I recall a blue ball, but I don't want to take that into account." This has the same effect as giving Bob conflicting memories.

Comment author: MrHen 18 December 2009 09:53:02PM 0 points [-]

We can say that Bob has more data than Alice, but since this data has no effect on how Bob may weigh his choices, it's a difference that makes no difference.

Okay, that makes sense to me.

Give Alice a memory of a blue ball, but at the same time give her a reason (unspecific) to doubt her senses, so that she reasons "I recall a blue ball, but I don't want to take that into account." This has the same effect as giving Bob conflicting memories.

Ah, okay, that makes a piece of the puzzle click into place.

In DIKW terms, what happens when we add Blue to Alice? When we later add Red? My hunch is that the label on the data simply changes as the set of data becomes useful or useless.

Also, would anything change if we add "Green" to Bob's choice list? My guess is that it would because Bob's memories of Red and Blue are useful in asking about Green. Specifically, there is no memory of Green and there are a memories of Red and Blue.

Interesting.

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