Wei_Dai comments on Individual vs. Group Epistemic Rationality - Less Wrong

22 Post author: Wei_Dai 02 March 2010 09:46PM

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Comment author: SoullessAutomaton 03 March 2010 12:33:05AM *  3 points [-]

I'm inclined to agree with your actual point here, but it might help to be clearer on the distinction between "a group of idealized, albeit bounded, rationalists" as opposed to "a group of painfully biased actual humans who are trying to be rational", i.e., us.

Most of the potential conflicts between your four forms of rationality apply only to the latter case--which is not to say we should ignore them, quite the opposite in fact. So, to avoid distractions about how hypothetical true rationalists should always agree and whatnot, it may be helpful to make explicit that what you're proposing is a kludge to work around systematic human irrationality, not a universal principle of rationality.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 03 March 2010 12:53:29AM *  3 points [-]

In conventional decision/game theory, there is often conflict between individual and group rationality even if we assume idealized (non-altruistic) individuals. Eliezer and others have been working on more advanced decision/game theories which may be able to avoid these conflicts, but that's still fairly speculative at this point. If we put that work aside, I think my point about over- and under-confidence hurting individual rationality, but possibly helping group rationality (by lessening the public goods problem in knowledge production), is a general one.

There is one paragraph in my post that is not about rationality in general, but only meant to apply to humans, but I made that pretty clear, I think:

Even amongst altruists (at least human ones) ...

Comment author: nerzhin 03 March 2010 05:53:59PM 1 point [-]

Then why the appeal to human biases? Here:

If you're overconfident in an idea, then you would tend to be more interested in working out its applications. Conversely, if you're underconfident in it (i.e., are excessively skeptical), you would tend to work harder to try to find its flaws.

For ideal rational agents with converging confidences, you could still get a spread of activities (not confidence levels) in a community, because if an angle (excessive skepticism for example) is not being explored enough, the potential payoff for working on it increases even if your confidence remains unchanged. But you seem to want to change activities by changing confidence levels, that is, hacking human irrationality.