Rain 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: Rain 04 March 2010 03:48:29PM *  2 points [-]

A better strategy may be to inject a 5% random walk from what is purely rational (actual value subject to further analysis), or to pick 5% of topics or actions at random to do a larger random walk.

That is to say, if there are 10 rationalists who agree that a particular action should be done with 99% certainty, perhaps one of them would roll the 5% randomness on that particular topic, and go a contrary path with potentially negative effects for him individually, but providing unexpected benefits to the group.

Is there any literature on how injections of randomness in this way might effect the value of rational decision making? "Literally everybody does the same thing" does not intuitively seem robust, despite a high degree of certainty.