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cousin_it comments on An introduction to decision theory - Less Wrong
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Comments (27)
Sorry for deleting my comment - on reflection it sounded too harsh.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't think you're promoting the greater good when you write an intuitive tutorial on a confused topic without screaming in confusion yourself. What's the hurry, anyway? Why not make some little bits perfectly clear for yourself, and write then?
Here's an example of an intuitive explanation (of an active research topic, no less) written by someone whose thinking is crystal clear: Cosma Shalizi on causal models. One document like that is worth a thousand "monad tutorials" written by Haskell newbies.
Maybe there should be a top-level post on how causal decision theory is like burritos?
I can't believe you just wrote that. The whole burrito thing is just going to confuse people, when it's really a very straightforward topic.
Just think of decision theory as if it were cricket...
At least that would be a change from treating decision theory as if it were all about prison.
I don't think you've sounded harsh. You obviously disagree with me but I think you've done so politely.
I guess my feeling is that different people learn differently and I'm not as convinced as you seem to be that this is the wrong way for all people to learn (as opposed to the wrong way for some people to learn). I grant that I could be wrong on this but I feel that I, at the very least, would gain something from this sort of tutorial. Open to be proven wrong if there's a chorus of dissenters.
Obviously, I could write a better explanation of decision theory if I had researched the area for years and had a better grasp of it. However, that's not the case, so I'm left to decide what should do given the experience I do have.
I am writing this hoping that doing so will benefit some people.
And doing so doesn't stop me writing a better tutorial when I do understand the topic better. I can still do that when that time occurs and yet create something that hopefully has positive value for now.
Thx for the Shalizi link. I'm currently slogging my way through Pearl, and Shalizi clarifies things.
At first I thought that AdamBell had invented Evidential Decision Theory from whole cloth, but I discover by Googling that it really exists. Presumably it makes sense for different problems - it certainly did not for the baby-kissing story as presented.
As far as I know, there's still no non-trivial formalization of the baby-kissing problem (aka Smoking Lesion). I'd be happy to be proved wrong on that.