Less Wrong: Open Thread, September 2010

matt

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

People sometimes use "Aumann's agreement theorem" to mean "the idea that you should update on other people's opinions", and I agree this is inaccurate and it's not what I meant to say, but surely the theorem is a salient example that implicitly involves such updating. Should I have said Geanakoplos and Polemarchakis?

I think LWers have been using "Aumann agreement" to refer to the whole literature spawned by Aumann's original paper, which includes explicit protocols for Bayesians to reach agreement. This usage seems reasonable, although I'm not sure if it's standard outside of our community.

This community already hopefully accepts that one can learn from knowing other people's opinions without knowing their arguments

I'm not sure this is right... Here's what I wrote in Probability Space & Aumann Agreement:

But in such methods, the agents aren't just m

... (read more)

0Vladimir_Nesov16y

The theorem doesn't involve any updating, so it's not a salient example in discussion of updating, much less proxy for that. [...] To answer literally, simply not mentioning the theorem would've done the trick, since there didn't seem to be a need for elaboration.