Rationality Quotes: November 2010

jaimeastorga2000

A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

I agreed with everything you said after "I don't think so". So I am left confused as to why you don't think so.

You analogize DT problems as test data used to determine whether we should accept or reject a decision theory. I am claiming that our requirements (i.e. "reflective consistency") are so unrealistic that we will always be able to find test data forcing us to reject. Why do you not think so?

Because I suspect that there are only so many functionally different types of connections between events (at the very least, I see no hint that there must be infinitely many) and once you've found them all you will have the possibility of writing a DT that can't be led to corner itself into suboptimal outcomes due to blind spots.

0Vladimir_Nesov16y

Decision theories should usually be seen as normative, not descriptive. How "realistic" something is, is not very important, especially for thought experiments. Decision theory cashes out where you find a situation that can indeed be analyzed with it, and where you'll secure a better outcome by following theory's advice. For example, noticing acausal control has advantages in many real-world situations (Parfit's Hitchhiker variants). Eliezer's TDT paper discusses this towards the end of Part I.