Wei_Dai comments on Utility is unintuitive - Less Wrong

-5 Post author: jsteinhardt 09 December 2010 05:39AM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 16 June 2011 12:20:56AM 1 point [-]

Can someone who subscribes to VNM please justify why independence is a reasonable axiom?

Apparently there is a book length treatment of this question, titled Rationality and dynamic choice: foundational explorations. The author writes in the introduction:

The focus of this book is on normative and justificatory issues. I shall be concerned with the weak ordering and independence principles as normative for [...] preference and choice behavior.

And in the conclusion:

The conclusion to be derived from all this, however, is that CF and CIND - alternatively, WO and IND - cannot be secured by any of the versions of the pragmatic arguments I have explored. [...] And this means, in turn, that both the expected utility theorem and its correlative, the theorem concerning the existence of well-defined subjective probabilities, cannot be neatly grounded in a set of postulates that can themselves be defended by appeal to pragmatic considerations.

(Note that I just found this book today and have not yet read it. It does have more than 300 citations in Google Scholar.)

Comment author: jsteinhardt 16 June 2011 06:51:03PM 0 points [-]

Thanks for the reference! I'm impressed that you still remembered this thread 6 months after the fact.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 16 June 2011 07:05:15PM *  1 point [-]

I'm impressed that you still remembered this thread 6 months after the fact.

Actually what happened was, I read a comment of yours mentioning a lab that you worked in, was curious which lab, so started scanning all your comments starting from the earliest to see if you said more about it, noticed this comment, remembered that I had read a paper about whether independence is justified, couldn't find that paper but found the book instead.

BTW, what lab are you working in? ;)

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