Sniffnoy comments on Dutch Books and Decision Theory: An Introduction to a Long Conversation - Less Wrong

19 Post author: Jack 21 December 2010 04:55AM

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Comment author: Sniffnoy 21 December 2010 06:18:39AM *  2 points [-]

Hm. I'd been meaning to ask about this apparent circularity in the foundations for a bit, and now this tells me the answer is "we don't know yet".

(Specifically: VNM proves the analogue of the "will-to-wager" assumption, but of course it assumes our usual notion of probability. Meanwhile Dutch book argument proves that you need our usual notion of probability - assuming the notion of utility! I guess we can say these at least demonstrate the two are equivalent in some sense. :P )

Comment author: scmbradley 17 January 2012 05:29:55PM 1 point [-]

Savage's representation theorem in Foundations of Statistics starts assuming neither. He just needs some axioms about preference over acts, some independence concepts and some pretty darn strong assumptions about the nature of events.

So it's possible to do it without assuming a utility scale or a probability function.

Comment author: Sniffnoy 17 January 2012 11:19:53PM 1 point [-]

I suppose this would be a good time to point anyone stumbling on this thread to my post that I later wrote on that theorem. :)