AlephNeil 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: AlephNeil 21 December 2010 11:53:44AM *  5 points [-]

I'm not very familiar with the literature, but just off the top my head:

It seems to me that the force of 'Dutch book' type arguments can easily be salvaged from criticisms such as these.

there is no reason for anyone to actually make wagers in this manner. These are wagers which have zero expected gain and which presumably involve transaction costs. No rational person would make these wagers according to the Will-to-wager assumption.

OK. Rather than ask the subject whether they would make this wager, ask them, "if you were forced to accept one side of the wager or the other, which side would you prefer?" (Or "for which value of b would you become indifferent?")

Second, the argument presented above uses money and as we are all familiar, money has diminishing return.

Yes, but if the amounts of money are small enough relative to the subject's "bankroll" then it's a 'good enough' approximation. If necessary you could just arbitrarily stipulate that each person is going to be given an extra million bucks simply for taking part, but keep the stakes of the actual wager very low - just a few dollars.

(EDIT: I have removed a paragraph which was confused.)

Comment author: Vulture 25 April 2012 04:31:51AM 0 points [-]

I remembering that in another discussion where the diminshing return of money was given as an issue with a thought experiment, somebody suggested that you could eliminate the effect by just stipulating that (in the case of a wager) your winnings will be donated to a highly efficient charity that feeds starving children or something.

My own thoughts: If the amount of money involved is so small that it would be worthless to any charity, just multiply everything by a sufficiently large constant. If you run out of starving children, start researching a cure for cancer, and once that's cured you can start in on another disease, etc. Once all problems are solved, we can assume that the standard of living can be improved indefinitely.

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