Larks comments on David Deutsch on How To Think About The Future - Less Wrong

4 Post author: curi 11 April 2011 07:08AM

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Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 April 2011 07:31:53PM 2 points [-]

and how much updating you can have done with the evidence you've recieved.

Why can't it happen that you have so little and/or such weak evidence, that the amount of precision you should have is none at all?

Comment author: Larks 10 April 2011 08:03:45PM 0 points [-]

Well, your prior gives you a unique value, and bayes theorem is a function, so it gives you a unique value for every input.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 April 2011 08:50:33PM 2 points [-]

Well, your prior gives you a unique value,

So the claim is that you have arbitrary precision priors. What are they, and where are they stored?

Comment author: Larks 10 April 2011 09:38:21PM 0 points [-]

Sorry, I haven't been very clear. A perfect bayesian agent would have a unique real number to represent it's level of belief in every hypothesis.

The betting-offer system I described about can force people (and force any hypothetical agent) to assign unique values.

Of course, an actual person won't be capable of this level of precision or coherence.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 April 2011 08:17:05PM 1 point [-]

Yes, but actually computing that function is computationally intractable in all but the simplest examples.