lessdazed comments on Pancritical Rationalism Can Apply to Preferences and Behavior - Less Wrong

1 Post author: TimFreeman 25 May 2011 12:06PM

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Comment author: JoshuaZ 25 May 2011 04:01:32PM 1 point [-]

One of the most important aspects of our epistemology with regards factual beliefs is that the set of beliefs a computationally unlimited agent should believe is uniquely determined by the evidence it has witnesses.

I don't think this is true. Aumann's agreement theorem shows that this is true in the limiting case assuming an infinite string of evidence. However, this isn't the case for any finite amount of evidence. Indeed, simply choose different versions of the Solomonoff prior (different formulations of Turing machines change the Kolmogorov complexity by at most a constant but that still changes the Solomonoff priors. It just means that two different sets of priors need to look similar overall.)

Comment author: lessdazed 25 May 2011 10:23:37PM 0 points [-]

Would a similar statement couched in terms of limits be true?

As an agent's computational ability increases, its beliefs should converge with those of similar agents regardless of their priors.

Comment author: TimFreeman 25 May 2011 10:51:27PM 1 point [-]

Would a similar statement couched in terms of limits be true?

As an agent's computational ability increases, its beliefs should converge with those of similar agents regardless of their priors.

The limit you proposed doesn't help. One's beliefs after applying Bayes' rule are determined by the prior and by the evidence. We're talking about a situation where the evidence is the the same and finite, and the priors differ. Having more compute power doesn't enter into it.