Warrigal comments on The basic questions of rationality - Less Wrong

25 [deleted] 22 August 2011 02:23AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 23 August 2011 02:16:50PM * 5 points [-]

In short: a method of answering questions should be judged not only on its benefits, but on its costs. So, another basic question of rationality is:

Q: When should we stop thinking about a question?

Comment author: Davorak 26 August 2011 06:36:39PM * 0 points [-]

Definitely when:

You are only going in circles. ** You need more data, to do so, you should preform an experiment.
You can no longer remember/track your best created strategies.
You can not judge value difference between new strategies and existing strategies.
You spend x percentage of your time tracking/remember your created strategies. Where x is significant.
There are better questions to consider.
The value of answering the question will diminish greatly if you spend more time trying to optimize it. ** "It is great you finished the test and got all the right answers but the test was over a week ago" -- extreme example some times .../years/months/weeks/days/hours/minutes/seconds/... count.

It can be a hard question to get right in my experience.