Larks comments on The Pleasures of Rationality - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (42)
The wiki entry does not look good to me.
This sentence is problematic. Beliefs are probabilistic, and the import of some rationalist's estimate varies according to one's own knowledge. If I am fairly certain that a rationalist has been getting flawed evidence (that is selected to support a proposition) and thinks the evidence is probably fine, that rationalist's weak belief that that proposition is true is, for me, evidence against the proposition.
Iterative updating is a method rationalists can use when they can't share information (as humans often can't do well), but that is a process the result of which is agreement, but not Aumann agreement.
Aumann agreement is a result of two rationalists sharing all information and ideally updating. It's a thing to know so that one can assess a situation after two reasoners have reached their conclusions based on identical information, because if those conclusions are not identical, then one or both are not perfect rationalists. But one doesn't get much benefit from knowing the theorem, and wouldn't even if people actually could share all their information; if one updates properly on evidence, one doesn't need to know about Aumann agreement to reach proper conclusions because it has nothing to do with the normal process of reasoning about most things, and likewise if one knew the theorem but not how to update, it would be of little help.
As Vladmir_Nesov said:
It's especially unhelpful for humans as we can't share all our information.
As Wei_Dei said:
So Wei_Dei's use is fine, as in his post he describe's its limited usefulness.
As I don't understand this at all, perhaps this sentence is fine and I badly misunderstand the concepts here.
No, this is not the case. All they need is a common prior and common knowledge of their probabilities. The whole reason Aumann agreement is clever is because you're not sharing the evidence that convinced you.
See, for example, the original paper.
Updated. (My brain, I didn't edit the comment.)