Steve_Rayhawk comments on What is control theory, and why do you need to know about it? - Less Wrong

40 Post author: RichardKennaway 28 April 2009 09:25AM

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Comment author: Steve_Rayhawk 30 April 2009 02:00:28AM *  1 point [-]

(Not all of your knowledge about possible future reference signals and possible future delayed effects of past disturbances is represented, only your knowledge about possible future differences between them.)

So this isn't a sufficient statistic, it's only a sufficient-for-policy-implications statistic. Is there a name for that?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 27 June 2009 05:32:26PM -1 points [-]

All "sufficient" statistics are only "sufficient" for some particular set of policy or epistemic implications. You could always care about the number of 1 bits, if you're allowed to care about anything.

Comment author: Steve_Rayhawk 28 June 2009 02:41:11AM *  2 points [-]

Then every "sufficient-for-policy-implications" statistic can become a "sufficient-for-implications-for-beliefs-about-the-future" statistic, under a coarsening of the sample space by some future-action-preserving and conditional-ratios-of-expected-payoff-differences-preserving equivalence relation?

(Would we expect deliberative thinking and memory to physically approximate such coarsenings, as linear controllers do?)

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