= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Nominull comments on Why you must maximize expected utility - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (75)
People can't order outcomes from best to worst. People exhibit circular preferences. I, myself, exhibit circular preferences. This is a problem for a utility-function based theory of what I want.
Interesting. Example of circular preferences?
There's a whole literature on preference intransitivity, but really, it's not that hard to catch yourself doing it. Just pay attention to your pairwise comparisons when you're choosing among three or more options, and don't let your mind cover up its dirty little secret.
Yup. Possible cause: motivations are caused by at least 3 totally different kinds of processes which often conflict.
Can you give an example of circular preferences that aren't contextual and therefore only superficially circular (like Benja's Alice and coin-flipping examples are contextual and only superficially irrational), and that you endorse, rather than regarding as bugs that should be resolved somehow? I'm pretty sure that any time I feel like I have intransitive preferences, it's because of things like framing effects or loss aversion that I would rather not be subject to.
That does happen to me from time to time, but when it does (and I notice that) I just think “hey, I've found a bug in my mindware” and try to fix that. (Usually it's a result of some ugh field.)
This would mean, of course, that humans can be money-pumped. In other words, if this is really true, there is a lot of money out there "on the table" for anyone to grab by simply money-pumping arbitrary humans. But in real life, if you went and tried to money-pump people, you would not get very far. But I accept a weaker form of what you are saying, that in the normal course of events when people are not consciously thinking about it we can exhibit circular reasoning. But in a situation where we actually are sitting down and thinking and calculating about it, we are capable of “resolving” those apparently circular preferences.
No, not "of course". It only implies that if they're rational actors, which of course they are not. They are deal-averse and if they see you trying to pump them around in a circle they will take their ball and go home.
You can still profit by doing one step of the money pump, and people do. Lots of research goes into exploiting people's circular preferences on things like supermarket displays.
I think you are taking my point as something stronger than what I said. As you pointed out, with humans you can often money pump them once, but not more than that. So it can not truly be said that that preference is fully circular. It is something weaker, and perhaps you could call it a semi-circular preference. My point was that the thing that humans exhibit is not a “circular preference” in the fullest technical sense of the term.
Well...