Gary_Drescher comments on Reflection in Probabilistic Logic - Less Wrong

63 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 March 2013 04:37PM

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Comment author: Gary_Drescher 26 March 2013 08:17:57PM *  13 points [-]

Wow, this is great work--congratulations! If it pans out, it bridges a really fundamental gap.

I'm still digesting the idea, and perhaps I'm jumping the gun here, but I'm trying to envision a UDT (or TDT) agent using the sense of subjective probability you define. It seems to me that an agent can get into trouble even if its subjective probability meets the coherence criterion. If that's right, some additional criterion would have to be required. (Maybe that's what you already intend? Or maybe the following is just muddled.)

Let's try invoking a coherent P in the case of a simple decision problem for a UDT agent. First, define G <--> P("G") < 0.1. Then consider the 5&10 problem:

  • If the agent chooses A, payoff is 10 if ~G, 0 if G.

  • If the agent chooses B, payoff is 5.

And suppose the agent can prove the foregoing. Then unless I'm mistaken, there's a coherent P with the following assignments:

P(G) = 0.1

P(Agent()=A) = 0

P(Agent()=B) = 1

P(G | Agent()=B) = P(G) = 0.1

And P assigns 1 to each of the following:

P("Agent()=A") < epsilon

P("Agent()=B") > 1-epsilon

P("G & Agent()=B") / P("Agent()=B") = 0.1 +- epsilon

P("G & Agent()=A") / P("Agent()=A") > 0.5

The last inequality is consistent with the agent indeed choosing B, because the postulated conditional probability of G makes the expected payoff given A less than the payoff given B.

Is that P actually incoherent for reasons I'm overlooking? If not, then we'd need something beyond coherence to tell us which P a UDT agent should use, correct?

(edit: formatting)

Comment author: Gary_Drescher 09 April 2013 09:00:04PM 1 point [-]

It occurs to me that my references above to "coherence" should be replaced by "coherence & P(T)=1 & reflective consistency". That is, there exists (if I understand correctly) a P that has all three properties, and that assigns the probabilities listed above. Therefore, those three properties would not suffice to characterize a suitable P for a UDT agent. (Not that anyone has claimed otherwise.)