shminux comments on Willing gamblers, spherical cows, and AIs - Less Wrong

15 Post author: ChrisHallquist 08 April 2013 09:30PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (40)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 08 April 2013 09:50:37PM *  14 points [-]

Humans are not only gambling when another human explicitly offers them a bet. Humans implicitly gamble all the time: for example, when you cross the street, you're gambling that the probability that you might get hit by a car and die doesn't outweigh whatever gain you expect from crossing the street (e.g. getting to school or work). Dutch book arguments in this context are an argument that if an agent doesn't play according to the rules of probability, then under adversarial assumptions the world can screw them over. It's valuable to know what can happen under adversarial assumptions even if you don't expect those assumptions to hold.

Therefore, it seems that making inaccurate probability estimates is compatible with success in a fields that require making decisions with uncertain outcomes.

This isn't strong evidence; you're mixing up P(is successful | makes good probability estimates) with P(makes good probability estimates | is successful).

Comment author: shminux 08 April 2013 10:05:02PM 2 points [-]

What would be such adversarial assumptions in your street-crossing example?

Comment author: HonoreDB 08 April 2013 11:09:21PM *  13 points [-]

I'm standing at a 4-way intersection. I want to go the best restaurant at the intersection. To the west is a three-star restaurant, to the north is a two-star restaurant, and to the northwest, requiring two street-crossings, is a four-star restaurant. All of the streets are equally safe to cross except for the one in between the western restaurant and the northern one, which is more dangerous. So going west, then north is strictly dominated by going north, then west. Going north and eating there is strictly dominated by going west and eating there. This means that if I cross one street, and then change my mind about where I want to eat based on the fact that I didn't die, I've been dutch-booked by reality.

That might need a few more elements before it actually restricts you to VNM-rationality.

Comment author: SilasBarta 23 April 2013 08:21:05PM 0 points [-]

Where is reality's corresponding utility gain?

Comment author: HonoreDB 30 April 2013 03:46:58PM 0 points [-]

The bad news is there is none. The good news is that this means, under linear transformation, that there is such a thing as a free lunch!