That's intersting; I'm approaching it from the perspective of welfare economics, not computer science, but the approaches you are describing sound promising. I'll need to look into them more. The problem is that there is a wide gulf between making decisions and delegating someone to do so.
My view is that if we have no metric for assessing whether a decision is good, it's hard to talk about making good decisions. We need coherent metrics, and partial orderings like pareto are only useful when we constrain the decision models to fit what our math can handle! (Instead of handling whatever portions of reality we can using our math, and admitting that the world is more complex than we can currently model.)
Just reading up on welfare economics a bit, so apologies if I say anything incorrect. I have a lot to read up on!
The problem is that there is a wide gulf between making decisions and delegating someone to do so.
True. My approach does rely on delegating decisions to actors. The open question in my mind is if we can create systems such that actors are encouraged to make good decisions or adopt good decision making processes*.
From my point of view some form of welfare economics (or decision markets) may be one of the processes that actor would be have inc...
Discussion article for the meetup : Group Decision Making (the good, the bad, and the confusion of welfare economics)
WHEN: 08 May 2013 07:00:00PM (-0700)
WHERE: West Los Angeles (At the Westside Tavern Upstair Wine Bar)
Where: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters. The entrance sign says "Lounge".
Parking is free for 3 hours
Or you can take a Public Transit! A Trip Planner can be found here: http://socaltransport.org/tm_pub_start.php <- So you can try to avoid multiple hour trips! (We appreciate your attendance despite length of commute!)
We will hang out for 30 minutes or so, then I'll spend 10-15 minutes presenting: Group decision making. AKA Why voting can be a stupid way to make utility decisions, AKA Adding utility between people is stupid, this is an ordinal scale AKA Didn't Arrow win a Nobel prize for telling you people to stop?
Then we'll talk about what math and economics can say about making collective decisions in a way that isn't ill defined, and continue a hopefully interesting discussion. (Bonus points if it leads to a publishable idea for me!)
This will be a great break for me from... writing papers and taking tests about the same subject.
No foreknowledge or exposure to Less Wrong is necessary; this will be generally accessible and useful to anyone who values thinking for themselves. That said, it might help to read http://lesswrong.com/lw/ggm/pinpointing_utility/ so we can avoid type errors and radiation poisoning while we talk. (Not real radiation poisoning!)
Discussion article for the meetup : Group Decision Making (the good, the bad, and the confusion of welfare economics)