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alex_zag_al comments on Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People - Less Wrong
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"For a true Bayesian, information would never have negative expected utility."
Is this true in general? It seems to me that if a Bayesian has limited information handling ability, then they need to give some thought (not too much!) to the risks of being swamped with information and of spending too many resources on gathering information.
Yeah, certainly. The search might be expensive. Or, some of its resources might be devoted to distinguishing the most relevant among the information it receives - diluting its input with irrelevant truths makes it work harder to find what's really important.
An interpretation of the original statement that I think is true, though, is that in all these cases, receiving the information and getting a little more knowledgeable offsets the negative utility of whatever price was paid for it. The negative utility of the combination of search+learning is always negative because of the searching part of it - if you kept the searching but removed the learning at the end, it'd be even worse.