satt comments on Epistemic and Instrumental Tradeoffs - Less Wrong

20 Post author: katydee 19 May 2013 07:49AM

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Comment author: ThrustVectoring 19 May 2013 12:45:35PM 5 points [-]

The article seems quite incomplete without even mentioning value-of-information. Instrumental and epistemic rationality have the same goals when the VOI of learning things is positive, and opposite goals when the total VOI is negative. Now, it may be hard to capture the VOI of, say, movie spoilers and truths that are bad for you, but the typical piece of information is positive VOI. In other words, most information merely lets you make better choices, as opposed to influencing your experiences in a predicted-in-advance negative manner.

This is basically the entire reasoning for going on an information diet. Not all truths are of equal value to you, so if you can deliberately get only the high value truths, you're consistently better off.

Comment author: satt 19 May 2013 05:07:14PM 1 point [-]

And when applying/calculating VoI, allow for the opportunity cost of harvesting information. A truth might have positive VoI in itself, but its effective net VoI might be negative if reaching that truth eats up one's time, money, attention, effort, or other resources.