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ThisSpaceAvailable comments on The non-Independence of superficially-Irrelevant Alternatives - Less Wrong
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I'm having trouble parsing the first paragraph. Behavior can't resemble a strategy; those are separate categories. The first paragraph seems to be saying "When animals violate certain axioms, their behavior is consistent with strategies that violate those axioms", which is so trivial I can't see the point of saying it. Or is the claim that the strategies that the behavior is consistent with, while appearing to violate the axioms, does in fact optimize for utility? Can you explain this more explicitly?
Does "animals of species S typically choose food A over food B in context X" fall into your "behavior" category or into your "strategy" category? It falls (loosely) into both for me: it is a behavior exhibited by the animals, but a priori one would expect a good possibility that this behavior is one part of an evolutionarily tuned strategy for survival.
Your final interpretation of the claim here was the correct one. It's not just that this set of apparently-irrational animal behaviors is part of the large class "apparently-irrational strategies", right next to "stare motionless at oncoming headlights"; it seems to be part of the narrower class "apparently-irrational strategies which turn out to be rational upon closer examination".
Sorry for my confusing wording.