TheOtherDave comments on Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points - Less Wrong

49 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 October 2007 01:59AM

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Comment author: TheOtherDave 07 February 2013 09:05:33PM 0 points [-]

Agreed that it's a lot easier to talk about flaws in specific methodologies than flaws in broad goals.

Agreed that a decision theory is a methodology by which someone could practice instrumental rationality, and there's a fair amount of talk around here about what kinds of decision theories are best in what kinds of scenarios. Most of it goes over my head; I don't really know what it would mean to apply the different decision theories that get talked about here to real-world situations.

Agreed that there could be a methodology that may apply/help with practicing epistemic rationality. Or many of them.

Agreed that in the absence of complete information about the world, our ability to maximize expected value will always be constrained, and that this is a shortcoming of instrumental rationality viewed in isolation. (Not so much when compared to alternatives, since all the alternatives have the same shortcoming.)