DSimon comments on The Power of Noise - Less Wrong

28 Post author: jsteinhardt 16 June 2014 05:26PM

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Comment author: Lumifer 16 June 2014 06:16:17PM 0 points [-]

This illustrates how randomness can be used to improve market liquidity.

While an interesting idea, I believe most people just call this "gambling".

Requiring that the inputs to a piece of software follow some probability distribution is the opposite of being modular.

I don't understand this. It's perfectly fine for a module (an object) to declare what kind of inputs it will accept. Modularity in software basically means "write to the declared interface and treat internals as a black box" and I don't see why requiring a particular set of inputs is a problem.

Overall, though, I agree -- randomness is highly useful in the real world where even if an optimal solution is known to exist it is often the case that you can't spend the resources (notably, time) to figure it out.

Comment author: DSimon 17 June 2014 02:41:40PM *  2 points [-]

While an interesting idea, I believe most people just call this "gambling".

I'm not sure what you're driving at here. A gambling system where everybody has a net expected gain is still a good use of randomness.

Comment author: Lumifer 17 June 2014 04:20:32PM 0 points [-]

A gambling system where everybody has a net expected gain

So what's the difference between a market where you can buy a chance to get some asset for cash, and a casino where you can buy a chance to get some asset for cash? You have non-coerced humans doing voluntary transactions in both of them.

Don't forget that you still need a counterparty in the markets.