Stuart_Armstrong comments on Continuity axiom of vNM - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 30 July 2014 04:27PM

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Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 31 July 2014 03:18:30PM *  2 points [-]

At the very minimum, you need to have a distributivity law for lotteries. If 50%(50%A+50%B)+50%(50%A+50%C) is not defined to be the same thing as 50%A+25%B+25%C, then it's easy to find counter-examples...

Comment author: owencb 31 July 2014 03:26:50PM 2 points [-]

Yes, I think in the classical conception of lotteries these are regarded as the same. You could reject that, but it seems like it would be similar to how some people think that (A, when B was on the table) is a different outcome from (A, when B was not on the table), and so may be assigned a different utility.