jimrandomh comments on The Number Choosing Game: Against the existence of perfect theoretical rationality - Less Wrong

-1 Post author: casebash 29 January 2016 01:04AM

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Comment author: jimrandomh 11 January 2016 06:12:15PM 0 points [-]

The problem goes away if you add finiteness in any of a bunch of different places: restrict agents to only output decisions of bounded length, or to only follow strategies of bounded length, or expected utilities are constrained to finitely many distinct levels. (Making utility a bounded real number doesn't work, but only because there are infinitely many distinct levels close to the bound).

The problem also goes away if you allow agents to output a countable sequence of successively better decisions, and define an optimal sequence as one such that for any possible decision, a decision at least that good appears somewhere in the sequence. This seems like the most promising approach.

Comment author: casebash 12 January 2016 01:57:36AM 0 points [-]

Except that isn't the problem and this post isn't intended to address practicalities, so the criticism that this is unrealistic is irrelevant.