An alternative to always having a precise distribution over outcomes is imprecise probabilities: You represent your beliefs with a set of distributions you find plausible.
And if you have imprecise probabilities, expected value maximization isn't well-defined. One natural generalization of EV maximization to the imprecise case is maximality:[1] You prefer A to B iff EV_p(A) > EV_p(B) with respect to every distribution p in your set. (You're permitted to choose any option that you don't disprefer to something else.)
If you don’t endorse either (1) imprecise probabilities or (2) maximality given imprecise probabilities, I’m interested to hear why.
- ^
I think originally due to Sen (1970); just linking Mogensen (2020) instead because it's non-paywalled and easier to find discussion of Maximality there.
Maximality seems asymmetrical and losing information?
Maybe it will help me to have an example though I'm not sure if this is a good one… if I have two weather forecasts that provide different probabilities for 0 inches, 1 inch, etc but I have absolutely no idea about which forecast is better, and I don't want to go out if there is greater than 20% probability of more than 2 inches of rain then I'd weigh each forecast equally and calculate the probability from there. If the forecasts themselves provide a high/low probabilities for 0 inches, 1 inch, etc then I'd think this isn't a very good forecast since the forecaster should either have combined all their analysis into a single probability (say 30%) or else given the conditions under which they give their low end (say 10%) or high end (say 40%) and then if I didn't have any opinions on the probability of those conditions then I would weigh the low and high equally (and get 25%). Do you think I should be doing something different (or what is a better example)?
I think I'm happy to say that in this example, you're warranted in reasoning like: "I have no information about the biases of the three coins except that they're in the range [0.2, 0.7]. The space 'possible biases of the coin' seems like a privileged space with respect to which I can apply the principle of indifference, so there's a positive motivation for having a determinate probability distribution about each of the three coins centered on 0.45."
But many epistemic situations we face in the real world, especially when reasoning about the far future, are ... (read more)