Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

lukeprog

This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

Ask away!

Previously: round 1, round 2, round 3

From the original thread:

This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

Ask away!

I don't understand what you mean. Can you give me an example of preferences that are intransitive but not cyclic?

A little bit of googling turned up this paper by Gustafsson (2010) on the topic, which says that indifference allows for intransitive preferences that do not create a strict cycle. For instance, A>B, B>C, and C=A.

The obvious solution is to add epsilon to break the indifference. If A>B, then there exists e>0 such that A>B+e. And if e>0 and C=A, then C+e>A. So A>B+e, B+e>C+e, and C+e>A, which gives you a strict cycle that allows for money pumping. Gustafsson calls this the small-bonus approach.

Gustafsson suggests an alterna... (read more)

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

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