You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Lumifer comments on Open thread, 11-17 March 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: David_Gerard 11 March 2014 10:45PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (226)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Lumifer 12 March 2014 02:56:49PM 0 points [-]

The only point of probabilities is to have them guide actions.

I don't agree with that (a quick example is that speculating about the Big Bang is entirely pointless under this approach), but that's a separate discussion.

How does the concept of Knightian uncertainty help in guiding actions?

It allows you to not invent fake probabilities and suffer from believing you have a handle on something when in reality you don't.

Comment author: ShardPhoenix 14 March 2014 02:58:04AM 2 points [-]

a quick example is that speculating about the Big Bang is entirely pointless under this approach

Such speculation may help guide actions regarding future investments in telescopes, decisions on whether to try to look for aliens, etc.

Comment author: AlexSchell 15 March 2014 01:09:25AM *  0 points [-]

OK, I'll give you that we might non-instrumentally value the accuracy of our beliefs (even so, I don't know how unpack 'accuracy' in a way that can handle both probabilities and uncertainty, but I agree this is another discussion). I still suspect that the concept of uncertainty doesn't help with instrumental rationality, bracketing the supposed immorality of assigning probabilities from sparse information. (Recall that you claimed Knightian uncertainty was 'useful'.)