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.

gjm comments on Open Thread August 31 - September 6 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: Elo 30 August 2015 09:26PM

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

Comments (326)

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

Comment author: evand 01 September 2015 02:59:41PM 1 point [-]

I'm looking for a good demonstration of Aumann's Agreement Theorem that I could actually conduct between two people competent in Bayesian probability. Presumably this would have a structure where each player performs some randomizing action, then they exchange information in some formal way in rounds, and eventually reach agreement.

A trivial example: each player flips a coin in secret, then they repeatedly exchange their probability estimates for a statement like "both coin flips came up heads". Unfortunately, for that case they both agree from round 2 onwards. Hal Finney has a version that seems to kinda work, but his reasoning at each step looks flawed. (As soon as I try to construct a method for generating the hints, I find that at each step when I update my estimate for my opponent's hint quality, I no longer get a bounded uniform distribution.)

So, what I'd like: a version that (with at least moderate probability) continues for multiple rounds before agreement is reached; where the information communicated is some sort of simple summary of a current estimate, not the information used to get there; where the math at each step is simple enough that the game can be played by humans with pencil and paper at a reasonable speed.

Alternate mechanisms (like players alternate communication instead of communicating current states simultaneously) are also fine.

Comment author: gjm 02 September 2015 11:20:51AM 2 points [-]

The two-coins example might be useful as a first step, even if you then present a more difficult one.