Vaniver comments on Open thread 7th september - 13th september - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (146)
I think it's simpler, but not by much. Instead of knowing both the value and cost of everything, you just need to know the cost of everything. (The 'actual' cost, that is, not the full economic cost, which by including opportunity cost includes the value problem.) You could probably get away with an approximation of the cost, though a guarantee like "at least as high as the actual cost" is probably helpful.
So if Lawrence says "I'll pay up to $10 for a hamburger," either it can find a plan that provides Lawrence a hamburger for less than $10 (gross cost, not net cost), or it says "sorry, can't find anything at that price range."
I think there's a huge amount of work to get there--you have to have an idea of 'gross cost' that matches up well enough with our intuitions, which is an intuition-encoding problem and thus hard. (If it tweets at the local burger company to get a coupon for a free burger, what's the cost?)