Dagon comments on Knightian Uncertainty and Ambiguity Aversion: Motivation - LessWrong

20 Post author: So8res 21 July 2014 08:32PM

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Comment author: Dagon 22 July 2014 07:16:09PM 2 points [-]

Now I'm really confused. It seems like my knowledge (confidence in my probability assessment) of the shape of a distribution is continuous in the same way as my knowledge (the probability assessment itself) about a discrete future experience. I never know absolutely nothing about it (alien spies: I at least know that I can't assign 0 to it). I also never know absolutely everything (there are very few actually perfect fair coins).

Are you saying that your belief in probability distributions is binary (or at least quantized to a small number of states)? You know it perfectly or you know nothing about it?

I don't get it well enough to be certain that I don't buy it, but that's where I'm currently leaning. Especially if you bite the bullet that uncertainty is about knowledge rather than about reality (probability is a limitation of a decision agent, not present in the base reality), this just makes no sense.

Comment author: Lumifer 22 July 2014 11:48:05PM 2 points [-]

It seems like my knowledge (confidence in my probability assessment) of the shape of a distribution is continuous

You are right. Knightian uncertainty isn't a separate discrete category, it's an endpoint of a particular interval on the other end of which sits uncertainty that you know everything about, e.g. the probability of drawing a red ball from an urn into which you have just placed 10 red and 10 black balls.

Knight himself called known uncertainty "risk" and unknown uncertainty "uncertainty". He wrote: Uncertainty must be taken in a sense radically distinct from the familiar notion of Risk, from which it has never been properly separated.... The essential fact is that 'risk' means in some cases a quantity susceptible of measurement, while at other times it is something distinctly not of this character; and there are far-reaching and crucial differences in the bearings of the phenomena depending on which of the two is really present and operating.... It will appear that a measurable uncertainty, or 'risk' proper, as we shall use the term, is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all."