= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
"Thermodynamics standpoint" care to elaborate?
I'm not the OP. I guess they meant that by feeding plants to animals instead of eating the plants themselves, you are letting the animal waste a lot of energy.
View more: Prev
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
"Thermodynamics standpoint" care to elaborate?
I'm not the OP. I guess they meant that by feeding plants to animals instead of eating the plants themselves, you are letting the animal waste a lot of energy.
View more: Prev
I usually understand "regret" in the context of game theory to mean that I would choose to do something different in the same situation (which also means having the same information).
That's different from "regret" in the normal English sense, which roughly speaking means I have unpleasant feelings about a decision or state of affairs.
For example, in the normal sense I can regret things that weren't choices in the first place (e.g., I can regret having been born), regret decisions I would make the same way with the same information (I regret having bet on A rather than B), and regret decisions I would make the same way even knowing the outcome (I regret that I had to shoot that mugger, but I would do it again if I had to). In the game-theory sense none of those things are regret.
There are better English words for what's being discussed here -- "reject" comes to mind -- but "regret" is conventional. I generally think of it as jargon.
Sorry to bring up such an old thread, but I have a question related to this. Consider a situation in which you have to make a choice between a number of actions, then you receive some additional information regarding the consequences of these actions. In this case there are two ways of regretting your decision, one of which would not occur for a perfectly rational agent. The first one is "wishing you could have gone back in time with the information and chosen differently". The other one (which a perfectly rational agent wouldn't experience) is "wishing you could go back in time, even without the information, and choose differently", that is, discovering afterwards (e.g. by additional thinking or sudden insight) that your decision was the wrong one even with the information you had at the time, and that if you were put in the same situation again (with the same knowledge you had at the beginning), you should act differently.
Does English have a way to distinguish these two forms of regret (one stemming from lack of information, the other from insufficent consideration)? If not, does some other language have words for this we could conveniently borrow? It might be an important difference to bear in mind when considering and discussing akrasia.