Venkat

I've wondered about, and even modeled versions of the fixed horizon IPD in the past. I concluded that so long as the finite horizon number is sufficiently large in the context of the application (100 is large for prison scenarios, tiny for other applications), a proper discounted accounting of future payoffs will restore TFT as an ESS. Axelrod used discounting schemes in various ways in his book(s).

The undiscounted case will always collapse. Recursive collapse to defect is actually rational and a good model for some situations, but you are right, in other situations it is both silly and not what people do, so it is the wrong model. If there is a finite horizon case where discounting is not appropriate, then I'd analyze it differently. To stop the recursive collapse, let the players optimize over possible symmetric reasoning futures...

My favorite example of both the controversies and the settled: the string theory controversies and Roger Penrose's careful treatment of what we do know in "The Road to Reality."

Of course, Popper and Feyerabend would have us believe that nothing is ever settled (and I tend to agree), but even in Popperian mode, the theory that displaces tends to subsume and refine at the asymptotes rather than invalidate directly.

I do not keep up with science news, but for different reasons: the sheer fire-hose volume of it. Especially in the gleeful stamp-collecting world of the biological sciences. I figure if something is important enough, it will eventually get to me after layers of filtering.

Definitely one of the most useful posts I've seen on overcoming bias. I shall be referring back to this list often. I am surprised though, that you did not reference that incisive philosopher, Humpty Dumpty, who had views about a word meaning exactly what he wanted it to mean :) While I haven't thought through the taxonomy of failures through quite as thoroughly, I spent a fair amount of time figuring out the uses of the words 'strategy' and 'tactics' in collaboration with a philosopher of language, and wondering about the motivated bias that enters into deliberately making these ambiguous words more fuzzy than they need to be. The result was a piece on the semantics of decision-making words. Somewhere in this dictionary, there is also probably a need to connect up with notions of conceptual metaphor (Lakoff) and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It'll probably come to me in a day or two. Something connecting intent, connotation, denotation... hmm.

Venkat

What you are talking about in terms of Solmonoff induction is usually called algorithmic information theory and the shortest-program-to-produce-a-bit-string is usually called Kolmogorov-Chaitin information. I am sure you know this. Which begs the question, why didn't you mention this? I agree, it is the neatest way to think about Occam's razor. I am not sure why some are raising PAC theory and VC-dimension. I don't quite see how they illuminate Occam. Minimalist inductive learning is hardly the simplest "explanation" in the Occam sense, and is actually closer to Shannon entropy in spirit, in being more of a raw measure. Gregory Chaitin's 'Meta Math: The Search for Omega', which I did a review summary of is a pretty neat look at this stuff.