The standard definition of "rationality" in economics is "having complete and transitive preferences", and sometimes "having complete and transitive preferences and adhering to the von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms". Not the way it's used on Less Wrong.
I think the really cool thing about game theory is how far you can go by stating the form of a game and deriving what someone will do, or the possible paths they may take, assuming only that they have rational preferences.
Wouldn't a rational consequentialist estimate the odds that the policy will have unpredictable and harmful consequences, and take this into consideration?
Regardless of how well it works, consequentialism essentially underlies public policy analysis and I'm not sure how one would do it otherwise. (I'm talking about economists calculating deadweight loss triangles and so on, not politicians arguing that "X is wrong!!!")
Why is whether your decision actually changes the boxes important to you? [....] If you argue yourself into a decision theory that doesn't serve you well, you've only managed to shoot yourself in the foot.
In the absence of my decision affecting the boxes, taking one box and leaving $1000 on the table still looks like shooting myself in the foot. (Of course if I had the ability to precommit to one-box I would -- so, okay, if Omega ever asks me this I will take one box. But if Omega asked me to make a decision after filling the boxes and before I'd made a precommitment... still two boxes.)
I think I'm going to back out of this discussion until I understand decision theory a bit better.
Do you choose to hit me or not?
No, I don't, since you have a time-turner. (To be clear, non-hypothetical-me wouldn't hit non-hypothetical-you either.) I would also one-box if I thought that Omega's predictive power was evidence that it might have a time turner or some other way of affecting the past. I still don't think that's relevant when there's no reverse causality.
Back to Newcomb's problem: Say that brown-haired people almost always one-box, and people with other hair colors almost always two-box. Omega predicts on the basis of hair color: both bo...
you will achieve a net gain of $4950*p(x) over a non-committer (a very small number admittedly given that p(x) is tiny, but for the sake of the thought experiment all that matters is that it's positive.)
Given that someone who makes such a precommitment comes out ahead of someone who doesn't - shouldn't you make such a commitment right now?
Right now, yes, I should precommit to pay the $100 in all such situations, since the expected value is p(x)*$4950.
If Omega just walked up to me and asked for $100, and I had never considered this before, the value of t...
The difference between this scenario and the one you posited before, where Ann's mom makes her prediction by reading your philosophy essays, is that she's presumably predicting on the basis of how she would expect you to choose if you were playing Omega.
Ok, but what if Ann's mom is right 99% of the time about how you would choose when playing her?
I agree that one-boxers make more money, with the numbers you used, but I don't think that those are the appropriate expected values to consider. Conditional on the fact that the boxes have already been filled...
I think it is worth preserving a distinction between the specific kind of signaling Patrick describes and a weaker definition, because "true signaling" explains a specific phenomenon: in equilibrium, there seems to be too much effort expended on something, but everyone is acting in their own best interest. "High-quality" people do something to prove they are high quality, and "low-quality" people imitate this behavior. If education is a signal, people seem to get "too much" education for what their jobs require.
As i...
Differences in conformity: women may conform a bit more to widespread social views (at least, to views of "their social class") and/or compartimentalize more between what they learn about a specific topic and their general views. This would mean female scientists would be slightly less likely to be atheists in religious countries, female theology students would be slightly less likely to be fanatics in not-that-fanatical societies, etc.
We need to look at differences between men and women conditional on the fact that they've become economists, ...
To be properly isomorphic to the Newcomb's problem, the chance of the predictor being wrong should approximate to zero.
If I thought that the chance of my friend's mother being wrong approximated to zero, I would of course choose to one-box. If I expected her to be an imperfect predictor who assumed I would behave as if I were in the real Newcomb's problem with a perfect predictor, then I would choose to two-box.
Hm, I think I still don't understand the one-box perspective, then. Are you saying that if the predictor is wrong with probability p, you would ...
I await the eager defenses of belief in belief in the comments, but I wonder if anyone would care to jump ahead of the game and defend belief in belief in belief? Might as well go ahead and get it over with.
My boyfriend was once feeling a bit tired and unmotivated for a few months (probably mild depression), and he also wanted to stop eating dairy for ethical reasons. He felt that his illness was partly mentally generated. He decided that he was allergic to dairy, and that dairy was causing his illness. Then he stopped eating dairy and felt better!
He t...
My rule of thumb is that I generally don't buy an X for myself unless I've tried living without it, then borrowed a friend's X and found it helpful. This mainly applies to cooking and hiking instruments. And I try really really hard to not buy yarn (for knitting) without a project in mind.
Hi, I'm Liz.
I'm a senior at a college in the US, soon to graduate with a double major in physics and economics, and then (hopefully) pursue a PhD in economics. I like computer science and math too. I'm hoping to do research in economic development, but more relevantly to LW, I'm pretty interested in behavioral economics and in econometrics (statistics). Out of the uncommon beliefs I hold, the one that most affects my life is that since I can greatly help others at a small cost to myself, I should; I donate whatever extra money I have to charity, although ...
Yep. The most common model that yields a rational agent who will choose to restrict zir own future actions is beta-delta discounting, or time inconsistent preferences. I've had problem sets with such questions, usually involving a student procrastinating on an assignment; I don't think I can copy them, but let me know if you want me to sketch out how such a problem might look.
Actually, maybe the most instrumental-rationality-enhancing topics to cover that have legitimate game theoretic aspects are in behavioral economics. Perhaps you could construct examples where you contrast the behavior of an agent who interprets probabilities in a funny way, as in Prospect Theory, with an agent who obeys the vNM axioms.