251–260 of 309 posts
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But then you're not being perfectly rational. You're calculating the odds, which is what my second sentence says. Being perfectly rational is impossible. See: perfect rationality vs bounded rationality
I think you may have a confused definition of what it means to be a rational actor. Being rational means making the optimal decision given the information available
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Maybe I don't understand what you mean by "perfectly rational". I'm using the definition from the article: A perfectly calibrated individual will be right X% of the time about statements in which they are X% confident. Are you using a different definition?
Perfectly rational means just what it sounds like. Making the correct decision because you have all available data. Being perfectly rational is impossible.
I maintain that it isn't just hard, it is computationally impossible. We should all know that given a belief about the world, and evidence, Bayes' Theorem describes how to update our beliefs. But what if we have a network of interrelated beliefs? That's called a Bayesian net, and it turns out that Bayes' Theorem also prescribes a unique answer. However, unfortunately, it turns out that working out that answer is NP-h…
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The sunk cost fallacy is particularly important to learn about and teach your children about. I see it everywhere, from my own decision making process to international politics. Just this morning I was thinking about it as I read the news about the US leaving Afghanistan, and last week talking with a friend who is staying at a bad job.
Here's a question for you: what is the difference between the sunk cost fallacy and persistence? And here's the answer: Persistence is good when it is successful. If the activity us unsuccessful, it's an example of the irrational sunk cost fallacy. (Making decisions without knowledge of future events is quite hard.) And the important lesson: If you bail at the first sign of adversity, no one can ever accuse you of be…
You can't go back in time and not work hard on something, so whether or not you should continue is purely a function of whether or not you think you will succeed, not a function of how much effort you've already put into it.
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I kind of intended that comment to be ironic self-deprecating humor because, of course, I have no way of knowing whether or not I'm being irrational. Irrational people think they're rational, and so the fact that I think I'm rational does not mean that I am. But it's likewise for everyone. The real point is that everyone ought to have a little more humility about their own rationality (especially all the idiots who a…
To late to edit the above comment, but just for the record, this is my actual response to the many-worlders: http://blog.rongarret.info/2019/07/the-trouble-with-many-wor...
One thing I'm curious about: I haven't read the literature all that well, but my personal understanding of MWI, after trying to wrap my head around it, is that there's probably no branching or peeling at all: every possible configuration of the universe immutably exists and is associated with a complex amplitude. What does change are the amplitudes. When I make a choice at point A and the universe "splits" into B and C, the only thing that happens is that the amplitude in bucket A is split into buckets B and C. But there's no reason to think A, B and C were ever empty or will ever be empty: after all, some other state Z might pour amplitude into A at the same time A pours into B and C. We might even currently be in a steady state where the universal wavefunction is perfectly static, because every single "branch" is perfectly compensated by a "join". If so, MWI would challenge the very idea that existence is a binary predicate (it's actually a continuous complex amplitude). I'm honestly not sure how we're even supposed to reason about that thing.
Does that make any sense, or am I way off base?
Nobody wants to deal with rational people. Big business want people to buy things they don't need, with money they don't have to impress people they don't like Politicians want people who will drink the cool-aid and follow what they (the politicians) say (and not what they do) Religions... well, same. And so all messages from advertisement, to movies, TV, narrative is about hijacking people's feelings and suppressing…
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People who gain knowledge by adding to a consistent/stable belief system are the ones who have the most difficulty adapting to new situations and processing new information that may upend volumes of settled knowledge. You can recognize them as the dogmatic types that remember the rules but forget how/why they adopted them and are at a loss to update them.
> People who gain knowledge by adding to a consistent/stable belief system are the ones who have the most difficulty adapting to new situations and processing new information that may upend volumes of settled knowledge. That's such an incredibly rare occurrence, that having a stable belief system far outweighs its potential drawbacks. Not to mention that rationality itself encompasses the ability to make such a switc…
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NP hard problems get abused for justifying things they cannot. An NP hard problem, even if it cannot be approximated does not mean the average input cannot be solved efficiently. Examples: - An NP hard problem is not sufficient for building crypto. - Type solving for many programming languages is EXP TIME complete, yet those languages prosper and compile just fine. Beware the idea of taking a mathematical concept and…
Ok, so what is the class of problems that is hard for any input?
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It's a fact many people believe themselves rational and use models expecting rational actors. Proof lacks that it actually works that way. The opposite is often most probable since you rarely have perfect knowledge in practice. Exceptions can be games like tic-tac-toe and chess.
> Proof lacks that it actually works that way I mean everyone know it doesn't really work that way. The actual question is: does viewing the average actor as trying to perfectly optimise their utility function using all the information available constitute a good estimation of how actors work in aggregate and does it yield accurate and interesting predictions? The real insight of Simon in Models of Man is not that ac…