Definition of “rationalism” from the Eggplant book draft. If you identify as a rationalist, I’m curious whether you find this accurate, and if not, why not?pic.twitter.com/2cvo7478fj
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I'm having trouble imagining by what stretch of the imagination you could call decision theory an account of reality and then declare it to be false. What does a universe look like in which decision theory is 'true'?
I misunderstood you as saying that it was a true account of reality (and not merely useful in practice). I guess I am missing your point if that is not the case?
I'm missing your point because I don't understand what it means for decision theory to be a "true account of reality", and hence I can neither confirm nor deny that I believe this to be the case.
Oh well. I guess we’re both talking past each other. It’s a bit puzzling. I can usually eventually understand other people’s worldviews, but I find yours unusually resistant :)
(?) It sounds like 'true theory of reality' is something that could be occupied only by a final theory of physics. Decision theory just tells you the objectively best way of acting to satisfy a set of preferences.
“Objectively best” assuming a set of axioms is satisfied. There can sometimes be a bait-and-switch or motte-and-bailey here when you try to apply this to a concrete real-world situation.
Do you have a specific example in mind?
Well, to get decision theory to apply, you have to characterize the situation in terms of a set of well-defined actions, well-defined outcomes, well-defined goodnesses, and you need some meaningful way of estimating probabilities. None of those are objectively given.
Writing this tweet, I have an unbounded number of possible things to say; an inconceivable set of possible outcomes; no clearly-defined goals; and any numerical probabilites would be meaningless. Do you know about aardvark cucumbers?
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