This is like saying "When building a car engine, use the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, thermodynamics may not tell you the tensile strength of steel". It's a type error. Like thermodynamics, DT holds true everywhere, whether or not it's useful to think about it right now.
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But once you go so far as to map certain parts of the system onto preference and belief, the coherence theorems hold like the theorems they are. In that sense they're more universal, and less physically informative, than thermodynamics.
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Most mappings on the system will be useless. If you regard a particular molecule as having compact preferences and beliefs, it will probably do very poorly. Human beings do have relatively compact preferences and beliefs, on the other hand, and applying it to humans make sense.
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This is not because humans obey the prescriptions of decision theory. It is because humans are making things that can be viewed as decisions. This is not because human beliefs are coherent. It's because humans can be well-viewed as believing things even if incoherently.
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It seems to me that you don't understand the very abstract use that is being made of decision theory. It's not a recipe or an algorithm. It's a generalization relating coherent or incoherent behavior to performance, making far more minimal assumptions than you seem to think.
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Well… I *think* I understand this; but I may be wrong! We clearly have very different cognitive styles, which makes it difficult for us to understand each other.
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Returning to your Facebook post, I take it that it is an attempt to characterize the difference (Law vs Toolbox). I don’t think that is accurate; I think I understand and use both of those ways of thinking. But, I can’t be sure. And I don’t have a good alternative model!
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Btw that you think you use both styles possibly suggests that you are a toolbox thinker, according to the original argument. (The argument might be wrong, but that is a separate point.)
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O_O Woah.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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