Epistemic status: Posting for blog day at MSFP! More trying to figure out what the right definitions are than saying anything concrete. I still don’t really know what agents are, and none of this is math yet. I’m hoping to develop these (and other) ideas more in the future, so...
Epistemic status: Posting for blog day at MSFP! More trying to figure out what the right definitions are than saying anything concrete. I still don’t really know what agents are, and none of this is math yet. I’m hoping to develop these (and other) ideas more in the future, so any feedback is greatly appreciated.
Y’know -- agents are, like, things that do things. They have utility functions and stuff. They make choices, whatever that means.
Unfortunately this ‘definition’ isn’t sufficient for making any concrete claims about how agents behave, so I’ve been thinking about some models that might be, and this post contains ideas that came out of that.
Because of the rain, we are skipping directly to the coffee-shop part of the meetup. Meet at the Starbucks at 66 Beacon street.
I realize I'm a couple weeks behind and nobody might read this, but this is false (e.g., if I flip two fair + independent coins and A = "first coin is heads" and B = "second coin is heads", P(B) = 1/2, but P(B|A) x P(A) = (1/2)x(1/2) = 1/4). I think what you mean is P(A and B) = P(B|A) x P(A).
(unless I'm missing some context and we are assuming B is a subset of A, but if so I'm not sure why we are assuming that)
At the recent Boston SSC meetup, I was asked what rationality skill I would most like everyone to have. Not sure I actually endorse this as the best, but one idea I had was that I would like everyone to be more aware that the things they believe might be false. The person who asked me the question reflected this answer back as ‘skepticism’, which didn’t seem right to me, but the conversation moved on before I could figure out why.
After some thought, I think I know what the distinction I was trying to draw is. I think of the central activity pointed at by the word ‘skepticism’ as being skepticism of... (read more)