Scott Garrabrant

This post will just be a concrete math question. I am interested in this question because I have recently come tor reject the independence axiom of VNM, and am thus playing with some weaker versions. Let Ω be a finite set of deterministic outcomes. Let L be the space of...

Earlier in the sequence, I presented the claim that humans are evolved to be naturally inclined towards geometric rationality over arithmetic rationality, and that around here, the local memes have moved us too far off this path. In this post, I will elaborate on that claim. I will argue for...

One elephant in the room throughout my geometric rationality sequence, is that it is sometimes advocating for randomizing between actions, and so geometrically rational agents cannot possibly satisfy the Von Neumann–Morgenstern axioms. That is correct: I am rejecting the VNM axioms. In this post, I will say more about why...

In this post, I give a application of geometric rationality to a toy version of a real problem. A Conflicted Agent Let's say you are an agent with two partially conflicting goals. Part of you wants to play a video game, and part of you wants to save the world...

I have been posting a lot on instrumental geometric rationality, with Nash bargaining, Kelly betting, and Thompson sampling. I feel some duty to also post about epistemic geometric rationality, especially since information theory is filled with geometric maximization. The problem is that epistemic geometric rationality is kind of obvious. A...

This post is going to mostly be propaganda for Thompson sampling. However, the presentation is quite different from the standard presentation. I will be working within a toy model, but I think some of the lessons will generalize. I end with some discussion of fairness and exploitation. A Exploration/Exploitation Toy...

A Suspicious Pattern There is a pattern that shows up in many of the toys we like to play with around here: the pattern of maximizing the expected logarithm. Nash bargaining is a method for aggregating preferences without a means to directly compare them. When Nash bargaining, you are maximizing...