#decisionTheory

2025-04-28
My half-baked deep thought of the weekend:

Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem should be renamed Arrow's Context-Sensitivity Theorem, and re-interpreted as saying a social choice function that neglects context leads to dictators.

I say this because the axiom of independence from irrelevant alternatives--one of the assumptions behind the theorem--states that a social choice function should be such that the relationship between A and B is not changed once a new alternative C is introduced. Unpacked, this means the choice function should be insensitive to any context C might bring with it.

Arrow's theorem essentially says that a social choice function satisfying this and a couple other axioms leads to dictators (meaning, one individual's preferences dictate the social choice function's preferences, overruling everyone else involved in the choice who might disagree). Hence the re-interpretation: neglecting context in social choice leads to dictators.

#economics #SocialWelfare #SocialChoice #WelfareEconomics #DecisionTheory #ArrowsTheorem
2025-03-13
Today I heard an anecdote about the Monty Hall problem. Apparently Monty Hall himself was once asked his thoughts about the formal version of the problem, and his response was that it was in no way faithful to the game show problem from which it takes its name.

Where does the formal version fall short? Monty himself actively tried to mislead the contestant. He knew them, and tried to persuade them. This was a key part of the game. He said the formal model kills all the suspense. It'd be too boring to watch.

In other words, Monty Hall operated in a large world and it's in that context the Monty Hall problem is interesting, whereas the formal "Monty Hall problem" chops it down to a small world that is not faithful to the real world version of the problem, and on top of it all is boring.

#EcologicalRationality #LargeWorlds #SmallWorlds #modeling #DecisionTheory #ChoiceTheory #RationalChoiceTheory #MontyHallProblem
2024-07-30

To be further accurate, you would also not know how many people are on each track, or whether there are any people at all on each track, or how many tracks there are.

#PascalsWager #trolleyProblem #decisionTheory #apologetics

h/t @AnswersInReason

2024-07-29

Based on work by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who have shown bad feelings about losses are stronger than good feelings we have about gains, Schwartz argues that as you’re presented with countless choices, your pleasure at the prospect of more options is canceled out by the anticipated loss of making a wrong choice.

nautil.us/the-problem-with-mod

2024-04-30

🚨 Exciting PhD opportunities (please boost) 🚨

I have up to three positions for funded PhD students at the University of St.Gallen. Applicants should be interested in one (or more) of the following topics:
- Machine learning in taxation
- Understanding preferences on taxation
- Decision theory and behavioral finance

More information is in the link below.

#PhD #Economics #Finance #Econometrics #MachineLearning #Taxation #DecisionTheory #BehavioralFinance

jobs.unisg.ch/offene-stellen/p

Nuki Raccoon: The DEI Program of Furry EroticaNuki@yiff.life
2024-03-11

DECISION MAKING ADVICE:

Whenever someone complains that a kid is doing something, respond with, "It would be better if they were doing drugs." because the absurdity of that response is directly proportional to the absurdity of the complaint.

#DecisionTheory #ParentingAdvice #kids

2024-01-06

Been having a bit of existential dread these days. I've got tremendous buckets of skill and talent in building mathematical models and doing decision making calculations and etc, but when I hear about people actually doing that stuff its like "I ran this linear regression and now I don't know how to use the outcomes and what sort of p value can I calculate to tell me if what I did was significant?" Or whatever. The world doesn't WANT competence. #bayesian #decisionTheory #statistics

Jason J.G. Whitejason@jasonjgw.net
2023-11-12
I recommend the following seminar presentation not only for the insights offered, but for truly superb philosophical exposition. The three domains discussed are decision theory, formal epistemology, and social choice theory.
"Lara Buchak - How to Care about Risk, Inequality, and Caution"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcFFRr3i8V0&t=26s
#philosophy #FormalEpistemology #DecisionTheory #SocialChoice
Oliver Maclarenomaclaren
2023-05-16

Here are 8 lectures (handwritten, sorry...) & 2 tuts on 'decision-making & modelling under uncertainty' for anyone interested...my first attempt on this particular topic this year. Looks at probability, utility, maximin utility/minimax regret/expected utility, statistical decision theory, graphical models, causal inference, Markov chains etc github.com/omaclaren/open-lear

METIS Mastodon FistMetisETH
2023-05-16

Take the apple or not? We try our hand at psychological field research! Kind of…

2023-04-23

"Behavioural and heuristic models are as-if models too – and that’s ok"

An overdue discussion and analysis by Ivan Moscati.
doi.org/10.1017/S0266267123000

So far, I am not sure his suggested 'as-if mentalism' is helpful or anything other than a new muddled term.... but its a very long paper and I probably need to read it again.

#behavioraleconomics #EconomicTheory #economicpsychology #decisiontheory #economicphilosophy

Oliver Maclarenomaclaren
2023-03-28

I have another naive question about / sparked by teaching it…is there a stat decision rule in the lit of the form: choose a confidence level & rejection sets for all states of nature (params), rule out all that would be rejected (CI by inversion) then do ‘no data’ minimax? Seems like a natural (naively anyway) freq analogue of eg posterior expected loss

Oliver Maclarenomaclaren
2023-03-06

Weird and question: Is defining a parameter via an M-estimator functional equivalent to maximising expected utility for a lottery where the states of nature correspond to the sample space values of the data and the decision is a choice of parameter? And if so, do estimators not derived from M-estimators violate max expected utility? Eg Z-estimators/estimating equations defined by zeros of functions not derived from potentials? What principle defines these?

Oliver Maclarenomaclaren
2023-02-26

Question about and — in elementary decision theory we usually call the basic possible ‘outcomes of nature’ ‘states of nature’. Eg ‘rain’ ‘no rain’ in deciding to take an umbrella. However in statistical decision theory (a la Wald’s formulation) we usually reserve the term ‘state of nature’ for a probability distribution over such outcomes 1/2

Yong Xin Hui (they/she)yongxinhui@fediphilosophy.org
2023-01-10

A super late #introduction

Hi Mastodon, and thank you @kinozhao for running @fediphilosopher !

I'm Xin Hui, a PhD student in #philosophy shuttling between the University of #Pittsburgh and #MIT. My main philosophical interests lie in the intersection of #decisiontheory and #feminist epistemology, particularly how decision models bear on our #social and #political agency.

You may know me as thyacinth on #twitter!

Roban Hultman Kramerroban@sigmoid.social
2023-01-06

You have a problem: you currently pick thresholds for model-based actions using some arbitrary heuristic.

Your solution: pick the threshold that maximizes expected utility (e.g. revenue, profit, ROI, …) instead. That’s the definition of the rational decision, right?

Hmm, for some reason you now seem to have several more problems.
#DecisionTheory #Optimization #rationality #AppliedML

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