I like that you’re being terse. Many of these are puzzles—I need to discover a way to interpret them that allows me to like them.
Of these, I’m unsure:
One of the failures of the Enlightenment is the failure to distinguish whether this distinction [between beliefs and preferences] is a belief or a preference.
Huh? It’s clearly a belief (part of a map). That seems easily grasped once the question is posed. The early Enlightenment wasn’t meta- enough for your liking, for not posing it?
Growth in a scientific field brings with it insularity, because internal progress measures scale faster than external measures.
You’re implying that the insularity is a result of researchers gravitating toward areas where they’re rewarded by other researchers more so than something that directly helps outsiders? I don’t understand “scale faster”.
Have a high discount rate for learning and a low discount rate for knowing.
In this metaphor, are learning and knowing investments that will return future cash? Why should there be different discount rates? Do you think the utility of learning something is more uncertain than the utility of knowing something? I don’t understand how to act on this advice at all. Are you saying I should try hard not to forget what I already know, instead of learning new things?
Train hard and improve your skills, or stop training and forget your skills. Training just enough to maintain your level is the worst idea.
Gaining knowledge is almost always good, but one must be wary of learning skills.
What’s meant is clear; the reason for it isn’t.
Some tasks are costly to resume because of mental mode switching. Maximize the cost of exiting these tasks.
Do you mean precommitment (burning the ships), or do you mean just to be aware of the cost of such a decision?
Who are the masters of forgetting? Can we learn to forget quickly and deliberately? Can we just forget our vices?
No. We can do neither. I can direct my attention slightly, and them maybe I’ll forget.
What sorts of cultures will endorse causal decision theory?
In this metaphor, are learning and knowing investments that will return future cash? Why should there be different discount rates?
By learning, I mean gaining knowledge. Humans can receive enjoyment both from having stuff and from gaining stuff, and knowledge is not an exception.
It’s true that a dynamically-consistent agent can’t have different discount rates for different terminal values, but bounded rationalists might talk about instrumental values using the same sort of math they use for terminal values. In that context it makes sense to use different discount rates for different sorts of good.
Writing the above comment got me thinking about agents having different discount rates for different sorts of goods. Could the appearance of hyperbolic discounting come from a mixture of different rates of exponential discounting?
I remembered that the same sort of question comes up in the study of radioisotope decay. A quick google search turned up this blog, which says that if you assume a maximum-entropy mixture of decay rates (constrained by a particular mean energy), you get hyperbolic decay of the mixture. This is exactly the answer I was looking for.
I like that you’re being terse. Many of these are puzzles—I need to discover a way to interpret them that allows me to like them.
Of these, I’m unsure:
Huh? It’s clearly a belief (part of a map). That seems easily grasped once the question is posed. The early Enlightenment wasn’t meta- enough for your liking, for not posing it?
You’re implying that the insularity is a result of researchers gravitating toward areas where they’re rewarded by other researchers more so than something that directly helps outsiders? I don’t understand “scale faster”.
In this metaphor, are learning and knowing investments that will return future cash? Why should there be different discount rates? Do you think the utility of learning something is more uncertain than the utility of knowing something? I don’t understand how to act on this advice at all. Are you saying I should try hard not to forget what I already know, instead of learning new things?
What’s meant is clear; the reason for it isn’t.
Do you mean precommitment (burning the ships), or do you mean just to be aware of the cost of such a decision?
No. We can do neither. I can direct my attention slightly, and them maybe I’ll forget.
Endorse? You mean, use it somehow?
By learning, I mean gaining knowledge. Humans can receive enjoyment both from having stuff and from gaining stuff, and knowledge is not an exception.
It’s true that a dynamically-consistent agent can’t have different discount rates for different terminal values, but bounded rationalists might talk about instrumental values using the same sort of math they use for terminal values. In that context it makes sense to use different discount rates for different sorts of good.
Writing the above comment got me thinking about agents having different discount rates for different sorts of goods. Could the appearance of hyperbolic discounting come from a mixture of different rates of exponential discounting?
I remembered that the same sort of question comes up in the study of radioisotope decay. A quick google search turned up this blog, which says that if you assume a maximum-entropy mixture of decay rates (constrained by a particular mean energy), you get hyperbolic decay of the mixture. This is exactly the answer I was looking for.