We were thinking about why it doesn’t work in that context when (I would argue) Aumann’s agreement theorem applies robustly in lots of other contexts.
That’s an interesting pair of claims, and I’d be interested in hearing your explanation.
IMO, Aumann’s theorem, while technically not incorrect, is highly overrated because it requires arbitrary levels of meta-trust (trust that the other person trusts you to trust them...) to work correctly, which is difficult to obtain, and people already, “rational” or not, base their opinions on the opinions of others so we never see the opinions they would have without taking into account the views of others. Also, even if a group had sufficient meta-trust to reach a consensus, they wouldn’t be able to find out exactly how much their private evidence overlapped without asking each other about their evidence—so merely reaching a consensus would not lead to opinions as accurate as could be reached by discussion of the evidence.
I think people just straightforwardly use Aumann’s agreement theorem all the time. Like for example at work today I needed to install a specific obscure program, so I asked one of my teammates who had previously installed it where to get the installer, and what to do in cases where I was unsure what settings to pick.
This relied on the fact that my teammate had correctly absorbed the information during the first installation run (i.e. was rational) and would share this information to me (i.e. was honest).
People very often get information from other people, and this very often depends on Aumann-like assumptions.
I think people in general assume that Aumann’s agreement theorem doesn’t apply because they have a different definition of disagreement than Aumann’s agreement theorem uses. People don’t tend to think of cases where one person knows about X and the other person doesn’t know about X as a disagreement between the two people on X, but according to Aumann’s agreement theorem’s definition, it is.
Yeah, I was reacting mainly to a fad that used to be common in the rationalist community where people would consider it to be a problem that we didn’t agree on everything, and where stating opinions was emphasized over discussing evidence. (i.e. devaluing the normal human baseline, and being overoptimistic about improvements over it, using actually-unhelpful techniques). I see now that you aren’t repeating that approach, and instead you are talking about the normal baseline including Aumann-like information sharing, which I agree with.
That’s an interesting pair of claims, and I’d be interested in hearing your explanation.
IMO, Aumann’s theorem, while technically not incorrect, is highly overrated because it requires arbitrary levels of meta-trust (trust that the other person trusts you to trust them...) to work correctly, which is difficult to obtain, and people already, “rational” or not, base their opinions on the opinions of others so we never see the opinions they would have without taking into account the views of others. Also, even if a group had sufficient meta-trust to reach a consensus, they wouldn’t be able to find out exactly how much their private evidence overlapped without asking each other about their evidence—so merely reaching a consensus would not lead to opinions as accurate as could be reached by discussion of the evidence.
I think people just straightforwardly use Aumann’s agreement theorem all the time. Like for example at work today I needed to install a specific obscure program, so I asked one of my teammates who had previously installed it where to get the installer, and what to do in cases where I was unsure what settings to pick.
This relied on the fact that my teammate had correctly absorbed the information during the first installation run (i.e. was rational) and would share this information to me (i.e. was honest).
People very often get information from other people, and this very often depends on Aumann-like assumptions.
I think people in general assume that Aumann’s agreement theorem doesn’t apply because they have a different definition of disagreement than Aumann’s agreement theorem uses. People don’t tend to think of cases where one person knows about X and the other person doesn’t know about X as a disagreement between the two people on X, but according to Aumann’s agreement theorem’s definition, it is.
Yeah, I was reacting mainly to a fad that used to be common in the rationalist community where people would consider it to be a problem that we didn’t agree on everything, and where stating opinions was emphasized over discussing evidence. (i.e. devaluing the normal human baseline, and being overoptimistic about improvements over it, using actually-unhelpful techniques). I see now that you aren’t repeating that approach, and instead you are talking about the normal baseline including Aumann-like information sharing, which I agree with.