One thing I find is that people focus too much on failures of AAT, rather than the much more common case of successes. I think almost every conversation you have relies on AAT.
For instance, I’m the one who cooks dinner in my home, and my girlfriend regularly asks me what options there are for dinner, and believes me when I tell her what the options are.
That she asks me what the options are shows that she, in a probabilistic sense, disagrees with me; I put high probability on a specific set of options that I know we have the ingredients for, while she puts low probability on those options due to not knowing we have the ingredients. She then updates her belief based on my response because she trusts me to be rational (I’m the one who ordered the ingredients/who observed the invoice, and my rationality thus makes me able to know what the food options are) and honest (I wouldn’t e.g. randomly say that the options are spaghetti carbonara, vegan sandwiches or lobster when actually I believe options are burgers, poke, or risotto).
This seems to me to be the basis of lots of conversations; you talk about stuff that you think the other person has experience with, and you trust them to be honest/rational and therefore you update your beliefs to match what they say.
I sometimes get the impression that the rationalist community doesn’t realize that Aumann’s Agreement Theorem works just fine most of the time.
One thing I find is that people focus too much on failures of AAT, rather than the much more common case of successes. I think almost every conversation you have relies on AAT.
For instance, I’m the one who cooks dinner in my home, and my girlfriend regularly asks me what options there are for dinner, and believes me when I tell her what the options are.
That she asks me what the options are shows that she, in a probabilistic sense, disagrees with me; I put high probability on a specific set of options that I know we have the ingredients for, while she puts low probability on those options due to not knowing we have the ingredients. She then updates her belief based on my response because she trusts me to be rational (I’m the one who ordered the ingredients/who observed the invoice, and my rationality thus makes me able to know what the food options are) and honest (I wouldn’t e.g. randomly say that the options are spaghetti carbonara, vegan sandwiches or lobster when actually I believe options are burgers, poke, or risotto).
This seems to me to be the basis of lots of conversations; you talk about stuff that you think the other person has experience with, and you trust them to be honest/rational and therefore you update your beliefs to match what they say.
I sometimes get the impression that the rationalist community doesn’t realize that Aumann’s Agreement Theorem works just fine most of the time.