some people say that “winning is about not playing dominated strategies”
I do not believe this statement. As in, I do not currently know of a single person, associated either with LW or with decision-theory academia, that says “not playing dominated strategies is entirely action-guiding.” So, as Raemon pointed out, “this post seems like it’s arguing with someone but I’m not sure who.”
In general, I tend to mildly disapprove of words like “a widely-used strategy”, “we often encounter claims” etc, without any direct citations to the individuals who are purportedly making these mistakes. If it really was that widely-used, surely it would be trivial for the authors to quote a few examples off the top of their head, no? What does it say about them that they didn’t?
mildly disapprove of words like “a widely-used strategy”
The text says “A widely-used strategy for arguing for norms of rationality involves avoiding dominated strategies”, which is true* and something we thought would be familiar to everyone who is interested in these topics. For example, see the discussion of Dutch book arguments in the SEP entry on Bayesianism and all of the LessWrong discussion on money pump/dominance/sure loss arguments (e.g., see all of the references in and comments on this post). But fair enough, it would have been better to include citations.
“we often encounter claims”
We did include (potential) examples in this case. Also, similarly to the above, I would think that encountering claims like “we ought to use some heuristic because it has worked well in the past” is commonplace among readers so didn’t see the need to provide extensive evidence.
*Granted, we are using “dominated strategy” in the wide sense of “strategy that you are certain is worse than something else”, which glosses over technical points like the distinction between dominated strategy and sure loss.
Adding to Jesse’s comment, the “We’ve often heard things along the lines of...” line refers both to personal communications and to various comments we’ve seen, e.g.:
[link]: “Since this intuition leads to the (surely false) conclusion that a rational beneficent agent might just as well support the For Malaria Foundation as the Against Malaria Foundation, it seems to me that we have very good reason to reject that theoretical intuition”
[link]: “including a few mildly stubborn credence functions in some judiciously chosen representors can entail effective altruism from the longtermist perspective is a fool’s errand. Yet this seems false”
[link]: “I think that if you try to get any meaningful mileage out of the maximality rule … basically everything becomes permissible, which seems highly undesirable”
(Also, as we point out in the post, this is only true insofar as you only use maximality, applied to total consequences. You can still regard obviously evil things as unacceptable on non-consequentialist grounds, for example.)
I do not believe this statement. As in, I do not currently know of a single person, associated either with LW or with decision-theory academia, that says “not playing dominated strategies is entirely action-guiding.” So, as Raemon pointed out, “this post seems like it’s arguing with someone but I’m not sure who.”
In general, I tend to mildly disapprove of words like “a widely-used strategy”, “we often encounter claims” etc, without any direct citations to the individuals who are purportedly making these mistakes. If it really was that widely-used, surely it would be trivial for the authors to quote a few examples off the top of their head, no? What does it say about them that they didn’t?
The text says “A widely-used strategy for arguing for norms of rationality involves avoiding dominated strategies”, which is true* and something we thought would be familiar to everyone who is interested in these topics. For example, see the discussion of Dutch book arguments in the SEP entry on Bayesianism and all of the LessWrong discussion on money pump/dominance/sure loss arguments (e.g., see all of the references in and comments on this post). But fair enough, it would have been better to include citations.
We did include (potential) examples in this case. Also, similarly to the above, I would think that encountering claims like “we ought to use some heuristic because it has worked well in the past” is commonplace among readers so didn’t see the need to provide extensive evidence.
*Granted, we are using “dominated strategy” in the wide sense of “strategy that you are certain is worse than something else”, which glosses over technical points like the distinction between dominated strategy and sure loss.
Adding to Jesse’s comment, the “We’ve often heard things along the lines of...” line refers both to personal communications and to various comments we’ve seen, e.g.:
[link]: “Since this intuition leads to the (surely false) conclusion that a rational beneficent agent might just as well support the For Malaria Foundation as the Against Malaria Foundation, it seems to me that we have very good reason to reject that theoretical intuition”
[link]: “including a few mildly stubborn credence functions in some judiciously chosen representors can entail effective altruism from the longtermist perspective is a fool’s errand. Yet this seems false”
[link]: “I think that if you try to get any meaningful mileage out of the maximality rule … basically everything becomes permissible, which seems highly undesirable”
(Also, as we point out in the post, this is only true insofar as you only use maximality, applied to total consequences. You can still regard obviously evil things as unacceptable on non-consequentialist grounds, for example.)