I don’t particularly like dragging out the old coherence discussions, but the annual review is partly about building common knowledge, so it’s the right time to bring it up.
This currently seems to be the canonical reference post on the subject. On the one hand, I think there are major problems/missing pieces with it. On the other hand, looking at the top “objection”-style comment (i.e. Said’s), it’s clear that the commenter didn’t even finish reading the post and doesn’t understand the pieces involved. I think this is pretty typical among people who object to coherence results: most of them have only dealt with the VNM theorem, and correctly complain about the assumptions of that theorem being too strong, but don’t know about the existence of all the other coherence theorems (including the complete class theorem mentioned in the post, and Savage’s theorem mentioned in the comments). The “real” coherence theorems do have problems with them, but they’re not the problems which a lot of people point to in VNM.
I’ll leave a more detailed review later. The point of this nomination is to build common knowledge: I’d like to get to the point where the objections to coherence theorems are the right objections, rather than objections based in ignorance, and this post (and reviews of it) seem like a good place for that.
I don’t particularly like dragging out the old coherence discussions, but the annual review is partly about building common knowledge, so it’s the right time to bring it up.
This currently seems to be the canonical reference post on the subject. On the one hand, I think there are major problems/missing pieces with it. On the other hand, looking at the top “objection”-style comment (i.e. Said’s), it’s clear that the commenter didn’t even finish reading the post and doesn’t understand the pieces involved. I think this is pretty typical among people who object to coherence results: most of them have only dealt with the VNM theorem, and correctly complain about the assumptions of that theorem being too strong, but don’t know about the existence of all the other coherence theorems (including the complete class theorem mentioned in the post, and Savage’s theorem mentioned in the comments). The “real” coherence theorems do have problems with them, but they’re not the problems which a lot of people point to in VNM.
I’ll leave a more detailed review later. The point of this nomination is to build common knowledge: I’d like to get to the point where the objections to coherence theorems are the right objections, rather than objections based in ignorance, and this post (and reviews of it) seem like a good place for that.