The problem with evaluating a post like this is that long post is long and slow and methodical, and making points that I (and I’m guessing most others who are doing the review process) already knew even at the time it was written in 2017. So it’s hard to know whether the post ‘works’ at doing the thing it is trying to do, and also hard to know whether it is an efficient means of transmitting that information.
Why can’t the post be much shorter and still get its point across? Would it perhaps even get the point across better if it was much shorter, because eyes would not glaze over? It’s really hard for me to tell. There definitely seems, to me, to be a (relatively) very short post here that seems like it would be much clearer to the me that did not yet know this than this post is, because it’s boiling things down better. But that same person also likely could derive the whole result from the title, perhaps with the words “else dutch book QED” attached.
I’d also feel better about linking to a shorter post than this, as pointing here seems like a big ask, and also makes it harder for people to quickly conclude they do in fact know this already, if they know this already.
Another worry is that by being this long and careful, the absence of other things seems like missing pieces, in a way that it wouldn’t in a shorter post, I think?
And it also relies heavily on the Dutch Book argument, in ways that realistic agents often have defenses against exactly because they’re not coherent enough to go without them. Dutch Book attacks seem like the easy mode where proving everything is trivial via proof by contradiction, and therefore it kind of excludes all the ‘interesting’ cases? As in all we need is: “If not consistent utilities then inconsistent utilities so there exist two inconsistent utilities so Dutch Book so not coherent QED” and then we extend to probability by saying “If probabilities don’t add to 1 then Dutch Book over all probabilities, selling a 1 payout for all possibilities for 1+epsilon if they sum to >1 and buying the 1 payout for 1-epsilon otherwise for some epsilon, then repeat, so again QED same way.” Is that unfair? If so, why? Actually want to know.
Does that short version exist? If not, should I just write it (better than I wrote it way too quickly here)?
The objections raised in the comments don’t seem to hold any weight and also seem (as John confirms) to be mostly arguing against something different than what the post says.
So I guess my question would then be, who got the central point from this post, that didn’t already have it, and what was that experience like? What parts of this seemed needed for that to happen versus not needed?
The problem with evaluating a post like this is that long post is long and slow and methodical, and making points that I (and I’m guessing most others who are doing the review process) already knew even at the time it was written in 2017. So it’s hard to know whether the post ‘works’ at doing the thing it is trying to do, and also hard to know whether it is an efficient means of transmitting that information.
Why can’t the post be much shorter and still get its point across? Would it perhaps even get the point across better if it was much shorter, because eyes would not glaze over? It’s really hard for me to tell. There definitely seems, to me, to be a (relatively) very short post here that seems like it would be much clearer to the me that did not yet know this than this post is, because it’s boiling things down better. But that same person also likely could derive the whole result from the title, perhaps with the words “else dutch book QED” attached.
I’d also feel better about linking to a shorter post than this, as pointing here seems like a big ask, and also makes it harder for people to quickly conclude they do in fact know this already, if they know this already.
Another worry is that by being this long and careful, the absence of other things seems like missing pieces, in a way that it wouldn’t in a shorter post, I think?
And it also relies heavily on the Dutch Book argument, in ways that realistic agents often have defenses against exactly because they’re not coherent enough to go without them. Dutch Book attacks seem like the easy mode where proving everything is trivial via proof by contradiction, and therefore it kind of excludes all the ‘interesting’ cases? As in all we need is: “If not consistent utilities then inconsistent utilities so there exist two inconsistent utilities so Dutch Book so not coherent QED” and then we extend to probability by saying “If probabilities don’t add to 1 then Dutch Book over all probabilities, selling a 1 payout for all possibilities for 1+epsilon if they sum to >1 and buying the 1 payout for 1-epsilon otherwise for some epsilon, then repeat, so again QED same way.” Is that unfair? If so, why? Actually want to know.
Does that short version exist? If not, should I just write it (better than I wrote it way too quickly here)?
The objections raised in the comments don’t seem to hold any weight and also seem (as John confirms) to be mostly arguing against something different than what the post says.
So I guess my question would then be, who got the central point from this post, that didn’t already have it, and what was that experience like? What parts of this seemed needed for that to happen versus not needed?