I mean, I think it would be totally reasonable for someone who is doing some decision theory or some epistemology work, to come up with new “dutch book arguments” supporting whatever axioms or assumptions they would come up with.
I think I am more compelled that there is a history here of calling money pump arguments that happen to relate to probabilism “dutch books”, but I don’t think there is really any clear definition that supports this. I agree that there exists the dutch book theorem, and that that one importantly relates to probabilism, but I’ve just had dozens of conversations with academics and philosophers and academics and decision-theorists, where in the context of both decision-theory and epistemology question, people brought up dutch books and money pumps interchangeably.
I agree that there exists the dutch book theorem, and that that one importantly relates to probabilism
I’m glad we could converge on this, because that’s what I really wanted to convey.[1] I hope it’s clearer now why I included these as important errors:
The statement that the vNM axioms “apart from continuity, are often justified using the Dutch book theorems” is false since these theorems only relate to belief norms like probabilism. Changing this to ‘money pump arguments’ would fix it.
There’s a claim on the main Dutch book page that the arguments demonstrate that “rationality requires assigning probabilities to events [...] and having preferences that can be modeled using the von Neumann–Morgenstern axioms.” I wouldn’t have said it was false if this was about money pumps.[2] I would’ve said there was a terminological issue if the page equated Dutch books and money pumps. But it didn’t.[3] It defined a Dutch book as “a set of bets that ensures a guaranteed loss.” And the theorems and arguments relating to that do not support the vNM axioms.
The issue of which terms to use isn’t that important to me in this case, but let me speculate about something. If you hear domain experts go back and forth between ‘Dutch books’ and ‘money pumps’, I think that is likely either because they are thinking of the former as a special case of the latter without saying so explicitly, or because they’re listing off various related ideas. If that’s not why, then they may just be mistaken. After all, a Dutch book is named that way because a bookie is involved!
It looks like OP edited the page just today and added ‘or money pump’. But the text that follows still describes a Dutch book, i.e. a set of bets. (Other things were added too that I find problematic but this footnote isn’t the place to explain it.)
I mean, I think it would be totally reasonable for someone who is doing some decision theory or some epistemology work, to come up with new “dutch book arguments” supporting whatever axioms or assumptions they would come up with.
I think I am more compelled that there is a history here of calling money pump arguments that happen to relate to probabilism “dutch books”, but I don’t think there is really any clear definition that supports this. I agree that there exists the dutch book theorem, and that that one importantly relates to probabilism, but I’ve just had dozens of conversations with academics and philosophers and academics and decision-theorists, where in the context of both decision-theory and epistemology question, people brought up dutch books and money pumps interchangeably.
I’m glad we could converge on this, because that’s what I really wanted to convey.[1] I hope it’s clearer now why I included these as important errors:
The statement that the vNM axioms “apart from continuity, are often justified using the Dutch book theorems” is false since these theorems only relate to belief norms like probabilism. Changing this to ‘money pump arguments’ would fix it.
There’s a claim on the main Dutch book page that the arguments demonstrate that “rationality requires assigning probabilities to events [...] and having preferences that can be modeled using the von Neumann–Morgenstern axioms.” I wouldn’t have said it was false if this was about money pumps.[2] I would’ve said there was a terminological issue if the page equated Dutch books and money pumps. But it didn’t.[3] It defined a Dutch book as “a set of bets that ensures a guaranteed loss.” And the theorems and arguments relating to that do not support the vNM axioms.
Would you agree?
The issue of which terms to use isn’t that important to me in this case, but let me speculate about something. If you hear domain experts go back and forth between ‘Dutch books’ and ‘money pumps’, I think that is likely either because they are thinking of the former as a special case of the latter without saying so explicitly, or because they’re listing off various related ideas. If that’s not why, then they may just be mistaken. After all, a Dutch book is named that way because a bookie is involved!
Setting asside that “demonstrates” is too strong even then.
It looks like OP edited the page just today and added ‘or money pump’. But the text that follows still describes a Dutch book, i.e. a set of bets. (Other things were added too that I find problematic but this footnote isn’t the place to explain it.)