Decision Theory

Edited by Rachael Briggs (Australian National University, Stanford University)
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  1. Small Amendment Arguments: How They Work and What They Do and Do Not Show.Martin van Hees, Akshath Jitendranath & Roland Iwan Luttens - 2025 - Theory and Decision 98 (1):153-163.
    The small improvement argument has been said to establish that the standard weak preference or value relation can be incomplete. We first show that the argument is one of three possible ‘small amendment arguments’, each of which would yield the same conclusion. Generalizing the analysis thus, we subsequently present a strong and a weak version of small amendment arguments and derive the exact rationality conditions under which they reveal incompleteness. The results show that the arguments (in any of their variants) (...)
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  2. The Valuationist Model of Human Agent Architecture: What Is It, and Why Does It Matter for Philosophy?Chandra Sripada - manuscript
    In computational cognitive science, a valuationist picture of human agent architecture has become widespread. At the heart of valuationism is a simple and sweeping claim: Every time an agent acts, they do so on the basis of value representations, which are, roughly, representations of the expected value of one’s response options. In this essay, I do three things. First, I give a systematic, philosophically rich account of the valuationist picture of agency. I also highlight the generality of the model in (...)
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  3. The Induction-of-Intrinsic-Desires Theory.Christoph Lumer - 2012 - In Alessandro Innocenti & Angela Sirigu (eds.), Neuroscience and the Economics of Decision Making. Abingdon; New York: Routledge. pp. 109-124.
    (1) Emotions influence decisions in various ways. In particular, they can induce new intrinsic desires. This mechanism is the topic of this paper. (2) After briefly discussing some rival approaches a new theory of such emotional decisions is presented. (3) The general framework into which this theory is integrated is an expectancy-valence or decision-theoretic model of decision, however with a strict distinction between intrinsic and other desires. (4) The specific part of the theory then explains emotional decisions by non-hedonic emotion-induced (...)
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  4. Reflection, Introspection, and Book.Kevin Zollman & Kevin Dorst - manuscript
    The much-debated Reflection principle states that a coherent agent’s cre- dences must match their estimates for their future credences. Defenders claim that there are Dutch-book arguments in its favor, putting it on the same normative footing as probabilistic coherence. Critics claim that those arguments rely on the implicit, implausible assumption that the agent is introspective: that they are certain what their own credences are. In this paper, we clarify this debate by surveying several different concep- tions of the book scenario. (...)
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  5. The Comprehensive Human Decision-Making Equation and Holistic Free Will.Juan Chavez - manuscript
    The Comprehensive Human Decision-Making Equation presents a robust model for understanding Holistic Free Will (HFW), conceptualizing decision-making as an autonomous, non-deterministic process within a complex network of influences. This model addresses the Infinite Regress issue by portraying free will as an emergent property of interacting layers, including internal beliefs, external contexts, emotional responses, cognitive biases, and habitual tendencies. Departing from traditional linear models, the equation adopts a systemic framework where each choice reflects a cumulative utility, integrating multiple components such as (...)
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  6. Fairness, ambiguity and dynamic consistency.H. Orri Stefánsson & Richard Bradley - forthcoming - Theory and Decision:1-21.
    Considerations of dynamic inconsistency have figured prominently in debates over the rationality of preferences that violate the separability conditions characteristic of expected utility theory. These debates have mostly focused on risk- and ambiguity averse preferences, but analogous considerations apply to preferences for fairness. We revisit these debates in the context of a specific hypothesis regarding the violations of separability by such preferences, namely that they are potentially both explained and rationalised by attitudes to the chances of goods that motivate a (...)
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  7. Ambiguous Decisions in Bayesianism and Imprecise Probability.Mantas Radzvilas, William Peden & Francesco De Pretis - 2024 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Short Reads.
    Do imprecise beliefs lead to worse decisions under uncertainty? This BJPS Short Reads article provides an informal introduction to our use of agent-based modelling to investigate this question. We explain the strengths of imprecise probabilities for modelling evidential states. We explain how we used an agent-based model to investigate the relative performance of Imprecise Bayesian reasoners against a standard Bayesian who has precise credences. We found that the very features of Imprecise Bayesianism which give it representational strengths also cause relative (...)
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  8. Awareness Revision and Belief Extension.Joe Roussos - 2024 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy:1-24.
    What norm governs how an agent should change their beliefs when they encounter a completely new possibility? Orthodox Bayesianism has no answer, as it takes all learning to involve updating prior beliefs. A partial proposal is Reverse Bayesianism, which mandates the preservation of ratios of prior probabilities, but it faces counterexamples introduced by Mahtani (2021). I propose to separate awareness growth into two stages: awareness revision and belief extension. I argue that Mahtani’s cases highlight that we need to theorize awareness (...)
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  9. Foundations for Knowledge-Based Decision Theories.Zeev Goldschmidt - 2024 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 102 (4):939-958.
    Several philosophers have proposed Knowledge-Based Decision Theories (KDTs)—theories that require agents to maximize expected utility as yielded by utility and probability functions that depend on the agent’s knowledge. Proponents of KDTs argue that such theories are motivated by Knowledge-Reasons norms that require agents to act only on reasons that they know. However, no formal derivation of KDTs from Knowledge-Reasons norms has been suggested, and it is not clear how such norms justify the particular ways in which KDTs relate knowledge and (...)
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  10. Against the no-difference argument.Adam Elga - 2023 - Analysis 84 (3):476-482.
    There are 1,000 of us and one victim. We each increase the level at which a ‘discomfort machine’ operates on the victim – leading to great discomfort. Suppose that consecutive levels of the machine are so similar that the victim cannot distinguish them. Have we acted permissibly? According to the ‘no-difference argument’ the answer is ‘yes’ because each of our actions was guaranteed to make the victim no worse off. This argument is of interest because, if it is sound, similar (...)
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  11. Nomothetic Mythology of Propositional Attitudes.Morteza Shahram - manuscript
    Physical translation of a mental content must involve a set of causal antecedents A and a set of causal consequents B which instantiate properties that figure in strict laws as antecedent and consequent conditions respectively. Only if there are double-role events in common between A and B capable of migrating to purely A or to purely B in future depending on the role that the mental content play then, psychological anomalism can be established but without any need to give up (...)
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  12. Probability discounting and money pumps.Petra Kosonen - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 109 (2):593-611.
    In response to cases that involve tiny probabilities of huge payoffs, some argue that we ought to discount small probabilities down to zero. However, this paper shows that doing so violates Independence and Continuity, and as a result of these violations, those who discount small probabilities can be exploited by money pumps. Various possible ways of avoiding exploitation will be discussed. This paper concludes that the money pump for Independence undermines the plausibility of discounting small probabilities. Much of the discussion (...)
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  13. The One-Party System.Ilexa Yardley - 2024 - Https://Medium.Com/the-Circular-Theory.
  14. Diagonal decision theory.Melissa Fusco - 2024 - Economics and Philosophy 40 (2):485-496.
    Stalnaker’s ‘Assertion’ (1978 [1999]) offers a classic account of diagonalization as an approach to the meaning of a declarative sentence in context. Here I explore the relationship between diagonalization and some puzzles in Mahtani’s book The Objects of Credence. Diagonalization can influence how we think about both credence and desirability, so it influences both components of a standard expected utility equation. In that vein, I touch on two of Mahtani’s case-studies, chance and the finite version of the Two Envelope Paradox.
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  15. Proliferation of Coreferential Homonyms.Morteza Shahram - manuscript
    A truism: a name that is essentially associated with a description—so that its description contributes to the psychological explanations in which it figures—refers not to its referent simpliciter but to its referent relative to the information that is mirrored by the description.
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  16. Decision theory presupposes free will.Christian List - manuscript
    This paper argues that decision theory presupposes free will. Although decision theorists seldom acknowledge this, the way decision theory represents, explains, or rationalizes choice behaviour acquires its intended interpretation only under the assumption that decision-makers are agents capable of making free choices between alternative possibilities. Without that assumption, both normative and descriptive decision theory, including the revealed-preference paradigm, would have to be reinterpreted in implausible ways. The hypothesis that decision-makers have free will is therefore explanatorily indispensable for decision theory. If (...)
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  17. Evidence, Causality, and Collective Action.Samuel Fullhart - 2024 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 21 (5-6):1-19.
    In collective action problems, large numbers of contributions together produce a good outcome, but any one contribution often makes no difference. Many philosophers think that act consequentialism implies that individuals should not contribute in these cases, given that their contributions cannot be expected to affect the outcome. Nearly everyone has assumed that the relevant expected effects of an action are those effects that are counterfactually dependent on what a given agent does. This assumption is at the heart of causal decision (...)
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  18. Locating Values in the Space of Possibilities.Sara Aronowitz - forthcoming - Philosophy of Science.
    Where do values live in thought? A straightforward answer is that we (or our brains) make decisions using explicit value representations which are our values. Recent work applying reinforcement learning to decision-making and planning suggests that more specifically, we may represent both the instrumental expected value of actions as well as the intrinsic reward of outcomes. In this paper, I argue that identifying value with either of these representations is incomplete. For agents such as humans and other animals, there is (...)
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  19. Decision Theory Unbound.Zachary Goodsell - 2024 - Noûs 58 (3):669-695.
    Countenancing unbounded utility in ethics gives rise to deep puzzles in formal decision theory. Here, these puzzles are taken as an invitation to assess the most fundamental principles relating probability and value, with the aim of demonstrating that unbounded utility in ethics is compatible with a desirable decision theory. The resulting theory frames further discussion of Expected Utility Theory and of principles concerning symmetries of utility.
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  20. How to do things with sunk costs.Michael Zhao - 2024 - Noûs 58 (3):596-615.
    It is a commonplace in economics that we should disregard sunk costs. The sunk cost effect might be widespread, goes the conventional wisdom, but we would be better off if we could rid ourselves of it. In this paper, I argue against the orthodoxy by showing that the sunk cost effect is often beneficial. Drawing on discussions of related topics in dynamic choice theory, I show that, in a range of cases, being disposed to honor sunk costs allows an agent (...)
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  21. Opaque Options.Kacper Kowalczyk & Aidan B. Penn - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (8).
    Moral options are permissions to do less than best, impartially speaking. In this paper, we investigate the challenge of reconciling moral options with the ideal of justifiability to each individual. We examine ex-post and ex-ante views of moral options and show how they might conflict with this ideal in single-choice and sequential-choice cases, respectively. We consider some ways of avoiding this conflict in sequential-choice cases, showing that they face significant problems.
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  22. The Buddha’s Lucky Throw and Pascal’s Wager.Bronwyn Finnigan - 2024 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 102 (3):561-580.
    The Apaṇṇaka Sutta, one of the early recorded teachings of the Buddha, contains an argument for accepting the doctrines of karma and rebirth that Buddhist scholars claim anticipates Pascal’s wager. I call this argument the Buddha’s wager. Does it anticipate Pascal’s wager and is it a good bet? Contemporary scholars identify at least four versions of Pascal’s wager in his Pensées. This article demonstrates that the Buddha’s wager anticipates two versions of Pascal’s wager, but not its canonical form. Like Pascal’s (...)
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  23. Symmetry, Invariance, and Imprecise Probability.Zachary Goodsell & Jacob M. Nebel - forthcoming - Mind.
    It is tempting to think that a process of choosing a point at random from the surface of a sphere can be probabilistically symmetric, in the sense that any two regions of the sphere which differ by a rotation are equally likely to include the chosen point. Isaacs, Hájek, and Hawthorne (2022) argue from such symmetry principles and the mathematical paradoxes of measure to the existence of imprecise chances and the rationality of imprecise credences. Williamson (2007) has argued from a (...)
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  24. From Science to Christianity: Hypothesis Testing, Theory, Model, Experiment and Practice.Robert W. P. Luk - manuscript
    This manuscript is about how to start from relying on science to be more certain about Christianity. This is because science is so pervasive in our everyday life that we expect that it works almost every time. However, when it comes to Christianity, we need to have faith because most of the time God does not appear to respond to us. Therefore, we feel uncertain about beliefs in Christianity. Instead of being uncertain, this manuscript tries to find a way so (...)
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  25. Embracing self‐defeat in normative theory.Samuel Fullhart - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 109 (1):204-225.
    Some normative theories are self-defeating. They tell us to respond to our situations in ways that bring about outcomes that are bad, given the aims of the theories, and which could have been avoided. Across a wide range of debates in ethics, decision theory, political philosophy, and formal epistemology, many philosophers treat the fact that a normative theory is self-defeating as sufficient grounds for rejecting it. I argue that this widespread and consequential assumption is false. In particular, I argue that (...)
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  26. Towards Shutdownable Agents via Stochastic Choice.Elliott Thornley, Alexander Roman, Christos Ziakas, Leyton Ho & Louis Thomson - 2024 - Global Priorities Institute Working Paper.
    Some worry that advanced artificial agents may resist being shut down. The Incomplete Preferences Proposal (IPP) is an idea for ensuring that doesn't happen. A key part of the IPP is using a novel 'Discounted REward for Same-Length Trajectories (DREST)' reward function to train agents to (1) pursue goals effectively conditional on each trajectory-length (be 'USEFUL'), and (2) choose stochastically between different trajectory-lengths (be 'NEUTRAL' about trajectory-lengths). In this paper, we propose evaluation metrics for USEFULNESS and NEUTRALITY. We use a (...)
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  27. How to act on what you know.Roman Heil - 2024 - Synthese 203 (6):1-26.
    That we may rely on our knowledge seems like a platitude. Yet, the view that knowledge is sufficient for permissible reliance faces a major challenge: when much hangs on whether we know, relying on our knowledge seems to license irrational action. Unfortunately, extant proposals to meet this challenge (Hawthorne & Stanley, 2008; Williamson, 2005a; Schulz, 2017, 2021b) either fail to make the correct predictions about high-stakes cases or, as I will argue, face a substantial objection. In this paper, I will (...)
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  28. Evil and the Quantum Multiverse.Eddy Keming Chen & Daniel Rubio - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    Problems in moral philosophy and philosophy of religion can take on new forms in light of contemporary physical theories. Here we discuss how the problem of evil is transformed by the Everettian "Many-Worlds" theory of quantum mechanics. We first present an Everettian version of the problem and contrast it to the problem in single-universe physical theories such as Newtonian mechanics and Bohmian mechanics. We argue that, pace Turner (2016) and Zimmerman (2017), the Everettian problem of evil is no more extreme (...)
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  29. Expected choiceworthiness and fanaticism.Calvin Baker - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (5).
    Maximize Expected Choiceworthiness (MEC) is a theory of decision-making under moral uncertainty. It says that we ought to handle moral uncertainty in the way that Expected Value Theory (EVT) handles descriptive uncertainty. MEC inherits from EVT the problem of fanaticism. Roughly, a decision theory is fanatical when it requires our decision-making to be dominated by low-probability, high-payoff options. Proponents of MEC have offered two main lines of response. The first is that MEC should simply import whatever are the best solutions (...)
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  30. Rational risk‐aversion: Good things come to those who weight.Christopher Bottomley & Timothy Luke Williamson - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (3):697-725.
    No existing normative decision theory adequately handles risk. Expected Utility Theory is overly restrictive in prohibiting a range of reasonable preferences. And theories designed to accommodate such preferences (for example, Buchak's (2013) Risk‐Weighted Expected Utility Theory) violate the Betweenness axiom, which requires that you are indifferent to randomizing over two options between which you are already indifferent. Betweenness has been overlooked by philosophers, and we argue that it is a compelling normative constraint. Furthermore, neither Expected nor Risk‐Weighted Expected Utility Theory (...)
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  31. Abwägung – Voraussetzungen und Grenzen einer Metapher für rationales Entscheiden.Weyma Lübbe & Thomas Grosse-Wilde (eds.) - 2022 - Paderborn: Brill mentis.
    Das Konzept der Abwägung wird in der praktischen Philosophie ebenso ubiquitär verwendet wie in den Wirtschaftswissenschaften und im Recht. Es ist jedoch voraussetzungsvoller und umstrittener als zumeist angenommen. „Abwägung“ bezeichnet einen Vorgang praktischen Überlegens, in den mehrere Aspekte in vergleichender Weise eingehen. Die Skepsis gegen das Konzept gründet darin, dass sich die Metapher nicht auf beliebige Gegenstände anwenden lässt. Insbesondere müssen die Wertzuschreibungen, die das Gewicht der Gegenstände bestimmen, in ihren normativen Grundlagen widerspruchsfrei sein und sie müssen ähnlich wie die (...)
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  32. Decision Theory without Luminosity.Yoaav Isaacs & Benjamin A. Levinstein - 2023 - Mind 133 (530):346-376.
    Our decision-theoretic states are not luminous. We are imperfectly reliable at identifying our own credences, utilities and available acts, and thus can never be more than imperfectly reliable at identifying the prescriptions of decision theory. The lack of luminosity affords decision theory a remarkable opportunity — to issue guidance on the basis of epistemically inaccessible facts. We show how a decision theory can guarantee action in accordance with contingent truths about which an agent is arbitrarily uncertain. It may seem that (...)
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  33. The Propagation of Suspension of Judgment.Aldo Filomeno - 2022 - Erkenntnis 89 (4):1327-1348.
    It is not uncommon in the history of science and philosophy to encounter crucial experiments or crucial objections the truth-value of which we are ignorant, that is, about which we suspend judgment. Should we ignore such objections? Contrary to widespread practice, I show that in and only in some circumstances they should not be ignored, for the epistemically rational doxastic attitude is to suspend judgment also about the hypothesis that the objection targets. In other words, suspension of judgment “propagates” from (...)
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  34. Non-Ideal Decision Theory.Sven Neth - 2023 - Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley
    My dissertation is about Bayesian rationality for non-ideal agents. I show how to derive subjective probabilities from preferences using much weaker rationality assumptions than other standard representation theorems. I argue that non-ideal agents might be uncertain about how they will update on new information and consider two consequences of this uncertainty: such agents should sometimes reject free information and make choices which, taken together, yield sure loss. The upshot is that Bayesian rationality for non-ideal agents makes very different normative demands (...)
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  35. Modeling Action: Recasting the Causal Theory.Megan Fritts & Frank Cabrera - forthcoming - Analytic Philosophy.
    Contemporary action theory is generally concerned with giving theories of action ontology. In this paper, we make the novel proposal that the standard view in action theory—the Causal Theory of Action—should be recast as a “model”, akin to the models constructed and investigated by scientists. Such models often consist in fictional, hypothetical, or idealized structures, which are used to represent a target system indirectly via some resemblance relation. We argue that recasting the Causal Theory as a model can not only (...)
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  36. Why bounded rationality (in epistemology)?David Thorstad - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (2):396-413.
    Bounded rationality gets a bad rap in epistemology. It is argued that theories of bounded rationality are overly context‐sensitive; conventionalist; or dependent on ordinary language (Carr, 2022; Pasnau, 2013). In this paper, I have three aims. The first is to set out and motivate an approach to bounded rationality in epistemology inspired by traditional theories of bounded rationality in cognitive science. My second aim is to show how this approach can answer recent challenges raised for theories of bounded rationality. My (...)
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  37. Idle Questions.Jens Kipper, Alexander W. Kocurek & Zeynep Soysal - 2024 - Journal of Philosophy.
    In light of the problem of logical omniscience, some scholars have argued that belief is question-sensitive: agents don't simply believe propositions but rather believe answers to questions. Hoek (2022) has recently developed a version of this approach on which a belief state is a "web" of questions and answers. Here, we present several challenges to Hoek's question-sensitive account of belief. First, Hoek's account is prone to very similar logical omniscience problems as those he claims to address. Second, the link between (...)
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  38. Correction to: The implicit decision theory of non-philosophers.Preston Greene, Andrew J. Latham, Kristie Miller & Michael Nielsen - 2024 - Synthese 203 (3):1-2.
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  39. The Isaac Levi Prize 2023: Optimization and Beyond.Akshath Jitendranath - 2024 - Journal of Philosophy 121 (3):1-2.
    This paper will be concerned with hard choices—that is, choice situations where an agent cannot make a rationally justified choice. Specifically, this paper asks: if an agent cannot optimize in a given situation, are they facing a hard choice? A pair of claims are defended in light of this question. First, situations where an agent cannot optimize because of incompleteness of the binary preference or value relation constitute a hard choice. Second, situations where agents cannot optimize because the binary preference (...)
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  40. Deference Principles for Imprecise Credences.Giacomo Molinari - manuscript
    This essay gives an account of epistemic deference for agents with imprecise credences. I look at the two main imprecise deference principles in the literature, known as Identity Reflection and Pointwise Reflection (Moss, 2021). I show that Pointwise Reflection is strictly weaker than Identity Reflection, and argue that, if you are certain you will update by conditionalisation, you should defer to your future self according to Identity Reflection. Then I give a more general justification for Pointwise and Identity Reflection from (...)
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  41. The Shutdown Problem: Incomplete Preferences as a Solution.Elliott Thornley - manuscript
    I explain and motivate the shutdown problem: the problem of creating artificial agents that (1) shut down when a shutdown button is pressed, (2) don’t try to prevent or cause the pressing of the shutdown button, and (3) otherwise pursue goals competently. I then propose a solution: train agents to have incomplete preferences. Specifically, I propose that we train agents to lack a preference between every pair of different-length trajectories. I suggest a way to train such agents using reinforcement learning: (...)
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  42. Suppositional Desires and Rational Choice Under Moral Uncertainty.Nicholas Makins - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    This paper presents a unifying diagnosis of a number of important problems facing existing models of rational choice under moral uncertainty and proposes a remedy. I argue that the problems of (i) severely limited scope, (ii) intertheoretic comparisons, and (iii) 'swamping’ all stem from the way in which values are assigned to options in decision rules such as Maximisation of Expected Choiceworthiness. By assigning values to options under a given moral theory by asking something like ‘how much do I desire (...)
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  43. Instrumental Divergence.J. Dmitri Gallow - 2024 - Philosophical Studies:1-27.
    The thesis of instrumental convergence holds that a wide range of ends have common means: for instance, self preservation, desire preservation, self improvement, and resource acquisition. Bostrom contends that instrumental convergence gives us reason to think that "the default outcome of the creation of machine superintelligence is existential catastrophe". I use the tools of decision theory to investigate whether this thesis is true. I find that, even if intrinsic desires are randomly selected, instrumental rationality induces biases towards certain kinds of (...)
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  44. The Self, Emptiness, and Awareness.Claus Janew - 2024 - Truthfulness. The Consciousness That Creates Reality (Book).
    In this exploration of self-identity, I argue that the self is not a standalone entity but an integral part of a broader consciousness. Deep meditation reveals the self as a construct beyond egoistic confines, interlinked with the external world and others' experiences. Decisions arise from an awareness that transcends individual ego, suggesting that our sense of self is an inexhaustible center of dynamic consciousness rather than an ultimate emptiness.
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  45. The Ambiguity Dilemma for Imprecise Bayesians.Mantas Radzvilas, William Peden & Francesco De Pretis - forthcoming - The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    How should we make decisions when we do not know the relevant physical probabilities? In these ambiguous situations, we cannot use our knowledge to determine expected utilities or payoffs. The traditional Bayesian answer is that we should create a probability distribution using some mix of subjective intuition and objective constraints. Imprecise Bayesians argue that this approach is inadequate for modelling ambiguity. Instead, they represent doxastic states using credal sets. Generally, insofar as we are more uncertain about the physical probability of (...)
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  46. Underdetermination of Imprecise Probabilities.Joshua Thong - 2022 - Dissertation, Australian National University
    In a fair finite lottery with n tickets, the probability assigned to each ticket winning is 1/n and no other answer. That is, 1/n is unique. Now, consider a fair lottery over the natural numbers. What probability is assigned to each ticket winning in this lottery? Well, this probability value must be smaller than 1/n for all natural numbers n. If probabilities are real-valued, then there is only one answer: 0, as 0 is the only real and non-negative value that (...)
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  47. Rational factionalization for agents with probabilistically related beliefs.David Peter Wallis Freeborn - 2024 - Synthese 203 (2):1-27.
    General epistemic polarization arises when the beliefs of a population grow further apart, in particular when all agents update on the same evidence. Epistemic factionalization arises when the beliefs grow further apart, but different beliefs also become correlated across the population. I present a model of how factionalization can emerge in a population of ideally rational agents. This kind of factionalization is driven by probabilistic relations between beliefs, with background beliefs shaping how the agents’ beliefs evolve in the light of (...)
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  48. Extending the intersection approach.Susumu Cato - 2020 - Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 21 (3):230-248.
    The intersection approach is a common method of overcoming a conflict among multiple values. Under this approach, a state is more desirable than another if it is so for all criteria in question. A fundamental difficulty is that judgment under the intersection approach lacks completeness in too many cases. We propose alternative methods that extend the intersection approach: the union and union-intersection approaches. Our methods generate a (quasi-)coherence judgment which is more completed and can be applied to most problems of (...)
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  49. Independent, neutral, and monotonic collective choice: the role of Suzumura consistency.Walter Bossert, Susumu Cato & Kohei Kamaga - 2023 - Social Choice and Welfare 61:835–852.
    We examine the impact of Suzumura’s (Economica 43:381–390, 1976) consistency property when applied in the context of collective choice rules that are independent of irrelevant alternatives, neutral, and monotonic. An earlier contribution by Blau and Deb (Econometrica 45:871–879, 1977) establishes the existence of a vetoer if the collective relation is required to be complete and acyclical. The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibilities that result if completeness and acyclicity are dropped and Suzumura consistency is imposed instead. A (...)
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  50. The impossibility of non-manipulable probability aggregation.Franz Dietrich & Christian List - 2023
    A probability aggregation rule assigns to each profile of probability functions across a group of individuals (representing their individual probability assignments to some propositions) a collective probability function (representing the group's probability assignment). The rule is “non-manipulable” if no group member can manipulate the collective probability for any proposition in the direction of his or her own probability by misrepresenting his or her probability function (“strategic voting”). We show that, except in trivial cases, no probability aggregation rule satisfying two mild (...)
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