On Wed, 07 Feb 2007 20:40:27 -0500, Charles D Hixson
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I suspect you of mis-analyzing the goals and rewards of casino
gamblers.... I'm not sure whether or not this speaks to the points that
you are attempting to raise, but it certainly calls into question
comments about "stupid bets". Well, the lottery isn't a casino, so
perhaps you are correct, but I would be suspicious about calculating
values based solely on the money.
The point I was making, and it applies equally well to lottery bets as it
does to casino bets, is that such bets are not evidence of incoherence
where incoherence is defined (by De Finetti) as vulnerability to dutch
books.
A dutch book occurs when an incoherent thinker is forced to lose as a
result of his inconsistent judgmental probabilities, no matter the
outcome. Such bets are worse than stupid. :)
I gave an example of a Dutch book in a post to Russell in which an
incoherent thinker assigns a higher probability to intelligent life on
Mars than to mere life on Mars. Since the first hypothesis can be true
only if the second is true, it is incoherent to assign a higher
probability to the first than to the second.
Coherence is basically just common sense applied to probabilistic
reasoning. I'm dismayed to learn from Ben that coherence is so difficult
to achieve in AGI.
-gts
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