On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 01:40:45PM +1300, LizR wrote: > One problem, surely, in real life is not knowing what the other person's > "utility function" is? So someone may behave apparently irrationally - e.g. > giving away money - because their utility function involves making > themselves feel good, or getting a reward in heaven, or they want to show > off how generous they are to impress someone, or something else we don't > know. So in practice it isn't even theoretically possible to know if > someone else is behaving rationally a lot of the time. > > Personally, I think anyone without brain damage or mental illness will > normally behave rationally according to their own lights. We call it > cognitive dissonance when someone is unable to justify their beliefs or > actions - they have found some contradiction within themselves - but they > usually quickly act to reduce this, by changing their beliefs or doing > something different. And it doesn't seem to happen very often, as far as I > know, so it seems to me that most people are acting rationally according to > their own utility functions most of the time.
Fair enough, but someone behaving deterministically can be modelled quite effectively given sufficient study. > > By the way, I don't see how a random decision can be considered "irrational > by definition". To say something is rational surely means there is a reason > for doing it which "attempts to maximise the person's utility > function" That's not the definition. A rational agent is someone who always chooses the optimal course of action, not that there might be a reason for it. - > so making a random decision is rational so long as there is a good reason > to do so - e.g. neither option seemed better, or a "leftfield" move > confounded an opponent, or it was more important to make *some* decision > quickly than to work out the best decision (as in the chess clock example) > etc. > -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
