On 1/20/2014 5:22 PM, LizR wrote:
On 21 January 2014 06:41, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:On 1/20/2014 1:09 AM, LizR wrote:On 20 January 2014 19:43, Russell Standish <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 10:13:22PM -0800, meekerdb wrote: > On 1/19/2014 7:09 PM, Russell Standish wrote: > >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. > > Isn't "being optimal" a reason? Yes - a specific reason, not any old reason. Obviously I wasn't meaning just "any old reason" ! (I said the reason was to optimise the utility function... I realise there are caveats like not knowing how to, not having time, etc)But Russell seems to think that "specific reason" means some "objective", i.e. publicly determinable reason. In general one's utility function is private, subjective and not known to others or maybe even to yourself.If that's what he thinks, he's wrong. Utility functions are by their nature private. It generally takes quite a while to get to know someone well enough to find out "what makes them tick" - and it varies tremendously from one person to another. Indeed, some people don't even know what their /own/ utility function is (well obviously there are broad things like the survival instinct, hunger etc that most people subscribe to, although even then...) Hence the occasional "conversion experience" and suchlike.
I would say that in all but the most simple cases (e.g. playing chess) nobody knows their own utility function and they are forced to treat it probabilistically just like they are their partially unknown environment.
It's not surprising that economists and game theorists want to use such an impoverished definition of rational though; it's the equivalent of the physicists spherical cow.
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