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What is a shame is how “egondocity economics” (maybe a reference to the size of Peters’ ego?) misrepresents some things. Are you calling “bad math” the expecte

by kgwgk 6y ago

What is a shame is how “egondocity economics” (maybe a reference to the size of Peters’ ego?) misrepresents some things. Are you calling “bad math” the expected utility theory developed by von Neumann (et al.)? He knew one thing or two about ergodicity, information theory, computer science, etc.

Ericson2314 6y ago
What is being mispreresented? I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenstern_utility_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenster..., And there's no notion of time let alone non-ergoticity in the formula. I am not familiar of with the rest of its book, but I wouldn't be surprise if it's similarly fine, building a theory similarly of rich theorems about very simple models. If so, the problem isn't Von Neumann's math then, even if the general aim of the endever was misinspired by Bernoulli's primitive notions. The problem would be all the math cargo culters in economics who constantly try to the premise premises of math theorems as if they were broad social laws. I mean don't get me wrong, I am no fan of Von Neumannn's politics, but obviously I am not going to fight his pure math.
- kgwgk 6y ago
  The article by Peters that you linked to says that “in maximizing the expectation value — an ensemble average over all possible outcomes of the gamble — expected utility theory implicitly assumes that individuals can interact with copies of themselves, effectively in parallel universes (the other members of the ensemble).” This is nonsense.
  - loup-vaillant 6y ago
    He may be desperately trying to shoehorn frequentist statistics, which require actual samples over repeated experiments. If you take the frequentist view, then you kinda have to collect all the possible results of your bet from all the parallel universes of outcomes. Which requires interaction with those universes, and does not make any sense unless maybe you wave your hands a lot about the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (and dammit, even if we believe in that, the parallel universes do not interact!) If you're a reasonable person instead, you recognise that probabilities instead describe a state of partial information (that is, probability is in the mind), and the "ensemble average" really comes from a probability distribution we can compute with bog standard probabilistic counterfactual reasoning, not by actually hopping universes. My, the abstract didn't prepare me for this.

by kgwgk 6y ago

Ericson2314 6y ago

What is being mispreresented? I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenstern_utility_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenster..., And there's no notion of time let alone non-ergoticity in the formula. I am not familiar of with the rest of its book, but I wouldn't be surprise if it's similarly fine, building a theory similarly of rich theorems about very simple models. If so, the problem isn't Von Neumann's math then, even if the general aim of the endever was misinspired by Bernoulli's primitive notions. The problem would be all the math cargo culters in economics who constantly try to the premise premises of math theorems as if they were broad social laws. I mean don't get me wrong, I am no fan of Von Neumannn's politics, but obviously I am not going to fight his pure math.

kgwgk 6y ago
The article by Peters that you linked to says that “in maximizing the expectation value — an ensemble average over all possible outcomes of the gamble — expected utility theory implicitly assumes that individuals can interact with copies of themselves, effectively in parallel universes (the other members of the ensemble).” This is nonsense.
- loup-vaillant 6y ago
  He may be desperately trying to shoehorn frequentist statistics, which require actual samples over repeated experiments. If you take the frequentist view, then you kinda have to collect all the possible results of your bet from all the parallel universes of outcomes. Which requires interaction with those universes, and does not make any sense unless maybe you wave your hands a lot about the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (and dammit, even if we believe in that, the parallel universes do not interact!) If you're a reasonable person instead, you recognise that probabilities instead describe a state of partial information (that is, probability is in the mind), and the "ensemble average" really comes from a probability distribution we can compute with bog standard probabilistic counterfactual reasoning, not by actually hopping universes. My, the abstract didn't prepare me for this.