Suppose you’re in a setting where the world is so large that you will only ever experience a tiny fraction of it directly, and you have to figure out the rest via generalization. Then your argument doesn’t hold up: shifting the mean might totally break your learning. But I claim that the real world is like this. So I am inherently skeptical of any result (like most convergence results) that rely on just trying approximately everything and gradually learning which to prefer and disprefer.
are you saying something like: you can’t actually do more of everything except one thing, because you’ll never do everything. so there’s a lot of variance that comes from exploration that multiplies with your O(k2) variance from having a suboptimal zero point. so in practice your k needs to be very close to optimal. so my thing is true but not useful in practice.
i feel people do empirically shift k quite a lot throughout life and it does seem to change how effectively they learn. if you’re mildly depressed your k is slightly too low and you learn a little bit slower. if you’re mildly manic your k is too high and you also learn a little bit slower. therapy, medications, and meditations shift k mildly.
Suppose you’re in a setting where the world is so large that you will only ever experience a tiny fraction of it directly, and you have to figure out the rest via generalization. Then your argument doesn’t hold up: shifting the mean might totally break your learning. But I claim that the real world is like this. So I am inherently skeptical of any result (like most convergence results) that rely on just trying approximately everything and gradually learning which to prefer and disprefer.
are you saying something like: you can’t actually do more of everything except one thing, because you’ll never do everything. so there’s a lot of variance that comes from exploration that multiplies with your O(k2) variance from having a suboptimal zero point. so in practice your k needs to be very close to optimal. so my thing is true but not useful in practice.
i feel people do empirically shift k quite a lot throughout life and it does seem to change how effectively they learn. if you’re mildly depressed your k is slightly too low and you learn a little bit slower. if you’re mildly manic your k is too high and you also learn a little bit slower. therapy, medications, and meditations shift k mildly.