I’m confused by what you mean by “non-pragmatic”. For example, what makes “avoiding dominated strategies” pragmatic but “deference” non-pragmatic?
(It seems like the pragmatic ones help you decide what to do and the non-pragmatic ones help you decide what to believe, but then this doesn’t answer how to make good decisions.)
Sorry this was confusing! From our definition here:
We’ll use “pragmatic principles” to refer to principles according to which belief-forming or decision-making procedures should “perform well” in some sense.
“Avoiding dominated strategies” is pragmatic because it directly evaluates a decision procedure or set of beliefs based on its performance. (People do sometimes apply pragmatic principles like this one directly to beliefs, see e.g. this work on anthropics.)
Deference isn’t pragmatic, because the appropriateness of your beliefs is evaluated by how your beliefs relate to the person you’re deferring to. Someone could say, “You should defer because this tends to lead to good consequences,” but then they’re not applying deference directly as a principle — the underlying principle is “doing what’s worked in the past.”
I’m confused by what you mean by “non-pragmatic”. For example, what makes “avoiding dominated strategies” pragmatic but “deference” non-pragmatic?
(It seems like the pragmatic ones help you decide what to do and the non-pragmatic ones help you decide what to believe, but then this doesn’t answer how to make good decisions.)
Sorry this was confusing! From our definition here:
“Avoiding dominated strategies” is pragmatic because it directly evaluates a decision procedure or set of beliefs based on its performance. (People do sometimes apply pragmatic principles like this one directly to beliefs, see e.g. this work on anthropics.)
Deference isn’t pragmatic, because the appropriateness of your beliefs is evaluated by how your beliefs relate to the person you’re deferring to. Someone could say, “You should defer because this tends to lead to good consequences,” but then they’re not applying deference directly as a principle — the underlying principle is “doing what’s worked in the past.”