Why are you specifying 100 or 0 value, and using fuzzy language like “acceptably small” for disvalue?
Is this based on “value” and “disvalue” being different dimensions, and thus incomparable? Wouldn’t you just include both in your prediction, and run it through your (best guess of) utility function and pick highest expectation, weighted by your probability estimate of which universe you’ll find yourself in?
Why are you specifying 100 or 0 value, and using fuzzy language like “acceptably small” for disvalue?
100 and 0 in this context make sense. Or at least in my initial reading: arbitrarily-chosen values that are in a decent range to work quickly with (akin to why people often work in percentages instead of 0..1)
Is this based on “value” and “disvalue” being different dimensions, and thus incomparable?
It is—I’m going to say “often”, although I am aware this is suboptimal phrasing—often the case that you are confident in the sign of an outcome but not the magnitude of the outcome.
As such, you can often end up with discontinuities at zero.
Wouldn’t you just include both in your prediction, and run it through your (best guess of) utility function and pick highest expectation, weighted by your probability estimate of which universe you’ll find yourself in?
Dropping the entire probability distribution of outcomes through your utility function doesn’t even necessarily have a closed-form result. In a universe where computation itself is a cost, finding a cheaper heuristic (and working through if said heuristic has any particular basis or problems) can be valuable.
The heuristic in the grandparent comment is just what happens if you are simultaneously very confident in the sign of positive results, and have very little confidence in the magnitude of negative results.
Why are you specifying 100 or 0 value, and using fuzzy language like “acceptably small” for disvalue?
Is this based on “value” and “disvalue” being different dimensions, and thus incomparable? Wouldn’t you just include both in your prediction, and run it through your (best guess of) utility function and pick highest expectation, weighted by your probability estimate of which universe you’ll find yourself in?
100 and 0 in this context make sense. Or at least in my initial reading: arbitrarily-chosen values that are in a decent range to work quickly with (akin to why people often work in percentages instead of 0..1)
It is—I’m going to say “often”, although I am aware this is suboptimal phrasing—often the case that you are confident in the sign of an outcome but not the magnitude of the outcome.
As such, you can often end up with discontinuities at zero.
Dropping the entire probability distribution of outcomes through your utility function doesn’t even necessarily have a closed-form result. In a universe where computation itself is a cost, finding a cheaper heuristic (and working through if said heuristic has any particular basis or problems) can be valuable.
The heuristic in the grandparent comment is just what happens if you are simultaneously very confident in the sign of positive results, and have very little confidence in the magnitude of negative results.