[extropy-chat] Superrationality (was: singularity conference at stanford)

[Robin Hanson]

At 07:42 PM 5/17/2006, Anders Sandberg wrote:
>... superrationality requires that you have no false beliefs, no uncertainty
>and indefinite amounts of mindpower, and that is unrealistic.
>This is also why I distrust a lot of ordinary game theory. People have a
>hard time doing these "rational" calculations, so they can't be trusted to
>follow rational strategies. And actions are subject to noise etc. Instead
>the aim ought to be to look for stable and robust strategies under many
>kinds of noise, uncertainty and coevolving competitors, and that is in
>IMHO a far more *fun* problem that finding equilibria. But it lacks all
>the austere purity of philosophy and classic game theory.

In case folks are not aware, most activity in game theory in the last decade
has been in these two directions:
1) Specific heuristics that people use in specific game contexts.
These models tend to be very context dependent, and so are of relatively
little use when applied to games with little behavior data.
2) Noisy game theories, which use a few general noise parameters to
predict behavior in a wide range of games.   These have been quite
successful and reasonably account for lack of full rationality without getting
bogged down in details.



Robin Hanson  rhanson at gmu.edu  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323