Manny’s Reviews > Rational Decisions > Status Update

Well, I can't decide if that really was a satisfactory punchline. Maybe it takes a while to get the joke?

You have to admire Binmore's breadth. Hands up everyone who's seen another book which spends significant time discussing both empathy and Kolmogorov's axiomatisation of probability theory.

Setting the utility of one's death to -∞ is nonsensical, because then no one would take any risks at all. In fact, empirical studies of preferences revealed by driving behaviour suggest that most people value their lives at under ten million dollars.

The Prisoner's Dilemma teaches the important lesson that rationality need not be good for a society. However, the response that we should therefore junk the orthodox theory in favor of some notion of collective rationality makes no sense. One might as well propose abandoning arithmetic because two loaves and seven fishes won't feed a multitude.