Manny’s Reviews > Rational Decisions > Status Update

An extreme form of Bayesianism holds that scientists actually do use some form of Bayesian updating when revising a theory, but that they are unconscious of doing so. This notion has been put to me with great urgency on several occasions, but you might as well seek to persuade me that fairies live at the bottom of my garden.

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.