Also, when reading Greaves and Mogensenâs papers, I was reminded of the ideas of cluster thinking (also here) and model combination. I could be drawing faulty analogies, but it seemed like those ideas could be ways to capture, in a form that can actually be readily worked with, the following idea (from Greaves; the same basic concept is also used in Mogensen):
in the situations we are considering, instead of having some single and completely precise (real-valued) credence function, agents are rationally required to have imprecise credences: that is, to be in a credal state that is represented by a many-membered set of probability functions (call this set the agentâs ârepresentorâ)
That is, we can consider each probability function in the agentâs representor as one model, and then either qualitatively use Holdenâs idea of cluster thinking, or get a weighted combination of those models. Then weâd actually have an answer, rather than just indifference.
This seems like potentially âthe best of both worldsâ; i.e., a way to capture both of the following intuitively appealing ideas:
perhaps we shouldnât present singular, sharp credence functions over extremely hard-to-predict long-term effects
we can still make educated guesses like âavoiding extinction is probably bad in expectationâ and (perhaps) âgiving to AMF is probably good in expectationâ.
(This second intuition can rest on ideas like âYeah, ok, I agree that itâs âunclearâ how to weigh up these arguments, but I weigh up arguments when itâs unclear how to do so all the time. Iâm still at least slightly more convinced by argument X, so Iâm going to go with what it suggests, and just also remain extremely open to new evidence.â)
Also, when reading Greaves and Mogensenâs papers, I was reminded of the ideas of cluster thinking (also here) and model combination. I could be drawing faulty analogies, but it seemed like those ideas could be ways to capture, in a form that can actually be readily worked with, the following idea (from Greaves; the same basic concept is also used in Mogensen):
That is, we can consider each probability function in the agentâs representor as one model, and then either qualitatively use Holdenâs idea of cluster thinking, or get a weighted combination of those models. Then weâd actually have an answer, rather than just indifference.
This seems like potentially âthe best of both worldsâ; i.e., a way to capture both of the following intuitively appealing ideas:
perhaps we shouldnât present singular, sharp credence functions over extremely hard-to-predict long-term effects
we can still make educated guesses like âavoiding extinction is probably bad in expectationâ and (perhaps) âgiving to AMF is probably good in expectationâ.
(This second intuition can rest on ideas like âYeah, ok, I agree that itâs âunclearâ how to weigh up these arguments, but I weigh up arguments when itâs unclear how to do so all the time. Iâm still at least slightly more convinced by argument X, so Iâm going to go with what it suggests, and just also remain extremely open to new evidence.â)