If you truly know absolutely and purely nothing about a probability distribution—which almost never happens
I would disagree with this particular statement. I’m not saying the opposite either. I think, it’s reasonable in a lot of cases to assume some probability distributions. However, there are lot of cases, where we just do not know at all. E.g., take the space of possible minds. What’s our probability distribution of our first AGI over this space? I personally don’t know. Even looking at binary events – What’s our probability distribution for AI x-risk this century? 10%? I find this widely used number implausible.
But I agree that we can try gathering more information to get more clarity on that. What is often done in DMDU analysis is that we figure out that some uncertainty variables don’t have much of an impact on our system anyway (so we fix the variables to some value) or that we constrain their value ranges to focus on more relevant subspaces. The DMDU framework does not necessitate or advocate for total ignorance. I think, there is room for an in-between.
I would disagree with this particular statement. I’m not saying the opposite either. I think, it’s reasonable in a lot of cases to assume some probability distributions. However, there are lot of cases, where we just do not know at all. E.g., take the space of possible minds. What’s our probability distribution of our first AGI over this space? I personally don’t know. Even looking at binary events – What’s our probability distribution for AI x-risk this century? 10%? I find this widely used number implausible.
But I agree that we can try gathering more information to get more clarity on that. What is often done in DMDU analysis is that we figure out that some uncertainty variables don’t have much of an impact on our system anyway (so we fix the variables to some value) or that we constrain their value ranges to focus on more relevant subspaces. The DMDU framework does not necessitate or advocate for total ignorance. I think, there is room for an in-between.