Wikipedia Is Out Of Control
Now there are excellent articles on two of my favorite puzzles: The Monty Hall Problem, which has a straightforward answer; and Newcomb's Paradox, which doesn't. Newcomb's Paradox is really fun because Bayesian expected returns analysis gives one answer (take one) and formal logic gives another (take both).
Looking forward to the elaboration of Kavka's toxin puzzle.
posted by Anonymous at 10:18 PM
1 Comments:
I just abandoned a much longer comment.
Here's my take on Newcomb's paradox -
A) Human decision makers NEVER make decisions in a vacuum of personal history, experience, emotions and influences, including genetic ones.
B) Human decisions are NEVER atomistic - in other words they are NEVER hard, isolated points of unchanging data. A decision is more like a cup of water dipped from the sea of will and influence, meaning that A to B to C logical progressions about real human decisions can ONLY be partly descriptive.
C) This suggests that only the statistical, game theory analysis has any real descriptive meaning; expected returns and formal logic MUST BE incomplete answers. The more ambitious extrapolations are just that, distorting from atomistic assumptions; hunger and religion and smell might easily influence such a choice OR a prediction- in fact, for all real humans, they would.
To me this make the deterministic assumptions rather preposterous.
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