David Wallace
speaker
1,940 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 20 Jul
David Wallace’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, sure.
Okay.
So in terms of what it is, um so at an abstract level, decision theory is just uh you know it goes back to people like Von Neumann, the kind of theoretical analysis of decision making under uncertainty.
So uh things like
how we understand the maxim the principle of maximising expected utility is an example of
that content if you disconnect it from quantum mechanics.
Why does that have anything to do with quantum mechanics?
Well go back to this problem of probability.
If you've got this situation where everyone agrees that mod squared amplitude has the formal property to be probability, but people are still worried that it can't be probability because intuitively it's not doing the kind it's not in the context we naturally think about probability.
Well, one way to make progress there and resolve the on pass is to go operational and say, well, never mind whether it has the deep metaphysical nature of probability, does it behave in the ways probability does?
Does it plug into our theories in the ways probability does?
So then you ask yourself, well, how does probability plug into our theories?
Um
And at least one very substantial aspect of probability is
Mm-hmm.
Plugging into our theories is decision theoretic.
It's in the fact that
Um
when we say something in the future has high probability, it translates the fact that we're prepared to
Um
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