Two years ago, a friend and I took a seminar on decision theory... we were allured by the taste of abstract thought experiments that grew more bizarre and dizzying as we read onward.
Our objections are not particularly novel, and this conversation was not intended to sway a seasoned decision theorist. Instead, it is a modest attempt to articulate the stance of two people who earnestly thought about decision theory for about half a year and changed their minds.
At the end of the class, we weren’t sure what to make of the intellectual mess of decision theory, and came away with a sense that the project as a whole was rather doomed.
Over the next two years, we consolidated our reasons into a slightly more coherent objection to the project of decision theory. This conversation is our attempt to describe our current stance on the unworkability of decision theory.
I tried using some of the online decision support and linear optimisation software to aide thinking about ranked choice decisions with multiple dimensions.
It's remarkably powerful to be confronted by orthogonal goals and to be asked to rank them or pick between them, and then see the "shape" of choice rankings which stem from those choices.
Over the next two years, we consolidated our reasons into a slightly more coherent objection to the project of decision theory. This conversation is our attempt to describe our current stance on the unworkability of decision theory.