The Value of Biased Information

Das, Nilanjan

doi:10.1093/bjps/axaa003

Cited by 20 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…One might question the assumption that rational agents always maximize expected utility (Buchak 2010;Campbell-Moore and Salow 2020) or that rationality requires precise credences (Bradley and Steele 2016;Wheeler 2021). 9 Relaxing these assumptions leads to cases where you can be 9 One could also question the assumption that learning can always be modeled as learning an element of a partition (Salow and Ahmed 2019;Dorst 2020;Das 2023), which is foreshadowed by Williamson (2000, pp. 230-7).…”

Section: What Does the Argument Show?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Rational Aversion to Information

Neth

2023

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science

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Is more information always better? Or are there some situations in which more information can make us worse off? Good (1966) argues that expected utility maximizers should always accept more information if the information is cost-free and relevant. But Good's argument presupposes that you are certain you will update by conditionalization. If we relax this assumption and allow agents to be uncertain about updating, these agents can be rationally required to reject free and relevant information. Since there are good reasons to be uncertain about updating, rationality can require you to prefer ignorance.

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Section: What Does the Argument Show?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Rational Aversion to Information

Neth

2023

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science

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“…24 All these constraints are synchronic in character: according to them, what an 22 For a more precise statement of the theorem and its proof, see Appendix A. 23 For the observation that failures of partitionality lead to failures of Good's inequality, see Ahmed and Salow (forthcoming), Dorst (forthcoming), and Das (2020). See the earlier footnote 3 for references to discusssions of how Good's inequality can fail in cases of dilation.…”

Section: Three Norms Of Instrumental Rationalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As Das (2020) shows, since failures of partitionality can give rise to unreflective inquiries, they can lead to failures of Value of Evidence . But this phenomenon has nothing much to do with Rationality of Imprecision .…”

Section: Reflection and Conditionalizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Credal imprecision and the value of evidence

Das

2022

Nous

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This paper is about a tension between two theses. The first is Value of Evidence: roughly, the thesis that it is always rational for an agent to gather and use cost-free evidence for making decisions. The second is Rationality of Imprecision: the thesis that an agent can be rationally required to adopt doxastic states that are imprecise, i.e., not representable by a single credence function. While others have noticed this tension, I offer a new diagnosis of it. I show that it arises when an agent with an imprecise doxastic state engages in an unreflective inquiry, an inquiry where they revise their beliefs using an updating rule that doesn't satisfy a weak reflection principle. In such an unreflective inquiry, certain synchronic norms of instrumental rationality can make it instrumentally irrational for an agent to gather and use cost-free evidence. I then go on to propose a diachronic norm of instrumental rationality that preserves Value of Evidence in unreflective inquiries. This, I suggest, may help us reconcile this thesis with Rationality of Imprecision.Consider this argument. The success of our actions depends on the way the world is. We can only find out how the world is by gathering more evidence and revising our beliefs in light of it. So, if a piece of evidence is available for gathering and use, it always makes sense to gather that evidence and use it for making decisions.This argument-though plausible at first glance-is subject to two challenges. First, if the expected costs of gathering and using the available evidence outweigh the expected benefits of This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

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“…The idea that risk averse agents can sometimes rationally decline free information is defended in detail by Buchak (2010), Ahmed and Salow (2019), and Campbell‐Moore and Salow (2020). For other examples of adjustments to the standard expected‐value framework that allow for violations of Good's theorem, see Dorst (2020) and Das (forthcoming).…”

Section: Risk Aversion and Rational Ignorancementioning

confidence: 99%

Risk aversion and elite‐group ignorance

Kinney

Bright

2021

Philos Phenomenol Research

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Critical race theorists and standpoint epistemologists argue that agents who are members of dominant social groups are often in a state of ignorance about the extent of their social dominance, where this ignorance is explained by these agents' membership in a socially dominant group (e.g., Mills 2007). To illustrate this claim bluntly, it is argued: 1) that many white men do not know the extent of their social dominance, 2) that they remain ignorant as to the extent of their dominant social position even where this information is freely attainable, and 3) that this ignorance is due in part to the fact that they are white men. We argue that on Buchak's (2010Buchak's ( , 2013 model of risk averse instrumental rationality, ignorance of one's privileges can be rational. This argument yields a new account of elite-group ignorance, why it may occur, and how it might be alleviated.

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The Value of Biased Information

Cited by 20 publications

References 41 publications

Rational Aversion to Information

Rational Aversion to Information

Credal imprecision and the value of evidence

Risk aversion and elite‐group ignorance

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