Graduate School

[Eolin]

Since this is the off-topic forum and I'm excited to the point of silly exuberance, I thought I'd tell everyone ...

That I have been accepted, and offered a bit of money, into the Computation and Logic Masters program at ... Carnegie Mellon University.

I'm a philosopher, so this wasn't quite my first choice. It was about the fifth -- just because what they do is a bit to formal for me. But a little formalized logic might do me well.

This officially means goodbye Oklahoma, hello state where they don't have to close down the roads just because of a football game. Goodbye Norman, hello blue state. Goodbye OU, hello cold weather. Sweet!

It is a day of celebration. I didn't expect to get admitted to Carnegie, I thought they'd reject me. Grey Goose for my men, whiskey for my horses!

 

[IamTheTest]

Congrats, CM is a great school.

 

[fusangite]

Congratulations!

 

[IronWolf]

Congratulations! I am sure you are quite excited about this accomplishment!

 

[DonAdam]

Congratulations! I just got accepted as well, so I know it's a relief.

 

[nakia]

Whoo-Hoo! Congrats on grad school. I'm finishing up now, myself.

What exactly is the Computation and Logic program? I have an MA in philosophy, but my focus sounds very different.

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

Congrats!

 

[Eolin]

Whoo-Hoo! Congrats on grad school. I'm finishing up now, myself.

What exactly is the Computation and Logic program? I have an MA in philosophy, but my focus sounds very different.

Its mostly what it sounds like, near as I can tell.

It goes into provability of logical systems, computability thereof, that sort of thing. I'm fairly sure it handles descision theory, but is concerned mostly with the axioms and provability thereof, not so much the application.

Which is too bad for me, because I'm heavily interested in the application of descision theory. and not just to computers, but to people. I think a whole new ethic could be devised which holds that human happiness is whats important. Sure, its utilitarianism, but it could have actual equations in how to get desire satisfaction, which would be new and neat.

It is so far the best school by far that has accepted me. Or that I've even heard from. There are still six schools that have as of yet not responded.

 

[nakia]

Which is too bad for me, because I'm heavily interested in the application of descision theory. and not just to computers, but to people. I think a whole new ethic could be devised which holds that human happiness is whats important. Sure, its utilitarianism, but it could have actual equations in how to get desire satisfaction, which would be new and neat.

It is so far the best school by far that has accepted me. Or that I've even heard from. There are still six schools that have as of yet not responded.

I think you and I could get into some interesting philosophical arguements, because "equations in how to get desire satisfaction" sounds deeply problematic to me. Granted, I don't really know that much about decision theory. But, that's what philosophers do -- argue.

And it's certainly not too late to hear from those other places. My program here at UVA just made most of its admission decisions, with some still to be worked out and all the letters still to be sent. Plus it's spring break time, so that slows things down as well. Good luck to you!

 

[Eolin]

Then let's get into an argument.

You think a axiomatized method of deriving satisfaction is inherently problematic. That's fine. Let me explain how the basics of decision theory works, and we'll see if you still see it the same way. Likely you will. I havn't done this in a while, so my apologies if the probabilities don't make sense.

Let's start with a pretty simple example. I want to each lunch, and I want to spend as little money as possible. And I really like meat and other things that taste good. My choices include anything I could find or make, but let's put it into three basic categories: Prime Rib (good-tasting meat), Mexican Food (meaning all pseudo-cheap eating out categories), and leftovers. Now, as this is a toy example, I can make the actual decision pretty easily. The calculations I'm about to demonstrate are good for something like buying a car, but they'll do here.

Currently decision theory doesn't have a mechanism that I know of for determining what's true. That's what Bayes theorem is for, but it hasn't been integrated yet. And I'm not about to try to do that in an internet post. So, for each of these, all I'm reall going to do is to list the expected utility from each choice, based on whatever areas I can think of right now. Wish I knew how to do tables. The numbers represent utilities. And, of course, this doesn't take into account other peoples happiness and how that affects me -- though it is fairly easy to do so.

Food: Prime Rib Mexican Leftovers
Cost: 1 2 4 (being free is great!)
Taste: 9 7 6
After: 3 4 2 (I like how good food makes me feel.)
Total: 13 13 12

I contrived the example such that Prime Rib and Mexican would win. From here, what descision theory generally calls for is to flip a coin. This being enroll, I'd say roll a die. Say, a d20. With prime Rib being 0-10, and Mexican being 11-20

It isn't that the we actually use the die to decide what to do -- that'd be boring folly. Instead, as the die in spinning, we find out how we want it to come out -- and that's what we decide.

Now, where does using real equations come in? Bayes Theorem, which is a the best way we've got currently of crunching conditional probabilities in order to decide between hypotheses. Its hypotheses-testing at its current best, and for this example our hypotheses might be:

H1: I desire Prime Rib.
H2: I desire Mexican Food.
H3: Leftovers are where its at!

What I want to be able to do with Bayes Theorem is to be able to deduce, using sweet probabilities, which of these is more likely to satisfy my desires. Once I do that, the world is my oyster. Or something.

And that's how we can mathematically derive desire satisfaction.

The above (c) by me. Don't steal from me, I'm just a graduate student.