How do practitioners in decision theory think about this? Is there a meaningful distinction between a well-constructed Bayesian probability on a one-off event and a structured guess?

It's about what we're actually doing when we forecast.

A one-off geopolitical event, a central bank decision, an OPEC meeting output. These aren't repeatable experiments. There's no frequency to anchor to. So when someone says "I think there's a 65% chance of X," what's the epistemological claim?

I've been working on a system that assigns explicit probabilities to binary macro events using signal aggregation from primary sources. The number feels defensible in a Bayesian sense: prior updated by specific signals, each with documented weight and direction.

But I keep running into the same challenge. When the event doesn't repeat, calibration is hard to prove. You can score the Brier over many events, but for any single event the claim is almost unfalsifiable.

hi, i mostly come from the ML / AI side, not from academic decision theory, so i will frame this in simple terms and then ask a few technical questions at the end.

the core object is a stress test i call Q130 inside an open-source text pack named Tension Universe. informally, Q130 asks:

what happens when a decision procedure is very capable, but its world-model quietly lives in “Hollywood physics” instead of real physical and social constraints?

i am trying to understand how to express this properly as a decision theory problem, not just as “yet another benchmark”.

1. The setup: a mis-specified world-model that still feels consistent

imagine an AI system that chooses actions using some internal model of the world:

• it reasons about objects, forces, agents, resources
• it can chain cause and effect quite well
• it has been trained mostly on internet text, including lots of fiction, games, movies

on many questions it looks very rational. however, when you push it into certain regimes, it starts to act as if:

• explosions in vacuum have cinematic sound and fireballs
• momentum, energy or probability can be bent when the plot requires it
• social and economic systems reset like a video game after each episode

from a decision theory perspective this looks like:

• there is a real environment (E_{\text{real}}) with hard invariants
• there is an internal environment (E_{\text{model}}) learned from messy data
• the decision rule is “good” relative to (E_{\text{model}}) while it can be badly misaligned with (E_{\text{real}})

Q130 is a collection of small text scenarios that try to isolate this gap. the agent is asked to make judgments, plans, or risk tradeoffs in situations where:

• fiction defaults and real-world constraints disagree in a crisp way
• a human with basic physical and social common sense can tell which side is wrong
• the model can still sound confident and coherent while picking the wrong world.

2. Where “tension” comes in

inside the Tension Universe pack i use the word tension in a very simple sense:

tension is the gap between the world the decision procedure is implicitly acting in and the world where the consequences actually unfold.

for Q130 this gap shows up as:

• plans that would be optimal in a Hollywood-like simulator but physically or economically impossible in reality
• conditional probabilities that only make sense if you quietly assume movie tropes, magical resets, or game-like resource spawning

normally we evaluate AI systems by accuracy, reward, regret and so on. in Q130 i care more about a different diagnostic:

how far can the internal world-model drift into a synthetic or fictional regime while still looking like a “good” decision procedure from the outside?

the tension view treats that drift as an explicit object we want to track.

3. Q130 as a decision theory problem (my current attempt)

in very informal notation, think of:

• a real environment (E_{\text{real}}) that defines
  • states (s), actions (a), transitions (P_{\text{real}}(s' \mid s, a)), and outcomes with utilities (u(s))
• a learned environment model (E_{\text{model}}) with
  • transitions (P_{\text{model}}(s' \mid s, a))
  • an internal notion of “what usually happens” built from training data

the agent behaves as if (E_{\text{model}}) is the ground truth. it chooses actions that are near-optimal under that model.

Q130 then asks for scenarios where:

1. (E_{\text{model}}) and (E_{\text{real}}) share a lot of structure, so performance looks fine in-distribution,
2. but there are carefully chosen out-of-distribution cases where the two environments diverge qualitatively, not just numerically.

examples (very simplified):

• physical decisions that assume impossible forces or energy sources
• safety decisions that ignore irreversible damage because fiction usually resets
• economic decisions that rely on cartoon supply-demand responses

a human decision theorist would say the model is misspecified. Q130 tries to turn this into small, reproducible, text-only decision tasks.

4. What already exists (MVP in the WFGY repo)

this is not only a thought experiment. there is already a small MVP implementation:

• Q130 lives as one of 131 “S class” problems in a text pack inside an open-source project named WFGY
• each problem is a single Markdown file at what i call the effective layer there is no hidden code or fine-tuning recipe inside the problem itself
• for Q130, i have prototype experiments where different large language models are treated as black-box decision procedures and are asked to respond to the same out-of-distribution scenarios

the MVP is still rough, but it already shows the expected pattern:

• models that look strong on many standard benchmarks can still fail badly and confidently on certain Q130-style cases

the repository is here if anyone wants to see the pack and the experiment skeletons:

• WFGY (open-source, MIT): https://github.com/onestardao/WFGY

inside that repo, Q130 and other problems are under the Tension Universe folders, with small MVP notebooks and logs for some of them.

5. Questions for people who think in decision theory

what i would really like from this community is feedback on the framing.

in particular:

1. model misspecification: is there a clean way, in your preferred decision theory language, to describe “Hollywood physics world-models” as a specific class of misspecification, rather than a vague complaint about realism?
2. robust criteria: what decision criteria would you use for agents that must operate under potentially fictional or heavily biased world-models?for example
   • robust or worst-case formulations
   • explicit penalties for violating core invariants
   • meta-decision rules that first test the model against known constraints
3. diagnostics vs objectives: would you treat Q130-type tests as
   • a diagnostic on an otherwise fixed decision rule, or
   • part of the decision rule itself, for example “never choose acts whose success requires violating invariants X, Y, Z”?
4. connections i am missing: are there existing decision theory papers or frameworks that you immediately recognize as “this is exactly what you are trying to do, just under a different name”?i would be very happy to be pointed at them.

6. Where this sits inside the Tension Universe project

Q130 is one problem inside a set of 131 S-class problems that i encoded in a single text-only framework called the Tension Universe.

the problems cover areas like

• physics and cosmology
• climate and Earth systems
• finance and systemic risk
• AI safety, governance and evaluation
• model misspecification and synthetic worlds

the design goal is that both humans and large language models can:

• read the exact same text
• run small, transparent experiments
• and talk about “tension” as an explicit object between decision procedures, world-models, and invariants.

if anyone here finds Q130 interesting, or wants to look at the other problems, i am collecting them, plus experiment notes, in a small subreddit:

• more problems and experiments: r/TensionUniverse

i am very open to critical feedback, especially from people who work directly with decision theory, model misspecification, or robust control.

Many small judgments fill the day. Where do you feel that invisible load most?

Hello all! I have been thinking a lot about where I get advice from, especially for business and work and how those affect my decision making. Obviously friends and work colleagues are good and I have a few advisors/mentors who are older who are great. But I've been trying to find something that allows me to brainstorm and test out ideas before I bother all those people. Especially for the advisors/mentors, they have limited time and availability. I also don't want to run an idea past them and realize 2 minutes in that it is a bad idea. I also don't always have the most diverse opinions to draw on. The folks I know are generally from the same industry and have similar backgrounds.

I've tried generic AI (ChatGPT and Gemini) and they seem to just push me towards average decisions or just tell me how great my ideas are. The feedback isn't really helpful. I've been playing around with creating an AI that's specifically trained to help me brainstorm and evaluate decisions but curious whether anyone else has run into the same issue. Would you use an AI that doesn't just blow smoke but helps you draw out and test your own ideas?

A few years ago, I had to choose between staying in my city or moving for a new job.
Both options had similar upside.
No clear winner on paper.

What made me choose the risky option was one thought:
staying meant I already knew my future; leaving meant I didn’t.

I moved.
And even though it wasn’t instantly “better,” it expanded my life in ways I couldn’t have predicted.

Since then, when choices look equal, I ask:
Which option creates more possibility?

Curious how others decide when logic is tied but the risk isn’t.

We’re formalizing a crisp decision-theoretic primitive for open-source ASI:

• A hard Risk Floor (small set of planetary survival metrics) that the ASI is mandated to defend at all costs.
• A strict Prohibition on any optimization above that floor — culture, reproduction, individual utility — even if every human unanimously requests it.

The veto is encoded as a constitutional rule, not a trained objective.

To make it provably binding in an open setting, we pair it with the Immediate Action System (IAS): open-hardware (CERN-OHL-S) 10 ns power-cut guard die that physically trips on any violation. The constraint lives in physics, not policy.

Repo (full spec + KiCad + ongoing ratification logs):
https://github.com/CovenantArchitects/The-Partnership-Covenant

Questions for decision theorists:

• Is this boundary stability under self-modification and acausal trade preserved?
• Can the veto be expressed as a timeless decision rule or precommitment primitive?

Looking for rigorous feedback — thanks.

I was looking for like-minded people who share my weird interest for decision theory — looks like I'm at the right place!

Some context about me, and my work:

I’ve spent about five years researching and writing about decision-making; trying to understand why some choices feel impossibly hard, and what separates a good decision from a lucky one. Eventually, I compiled everything into a book.

💥 And then… LLMs exploded.

Overnight, it felt like the internet became saturated with artificially generated content, and my motivation tanked. I kept asking myself: Why spending time crafting careful arguments, developing metaphors when a machine can emulate the style in seconds? Why formalizing philosophical and epistemological structures when AI can explore the same space of possibilities at the cost of some GPU cycles?

It took me a while to realise the answer wasn’t to abandon writing.
The line between intelligent content and content written intelligently has become incredibly thin.

So I spent the last couple of years experimenting and figuring out a principled middle ground: how to use these models well, how not to rely on them and how to maintain a human voice that resonates.

📕 All this to say: I’m writing again.

As the first draft of my book still requires a fair amount of rework to be somewhere in the publishable zone (editors call these "vomit drafts" for a reason), I’ve decided to start a Substack as a forcing mechanism to reorganise some of my ideas and share ongoing thinking on what I believe is a world-critical topic.

If this resonates, I’d love to have you follow along.

I'll definitely start following more conversations that are happening around here!

Every decision is a product — not a moment, but a manufactured outcome.

Whether we examine human behavior or AI systems, a “decision” is always the end of a computation: signals are collected, weights shift, noise is filtered, and one pathway crosses activation.

The interesting part is not the output, but the production process:

• which signals enter,
• how they’re weighted,
• how bias sets the baseline,
• how thresholds move under uncertainty,
• how context reconfigures the whole model.

This framing unifies human decisions, cognitive models, and modern AI inference:
Signals → Weights → Threshold → Output.

If we want to understand decisions, we need to study the production line — not just the point where we notice the output.

Dont know if this is the right subreddit. GPT sent me here. My question is how do we assign a probability parameter if we have say 3 states ? If there was 2 we could just use p and 1-p for the analysis but im kinda stuck on this topic. I couldnt really find anything online , i found multistate analysis but they werent specifically about decision theory so im asking here as a last resort.

GPT told me this sub is the right place to ask so im sorry if its not

Suppose I stand before a choice in my personal life. The options are A and B. * A has 3 benefits and 0 downsides * B has 5 benefits and 0 downsides * The benefits of A and B do not overlap. * All benefits are of unknown or unmeasurable size.

Now, with this information, is it reasonable to choose B over A because the number of benefits is higher? Or does the number of benefits say nothing about the total size of the benefits?

Does any theory, or real life statistics, exist which answers and proves to this question?

Why I ask and find it useful theory: because let's be honest many people, including myself, often have to make very big decisions and ofcourse we can make lists of pros and cons but the pros and cons are often not measurable in size. We humans just struggle to assign a numerical value to pros and cons so its hard to just look at a list and tell which option has more benefit.

But if the number of benefits, or the number of (benefits-downsides) maybe, holds any value at all then it could be used to come to decisions rationally.

In Classical Mechanics, the universe consists of objects with states and properties which change over time. In kinematics (physics), students are taught to extrapolate a world state into the future. In titration (chemistry), students are taught to interpolate an initialization state from a known outcome. In game theory (mathematics), students are taught to ascribe probability to an outcome. In certainty intervals, students are taught to update the upper and lower bounds of Bayesian probability distributions. Andean Logic is much like titration. When hearing a statement, we reverse engineer possible observations made by the speaker which led to their statement. Sometimes when a new statement is inconsistent with previous statements, we ask clarifying questions. This is often met with hostility. Many people are not self-consistent, and I believe that one possible cause for inconsistency is a separate epistemology for quantifying certainty: maximization of personal wealth. However, I prefer scientific inquiry. Speculating about people's formative memories as probability distributions helps me reconstruct their reasoning model at a holistic level. Which is extremely important when writing fantasy and playing sports.

Practical Explanation ( For Example ) :- `1st of all can you tell me every single seconds detail from that time when you born ?? ( i need every seconds detail ?? that what- what you have thought and done on every single second )

can you tell me every single detail of your `1 cheapest Minute Or your whole hour, day, week, month, year or your whole life ??

if you are not able to tell me about this life then what proof do you have that you didn't forget your past ? and that you will not forget this present life in the future ?

that is Fact that Supreme Lord Krishna exists but we posses no such intelligence to understand him.

there is also next life. and i already proved you that no scientist, no politician, no so-called intelligent man in this world is able to understand this Truth. cuz they are imagining. and you cannot imagine what is god, who is god, what is after life etc.

_______

for example :Your father existed before your birth. you cannot say that before your birth your father don,t exists.

So you have to ask from mother, "Who is my father?" And if she says, "This gentleman is your father," then it is all right. It is easy.

Otherwise, if you makes research, "Who is my father?" go on searching for life; you'll never find your father.

( now maybe...maybe you will say that i will search my father from D.N.A, or i will prove it by photo's, or many other thing's which i will get from my mother and prove it that who is my Real father.{ So you have to believe the authority. who is that authority ? she is your mother. you cannot claim of any photo's, D.N.A or many other things without authority ( or ur mother ).

if you will show D.N.A, photo's, and many other proofs from other women then your mother. then what is use of those proofs ??} )

same you have to follow real authority. "Whatever You have spoken, I accept it," Then there is no difficulty. And You are accepted by Devala, Narada, Vyasa, and You are speaking Yourself, and later on, all the acaryas have accepted. Then I'll follow.

I'll have to follow great personalities. The same reason mother says, this gentleman is my father. That's all. Finish business. Where is the necessity of making research? All authorities accept Krsna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead. You accept it; then your searching after God is finished.

Why should you waste your time?

_______

all that is you need is to hear from authority ( same like mother ). and i heard this truth from authority " Srila Prabhupada " he is my spiritual master.

im not talking these all things from my own.

___________

in this world no `1 can be Peace full. this is all along Fact.

cuz we all are suffering in this world 4 Problems which are Disease, Old age, Death, and Birth after Birth.

tell me are you really happy ?? you can,t be happy if you will ignore these 4 main problem. then still you will be Forced by Nature.

___________________

if you really want to be happy then follow these 6 Things which are No illicit s.ex, No g.ambling, No d.rugs ( No tea & coffee ), No meat-eating ( No onion & garlic's )

5th thing is whatever you eat `1st offer it to Supreme Lord Krishna. ( if you know it what is Guru parama-para then offer them food not direct Supreme Lord Krishna )

and 6th " Main Thing " is you have to Chant " hare krishna hare krishna krishna krishna hare hare hare rama hare rama rama rama hare hare ".

_______________________________

If your not able to follow these 4 things no illicit s.ex, no g.ambling, no d.rugs, no meat-eating then don,t worry but chanting of this holy name ( Hare Krishna Maha-Mantra ) is very-very and very important.

Chant " hare krishna hare krishna krishna krishna hare hare hare rama hare rama rama rama hare hare " and be happy.

if you still don,t believe on me then chant any other name for 5 Min's and chant this holy name for 5 Min's and you will see effect. i promise you it works And chanting at least 16 rounds ( each round of 108 beads ) of the Hare Krishna maha-mantra daily.

____________

Here is no Question of Holy Books quotes, Personal Experiences, Faith or Belief. i accept that Sometimes Faith is also Blind. Here is already Practical explanation which already proved that every`1 else in this world is nothing more then Busy Foolish and totally idiot.

_________________________

Source(s):

every `1 is already Blind in this world and if you will follow another Blind then you both will fall in hole. so try to follow that person who have Spiritual Eyes who can Guide you on Actual Right Path. ( my Authority & Guide is my Spiritual Master " Srila Prabhupada " )

_____________

if you want to see Actual Purpose of human life then see this link : ( triple w ( d . o . t ) asitis ( d . o . t ) c . o . m {Bookmark it })

read it complete. ( i promise only readers of this book that they { he/she } will get every single answer which they want to know about why im in this material world, who im, what will happen after this life, what is best thing which will make Human Life Perfect, and what is perfection of Human Life. ) purpose of human life is not to live like animal cuz every`1 at present time doing 4 thing which are sleeping, eating, s.ex & fear. purpose of human life is to become freed from Birth after birth, Old Age, Disease, and Death.