Linear pooling has had a hard time recently. Elkin and Wheeler reminded us that linear pooling almost never preserves unanimous judgments of independence; Russell, et al. reminded us that it almost never commutes with Bayesian conditionalization; and Bradley showed that aggregating a group of experts using linear pooling almost never gives the same result as you would obtain from updating your own probabilities in the usual Bayesian way when you learn the probabilities of those experts. I've tried to defend linear pooling against the first two attacks here. In that paper, I also offer a positive argument in favour of that aggregation method: I argue that, if your aggregate is not a result of linear pooling, there will be an alternative aggregate that each experts expects to be more accurate than yours; if your aggregate is a result of linear pooling, this can't happen. Thus, my argument is a non-pragmatic, accuracy-based argument, in the same vein as Jim Joyce's non-pragmatic vindication of probabilism. In this post, I offer an alternative, pragmatic, Dutch book-style defence, in the same vein as the standard Ramsey-de Finetti argument for probabilism.
My argument is based on the following fact: if your aggregate probability function is not a result of linear pooling, there will be a series of bets that the aggregate will consider fair but which each expert will expect to lose money (or utility); if your aggregate is a result of linear pooling, this can't happen. Since one of the things we might wish to use an aggregate to do is to help us make communal decisions, a putative aggregate cannot be considered acceptable if it will lead us to make a binary choice one way when every expert agrees that it should be made the other way. Thus, we should aggregate credences using a linear pooling operator.
We now prove the mathematical fact behind the argument, namely, that if $c$ is not a linear pool of $c_1, \ldots, c_n$, then there is a bet that $c$ will consider fair, and yet each $c_i$ will expect it to lose money; the converse is straightforward.
Suppose $\mathcal{F} = \{X_1, \ldots, X_m\}$. Then:
- We can represent a probability function $c$ on $\mathcal{F}$ as a vector in $\mathbb{R}^m$, namely, $c = \langle c(X_1), \ldots, c(X_m)\rangle$.
- We can also represent a book of bets on the propositions in $\mathcal{F}$ by a vector in $\mathbb{R}^m$, namely, $S = \langle S_1, \ldots, S_m\rangle$, where $S_i$ is the stake of the bet on $X_i$, so that the bet on $X_i$ pays out $S_i$ dollars (or utiles) if $X_i$ is true and $0$ dollars (or utiles) if $X_i$ is false.
- An agent with probability function $c$ will be prepared to pay $c(X_i)S_i$ for a bet on $X_i$ with stake $S_i$, and thus will be prepared to pay $S \cdot c = c(X_1)S_1 + \ldots + c(X_m)S_m$ dollars (or utiles) for the book of bets with stakes $S = \langle S_1, \ldots, S_m\rangle$. (As is usual in Dutch book-style arguments, we assume that the agent is risk neutral.)
- This is because $S \cdot c$ is the expected pay out of the book of bets with stakes $S$ by the lights of probability function $c$.
- $S \cdot c$ is the amount that the aggregate $c$ is prepared to pay for the book of bets with stakes $S$; and
- $S \cdot c_i$ is the expert $i$'s expected pay out of the book of bets with stakes $S$.
Interesting post. You write, "Since one of the things we might wish to use an aggregate to do is to help us make communal decisions, a putative aggregate cannot be considered acceptable if it will lead us to make a binary choice one way when every expert agrees that it should be made the other way." I was wondering what you might think about the SSK example at the end of their "Coherent Choice Functions under Uncertainty" paper. There, two experts unanimously reject an option in a three-option menu. But this option is uniquely admissible according to the .5-.5 convex combination of the two expert opinions.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this, Rush. Yes, you're right that I have to be more careful about how I state that. What linear pooling guarantees is that, if all experts prefer A to B, then the aggregate prefers A to B. And, as this result shows, only linear pooling entails that. But, as you point out, it is possible that all experts reject A in favour of B or C, while the aggregate favours A. The Miners Paradox would be a case of this. But what will happen in this situation is that one expert prefers B to A to C, and the other prefers C to A to B, and the aggregate prefers A to B/C.
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