Is Ignorance Bliss?

Abstract

``...where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.'' Thomas Gray\nIf ignorance were bliss, there is information you would pay not to have. Hence the question is whether a rationally-behaving agent would ever do such a thing. This paper demonstrates that A Bayesian agent with a proper, countably additive prior never maximizes utility by paying not to see cost-free data. The definition of ``cost-free'' is delicate, and requires explanation. A Bayesian agent with a finitely additive prior, or an improper prior, however, might pay not to see cost-free data. An agent following a gamma-minimax strategy might also do so. An agent following the strategies of E-admissibility recommended by Levi and of maximality recommended by Sen and Walley, might also do so. \nA discussion follows about how damaging to a decision theory intended to be rational it might be to pay not to receive cost-free information.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 45 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.