p.3 The models we use to make sense of the world are merely human inventions.
p.14 utility functions are no more than a mathematical device introduced to help
solve choice problems.
p.25 Game theory is perhaps the most important arena for the application of rational decision theory...
A game arises when several players have to make decisions in a situation in which the outcome for each player is partly determined
by the choices made by the other players.
p.76 In brief, we need to avoid fooling ourselves into thinking that we always know how to scale down the
universe into a manageable package.
The latter problem is captured in classical probability theory by saying that some events are measurable
and others are not. The measurable events are those that we can tie down sufficiently to make it meaningful to attach a probability
to them. To speak of the probability of a nonmeasurable set is to call upon the theory to deliver something for which it is
unequipped.
p.79 In a sufficiently complex world, the implication is that some version of what I shall call the Horatio
principle must apply: Some events in a large world are necessarily nonmeasurable.
p.146 Worse still, the kind of game-theoretic arguments that begin:
If I think that he thinks that I think...
require that she contemplates models of the world that incorporate models of herself.
p.150 In the absence of an ultimate model of possible realities, we make do in practice with a bunch
of gimcrack [JLJ gimcrack: A cheap and showy object of little or no use] models that everybody agrees are
inadequate... The game we play with the notion of truth when manipulating such models isn't at all satisfactory,
but it seems to me the only genuine game in town. I therefore seek guidance in how to model knowledge and truth from the way
these notions are actually used when making... decisions in real life
p.151 I therefore suggest saying that Pandora reveals that she knows something if she acts as though
it were true in all possible worlds generated by her model... knowledge is interpreted as commitment to a model.
p.151 In Bayesian decision theory, Pandora is similarly regarded as knowing the structure... of her decision
problem because she never varies this structure when considering the various possible worlds that may arise as a result of
her choice of an action
