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AlexMennen18hΩ160

I see that when I commented yesterday, I was confused about how you had defined U. You're right that you don't need a consistent guessing oracle to get from U to a completion of U, since the axioms are all atomic propositions, and you can just set the remaining atomic propositions however you want. However, this introduces the problem that getting the axioms of U requires a halting oracle, not just a consistent guessing oracle, since to tell whether something is an axiom, you need to know whether there actually is a proof of a given thing in T.

AlexMennen2dΩ170

I think what you proved essentially boils down to the fact that a consistent guessing oracle can be used to compute a completion of any consistent recursively axiomatizable theory. (In fact, it turns out that a consistent guessing oracle can be used to compute a model (in the sense of functions and relations on a set) of any consistent recursively axiomatizable theory; this follows from what you showed and the fact that an oracle for a complete theory can be used to compute a model of that theory.)

I disagree with

Philosophically, what I take from this is that, even if statements in a first-order theory such as Peano arithmetic appear to refer to high levels of the Arithmetic hierarchy, as far as proof theory is concerned, they may as well be referring to a fixed low level of hypercomputation, namely a consistent guessing oracle.

The translation from T to U is computable. The consistent guessing oracle only came in to find a completion of U, but it could also find a completion of T (in fact, a completion of U can be computably translated to a completion of T), so the consistent guessing oracle doesn't really have anything to do with the relationship between T and U.

AlexMennen2dΩ250

a consistent guessing oracle rather than a halting oracle (which I theorize to be more powerful than a consistent guessing oracle).

This is correct. Or at least, the claim I'm interpreting this as is that there exist consistent guessing oracles that are strictly weaker than a halting oracle, and that claim is correct. Specifically, it follows from the low basis theorem that there are consistent guessing oracles that are low, meaning that access to a halting oracle makes it possible to tell whether any Turing machine with access to the consistent guessing oracle halts. In contrast, access to a halting oracle does not make it possible to tell whether any Turing machine with access to a halting oracle halts.

AlexMennen2dΩ120

I don't understand what relevance the first paragraph is supposed to have to the rest of the post.

Something that I think it unsatisfying about this is that the rationals aren't previleged as a countable dense subset of the reals; it just happens to be a convenient one. The completions of the diadic rationals, the rationals, and the algebraic real numbers are all the same. But if you require that an element of the completion, if equal to an element of the countable set being completed, must eventually certify this equality, then the completions of the diadic rationals, rationals, and algebraic reals are all constructively inequivalent.

This means that, in particular, if your real happens to be rational, you can produce the fact that it is equal to some particular rational number. Neither Cauchy reals nor Dedekind reals have this property.

perhaps these are equivalent.

They are. To get enumerations of rationals above and below out of an effective Cauchy sequence, once the Cauchy sequence outputs a rational  such that everything afterwards can only differ by at most , you start enumerating rationals below  as below the real and rationals above  as above the real. If the Cauchy sequence converges to , and you have a rational , then once the Cauchy sequence gets to the point where everything after is gauranteed to differ by at most , you can enumerate  as less than .

My take-away from this:

An effective Cauchy sequence converging to a real  induces recursive enumerators for  and , because if , then  for some , so you eventually learn this.

The constructive meaning of a set is that that membership should be decidable, not just semi-decidable.

If  is irrational, then  and  are complements, and each semi-decidable, so they are decidable. If  is rational, then the complement of  is , which is semi-decidable, so again these sets are decidable. So, from the point of view of classical logic, it's not only true that Cauchy sequences and Dedekind cuts are equivalent, but also effective Cauchy sequences and effective Dedekind cuts are equivalent.

However, it is not decidable whether a given Cauchy-sequence real is rational or not, and if so, which rational it is. So this doesn't give a way to construct decision algorithms for the sets   and   from recursive enumerators of them.

AlexMennen5mo1414

If board members have an obligation not to criticize their organization in an academic paper, then they should also have an obligation not to discuss anything related to their organization in an academic paper. The ability to be honest is important, and if a researcher can't say anything critical about an organization, then non-critical things they say about it lose credibility.

Yeah, I wasn't trying to claim that the Kelly bet size optimizes a nonlogarithmic utility function exactly, just that, when the number of rounds of betting left is very large, the Kelly bet size sacrifices a very small amount of utility relative to optimal betting under some reasonable assumptions about the utility function. I don't know of any precise mathematical statement that we seem to disagree on.

Well, we've established the utility-maximizing bet gives different expected utility from the Kelly bet, right? So it must give higher expected utility or it wouldn't be utility-maximizing.

Right, sorry. I can't read, apparently, because I thought you had said the utility-maximizing bet size would be higher than the Kelly bet size, even though you did not.

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