Lara Buchak

University of California, Berkeley, Philosophy, Faculty Member

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My primary research interests are in decision, game, and rational choice theory. My work focuses on how an individual should take risk into account when making decisions and how we should best model risk attitudes within decision theory; and I argue for a more permissive theory of rationality than is standardly assumed. I am also working on two applications of this theory: one in formal epistemology and one in the philosophy of religion. In philosophy of religion, I am interested in what faith is, and under what circumstances it is rational to have faith. I also have more general interests in the philosophy of religion, and in epistemology.
Supervisors: Adam Elga and Philip Pettit
Address: Department of Philosophy
314 Moses Hall MC 2390
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-2390

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Jeff Russell

University of Southern California

Lara Buchak

University of California, Berkeley

Luke Fenton-Glynn

University College London

Kenny Easwaran

Texas A&M University

Richard Pettigrew

University of Bristol

Patryk Dziurosz-Serafinowicz

University of Lodz

Maria Lasonen-Aarnio

University of Helsinki

Michael Caie

Ben Levinstein

University of Oxford

Rachael Briggs

The Australian National University

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Papers by Lara Buchak

Groupthink (Penultimate version), with Jeff Russell and Lara Buchak.

by Lara Buchak and John Hawthorne

How should a group with different opinions (but the same values) make decisions? In a Bayesian se... more How should a group with different opinions (but the same values) make decisions? In a Bayesian setting, the natural question is how to aggregate credences: how to use a single credence function to naturally represent a collection of different credence functions. An extension of the standard Dutch-book arguments that apply to individual decision-makers recommends that group credences should be updated by conditionalization. This imposes a natural constraint on what aggregation rules can be like. Taking conditionalization as a basic constraint, we gather lessons from the established work on credence aggregation, and extend this work with two new impossibility results. We then explore contrasting features of two kinds of rules that satisfy the constraints we articulate: one kind uses fixed prior credences, and the other uses geometric averaging, as opposed to arithmetic averaging. We also prove a new characterisation result for geometric averaging. Finally we consider applications to neighboring philosophical issues, including the epistemology of disagreement.

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Oyun: A New, Free Program for Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Tournaments in the Classroom

Evolution: Education and Outreach, Jan 1, 2012

Evolutionary applications of game theory present one of the most pedagogically accessible varieti... more Evolutionary applications of game theory present one of the most pedagogically accessible varieties of genuine, contemporary theoretical biology. We present here Oyun (OY-oon, http://charlespence.net/oyun), a program designed to run iterated prisoner's dilemma tournaments, competitions between prisoner's dilemma strategies developed by the students themselves. Using this software, students are able to readily design and tweak their own strategies, and to see how they fare both in round-robin tournaments and in "evolutionary" tournaments, where the scores in a given "generation" directly determine contribution to the population in the next generation. Oyun is freely available, runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, and the process of creating new prisoner's dilemma strategies is both easy to teach and easy for students to grasp. We illustrate with two interesting examples taken from actual use of Oyun in the classroom. 3 Game-theoretic models in evolutionary theory have been used to explain many diverse phenomena, including altruism (Bowles 2006; Fletcher and Zwick 2007), 4 frequencydependent selection (Nowak and Sigmund 2004), eusociality (Nowak et al. 2010), and many other facets of evolution . Importantly, they are also one of the most pedagogically accessible varieties of sophisticated biological modeling. We 3 Oyun was written by CHP and implemented as a teaching tool by LB. This paper is jointly authored. 4 Altruism is here meant in the restricted sense of biological or evolutionary altruism -"costly helping" behavior that decreases fitness (Allchin 2009a, p. 592), not behavior with an "intent to help" more generally (which is often termed "psychological" altruism). See Sober (1988) for a thorough discussion of the scope and limits of evolutionary altruism.

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Free Acts and Chance: Why The Rollback Argument Fails

The Philosophical Quarterly, Jan 1, 2012

The "rollback argument," pioneered by Peter van Inwagen, purports to show that indeterminism in a... more The "rollback argument," pioneered by Peter van Inwagen, purports to show that indeterminism in any form is incompatible with free will. The argument has two major premises: the first claims that certain facts about chances obtain in a certain kind of hypothetical situation, and the second that these facts entail that some actual act is not free. Since the publication of the rollback argument, the second claim has been vehemently debated, but everyone seems to have taken the first claim for granted. Nevertheless, the first claim is totally unjustified. Even if we accept the second claim, therefore, the argument gives us no reason to think that free will and indeterminism are incompatible. Furthermore, seeing where the rollback argument goes wrong illuminates how a certain kind of incompatibilist, the "chance-incompatibilist," ought to think about free will and chance, and points to a possibility for free will that has remained largely unexplored.

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Reasonable FaithBy John Haldane

Analysis, Jan 1, 2012