There was once a flourishing literature on rational decision theory in large worlds. Luce and Raiffa (1957, chapter 13) refer to this literature as decision making under complete ignorance. They classify what we now call Bayesian decision theory as decision making under partial ignorance (because Pandora can’t be completely ignorant if she is able to assign subjective probabilities to some events).
It says a lot about our academic culture that this literature should be all but forgotten. Presumably nobody reads Savage’s (1951) Foundations of Statistics any more, since the latter half of the book is entirely devoted to his own attempt to contribute to the literature on decision making under complete ignorance. ...
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