I’m posting a short response rather than there be none, although I think you are calling for a longer more thoughtful response.
I would simply say an evidential agent selects an action via argmaxaEp(u|a); that is, it evaluates each action by (Bayes-)conditioning on that action, and checking expected utility.
Of course this simple formula can take on many complications when EDT is being described in more fleshed-out mathematical settings. Perhaps this is where part of the confusion comes from. There is some intuitive aspect to judging whether a more complicated formula is “essentially EDT”. (For example, the classic rigorous formulation of EDT is the Jeffrey-Bolker axioms, which at a glance look nothing like the formula.)
But I would say that most of the issue you’re describing in the OP is that people think of EDT in terms of what it does or doesn’t do, rather than in terms of this simple formula. That seems to be genuinely solved by just writing out argmaxaEp(u|a) when people seem unclear on what EDT is.
Also, note, the claim that EDT doesn’t smoke in smoking lesion is quite controversial (the famous tickle defense argues to the contrary). This is related to your observation that EDT will often correctly navigate causality, because the causal structure is already encoded in the conditional probability. So that’s part of why it’s critical to think of EDT as the formula, rather than as what it supposedly does or doesn’t do.
I’m posting a short response rather than there be none, although I think you are calling for a longer more thoughtful response.
I would simply say an evidential agent selects an action via argmaxaEp(u|a); that is, it evaluates each action by (Bayes-)conditioning on that action, and checking expected utility.
Of course this simple formula can take on many complications when EDT is being described in more fleshed-out mathematical settings. Perhaps this is where part of the confusion comes from. There is some intuitive aspect to judging whether a more complicated formula is “essentially EDT”. (For example, the classic rigorous formulation of EDT is the Jeffrey-Bolker axioms, which at a glance look nothing like the formula.)
But I would say that most of the issue you’re describing in the OP is that people think of EDT in terms of what it does or doesn’t do, rather than in terms of this simple formula. That seems to be genuinely solved by just writing out argmaxaEp(u|a) when people seem unclear on what EDT is.
Also, note, the claim that EDT doesn’t smoke in smoking lesion is quite controversial (the famous tickle defense argues to the contrary). This is related to your observation that EDT will often correctly navigate causality, because the causal structure is already encoded in the conditional probability. So that’s part of why it’s critical to think of EDT as the formula, rather than as what it supposedly does or doesn’t do.