My model is that ‘FDT’ is used in the paper instead of ‘UDT’ because:
The name ‘UDT’ seemed less likely to catch on.
The term ‘UDT’ (and ‘modifier+UDT’) had come to refer to a bunch of very different things over the years. ‘UDT 1.1’ is a lot less ambiguous, since people are less likely to think that you’re talking about an umbrella category encompassing all the ‘modifier+UDT’ terms; but it’s a bit of a mouthful.
I’ve heard someone describe ‘UDT’ as “FDT + a theory of anthropics”—i.e., it builds in the core idea of what we’re calling “FDT” (“choose by imagining that your (fixed) decision function takes on different logical outputs”), plus a view to the effect that decisions+probutilities are what matter, and subjective expectations don’t make sense. Having a name for the FDT part of the view seems useful for evaluating the subclaims separately.
The FDT paper introduces the FDT/UDT concept in more CDT-ish terms (for ease of exposition), so I think some people have also started using ‘FDT’ to mean something like ‘variants of UDT that are more CDT-ish’, which is confusing given that FDT was originally meant to refer to the superset/family of UDT-ish views. Maybe that suggests that researchers feel more of a need for new narrow terms to fill gaps, since it’s less often necessary in the trenches to crisply refer to the superset.
I don’t suppose you could be clearer about how anthropics works on in FDT? Like are there any write-ups of how it solves any of the traditional anthropic paradoxes? Plus why don’t subjective expectations make any sense?
My model is that ‘FDT’ is used in the paper instead of ‘UDT’ because:
The name ‘UDT’ seemed less likely to catch on.
The term ‘UDT’ (and ‘modifier+UDT’) had come to refer to a bunch of very different things over the years. ‘UDT 1.1’ is a lot less ambiguous, since people are less likely to think that you’re talking about an umbrella category encompassing all the ‘modifier+UDT’ terms; but it’s a bit of a mouthful.
I’ve heard someone describe ‘UDT’ as “FDT + a theory of anthropics”—i.e., it builds in the core idea of what we’re calling “FDT” (“choose by imagining that your (fixed) decision function takes on different logical outputs”), plus a view to the effect that decisions+probutilities are what matter, and subjective expectations don’t make sense. Having a name for the FDT part of the view seems useful for evaluating the subclaims separately.
The FDT paper introduces the FDT/UDT concept in more CDT-ish terms (for ease of exposition), so I think some people have also started using ‘FDT’ to mean something like ‘variants of UDT that are more CDT-ish’, which is confusing given that FDT was originally meant to refer to the superset/family of UDT-ish views. Maybe that suggests that researchers feel more of a need for new narrow terms to fill gaps, since it’s less often necessary in the trenches to crisply refer to the superset.
I don’t suppose you could be clearer about how anthropics works on in FDT? Like are there any write-ups of how it solves any of the traditional anthropic paradoxes? Plus why don’t subjective expectations make any sense?