In the “Bomb” scenario, suppose we delete the words “by running a simulation of you and seeing what the simulation did” and replace them with something like “by carefully analysing your brain in order to deduce what you would do”.
I am not an FDT expert and so maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me that FDT still says you should pick Left (because, a priori, if your algorithm picks Right then the predictor will put the bomb in Left and you’ll have to pay, whereas if your algorithm picks Left then the predictor will leave the bomb out and you won’t, and the latter is the better outcome).
But in this version of the “Bomb” scenario, you have no particular reason to think that in addition to the real-world you making the choice there’s also a faithfully-simulated you that you-right-now might equally plausibly turn out to be. You might perhaps worry that that might be how the predictor is doing her analysis, but unless you think she almost certainly ran a faithful simulation it seems obvious that you do better to pick Right contrary to FDT’s recommendation.
(Once again, I’m not an expert and there’s a good chance I’m missing something important. If so, I hope someone will enlighten me.)
What you’re missing is the F in FDT: the agent is assumed to have a function that maps their available information to a decision. In a note-less scenario, every possible agent has the same information available, and so there are only two possible functions: one that maps to Left, and one that maps to Right. FDT then says that Left performs better.
Once you introduce the possibility of a note, there are now (at least) three values in the domain: no note, a note saying the prediction was Left, and a note saying the prediction was Right. MacAskill assumed that this doesn’t change the FDT decision, but of course it does: there are now at least 8 (and possibly infinitely many) such functions to compare, not just 2, and unstated distributions over the mapping between inputs and outputs. In almost all of the distributions, FDT will in these new and different scenarios recommend picking Right.
In the “Bomb” scenario, suppose we delete the words “by running a simulation of you and seeing what the simulation did” and replace them with something like “by carefully analysing your brain in order to deduce what you would do”.
I am not an FDT expert and so maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me that FDT still says you should pick Left (because, a priori, if your algorithm picks Right then the predictor will put the bomb in Left and you’ll have to pay, whereas if your algorithm picks Left then the predictor will leave the bomb out and you won’t, and the latter is the better outcome).
But in this version of the “Bomb” scenario, you have no particular reason to think that in addition to the real-world you making the choice there’s also a faithfully-simulated you that you-right-now might equally plausibly turn out to be. You might perhaps worry that that might be how the predictor is doing her analysis, but unless you think she almost certainly ran a faithful simulation it seems obvious that you do better to pick Right contrary to FDT’s recommendation.
(Once again, I’m not an expert and there’s a good chance I’m missing something important. If so, I hope someone will enlighten me.)
What you’re missing is the F in FDT: the agent is assumed to have a function that maps their available information to a decision. In a note-less scenario, every possible agent has the same information available, and so there are only two possible functions: one that maps to Left, and one that maps to Right. FDT then says that Left performs better.
Once you introduce the possibility of a note, there are now (at least) three values in the domain: no note, a note saying the prediction was Left, and a note saying the prediction was Right. MacAskill assumed that this doesn’t change the FDT decision, but of course it does: there are now at least 8 (and possibly infinitely many) such functions to compare, not just 2, and unstated distributions over the mapping between inputs and outputs. In almost all of the distributions, FDT will in these new and different scenarios recommend picking Right.