In counterfactual mugging with a logical coin, AsDT always uses a logical inductor’s best-estimate of the utility it would get right now, so it sees the coin as already determined, and sees no benefit from giving Omega money in the cases where Omega asks for money.
The way I would think about what’s going on is that if the coin is already known at the time that the expectations are evaluated, then the problem isn’t convergent in the sense of AsDT. The agent that pays up whenever asked has a constant action, but it doesn’t receive a constant expected utility. You can think of the averaging as introducing artificial logical uncertainty to make more things convergent, which is why it’s more updateless. (My understanding is that this is pretty close to how you’re thinking of it already.)
I think AsDT has a limited notion of convergent problem. It can only handle situations where the optimal strategy is to make the same move each time. Tail-dependence opens this up, partly by looking at the limit of average payoff rather than the limit of raw payoff. This allows us to deal with problems where the optimal strategy is complicated (and even somewhat dependent on what’s done in earlier instances in the sequence).
I wasn’t thinking of it as introducing artificial logical uncertainty, but I can see it that way.
There’s this question of whether for logical uncertainty we should think of it more as trying to “un-update” from a more logically informed perspective rather than trying to use some logical prior that exists at the beginning of time. Maybe you’ve heard such ideas from Scott? I’m not sure if that’s the right perspective, but it’s what I’m alluding to when I say you’re introducing artificial logical uncertainty.
I don’t think it’s much like un-updating. Un-updating takes a specific fact we’d like to pretend we don’t know. Plus, the idea there is to back up the inductor. Here I’m looking at average performance as estimated by the latest stage of the inductor. The artificial uncertainty is more like pretending you don’t know which problem in the sequence you’re at.
The way I would think about what’s going on is that if the coin is already known at the time that the expectations are evaluated, then the problem isn’t convergent in the sense of AsDT. The agent that pays up whenever asked has a constant action, but it doesn’t receive a constant expected utility. You can think of the averaging as introducing artificial logical uncertainty to make more things convergent, which is why it’s more updateless. (My understanding is that this is pretty close to how you’re thinking of it already.)
I think AsDT has a limited notion of convergent problem. It can only handle situations where the optimal strategy is to make the same move each time. Tail-dependence opens this up, partly by looking at the limit of average payoff rather than the limit of raw payoff. This allows us to deal with problems where the optimal strategy is complicated (and even somewhat dependent on what’s done in earlier instances in the sequence).
I wasn’t thinking of it as introducing artificial logical uncertainty, but I can see it that way.
Yeah, I like tail dependence.
There’s this question of whether for logical uncertainty we should think of it more as trying to “un-update” from a more logically informed perspective rather than trying to use some logical prior that exists at the beginning of time. Maybe you’ve heard such ideas from Scott? I’m not sure if that’s the right perspective, but it’s what I’m alluding to when I say you’re introducing artificial logical uncertainty.
I don’t think it’s much like un-updating. Un-updating takes a specific fact we’d like to pretend we don’t know. Plus, the idea there is to back up the inductor. Here I’m looking at average performance as estimated by the latest stage of the inductor. The artificial uncertainty is more like pretending you don’t know which problem in the sequence you’re at.