For what it’s worth there are some people who think I’m pretty cool. Up the variance!
Note that few of my seemingly-strange beliefs are due to or related to speculation about supposed implications of decision theory. Only my theology and its related “objective morality” speculation can be (partially) blamed on that. My reasons for interest in e.g. psi & UFOs are purely experiential and hermeneutical/Aumannesque.
(Warning: The rest of this comment might include some nonsense.)
The closest I’ve come to mixing experiential/experimental predictions and decision theory is an idea inspired by the Oxford school’s derivation of the Born rule from rationality assumptions;—I speculatively postulated that there are coordination/decision problems, e.g. generalizations of Nesov’s counterfactual mugging, where decision theoretic rationality suggests decision policies which differ from those suggested by a naive “linear Schroedinger equation plus Born rule” formulation of the universal wave function. This would be because our conception of probability “may be just an approximation that is only relevant in special situations which meet certain independence [e.g. non-interactivity?] assumptions around the agent’s actions” (context here). Currently QM is inseparable from probability. In the proposed alternative framework, instead of conservation of probability, there would be a more general conservation of “importance measure”. (FWIW I think my Leibnizian variant of theism would make the math a lot more elegant, ’cuz UDT-like “rational agents” with instantaneously time-stamped utility functions are conspicuously complex/unparsimonious & weird to think about, physically speaking. If rationality ultimately requires certain theoretical kinds of consistency then that fact alone could greatly simplify the formalism by reducing the space of admissible decision policies.)
I suppose it would also make for an offbeat attack on a few unsolved problems in physics. E.g., the preferred basis problem. Simon Saunders and David Wallace have pointed out the similarities between the choice of a preferred basis in QM and the choice of a preferred foliation in relativity: these choices of a preferred basis & foliation are themselves decision problems and thus would at least theoretically be naturally representable as a coherent part of the proposed “influence”-centric (decision-policy-centric) formalism. Thus the generality of updatelessness allows us to circumvent otherwise problematic chicken-and-egg “which came first, the Born rule or Bayesian rationality” arguments.
In any case I think such a re-formulation of QM would only be mathematically tractable/elegant if we had a more complete decision theory with a more coherent ontology of agency (e.g. no arbitrarily-timed arbitrarily-instantaneous time-stamping of utility functions), which is a whole ’nother tricky “FAI”-relevant research project.
For what it’s worth there are some people who think I’m pretty cool. Up the variance!
For the record, I do think you’re unspeakably cool, with multiple connotations included. I just think becoming more like you is something the average LWer should approach with awareness and no small measure of trepidation.
For what it’s worth there are some people who think I’m pretty cool. Up the variance!
Note that few of my seemingly-strange beliefs are due to or related to speculation about supposed implications of decision theory. Only my theology and its related “objective morality” speculation can be (partially) blamed on that. My reasons for interest in e.g. psi & UFOs are purely experiential and hermeneutical/Aumannesque.
(Warning: The rest of this comment might include some nonsense.)
The closest I’ve come to mixing experiential/experimental predictions and decision theory is an idea inspired by the Oxford school’s derivation of the Born rule from rationality assumptions;—I speculatively postulated that there are coordination/decision problems, e.g. generalizations of Nesov’s counterfactual mugging, where decision theoretic rationality suggests decision policies which differ from those suggested by a naive “linear Schroedinger equation plus Born rule” formulation of the universal wave function. This would be because our conception of probability “may be just an approximation that is only relevant in special situations which meet certain independence [e.g. non-interactivity?] assumptions around the agent’s actions” (context here). Currently QM is inseparable from probability. In the proposed alternative framework, instead of conservation of probability, there would be a more general conservation of “importance measure”. (FWIW I think my Leibnizian variant of theism would make the math a lot more elegant, ’cuz UDT-like “rational agents” with instantaneously time-stamped utility functions are conspicuously complex/unparsimonious & weird to think about, physically speaking. If rationality ultimately requires certain theoretical kinds of consistency then that fact alone could greatly simplify the formalism by reducing the space of admissible decision policies.)
I suppose it would also make for an offbeat attack on a few unsolved problems in physics. E.g., the preferred basis problem. Simon Saunders and David Wallace have pointed out the similarities between the choice of a preferred basis in QM and the choice of a preferred foliation in relativity: these choices of a preferred basis & foliation are themselves decision problems and thus would at least theoretically be naturally representable as a coherent part of the proposed “influence”-centric (decision-policy-centric) formalism. Thus the generality of updatelessness allows us to circumvent otherwise problematic chicken-and-egg “which came first, the Born rule or Bayesian rationality” arguments.
In any case I think such a re-formulation of QM would only be mathematically tractable/elegant if we had a more complete decision theory with a more coherent ontology of agency (e.g. no arbitrarily-timed arbitrarily-instantaneous time-stamping of utility functions), which is a whole ’nother tricky “FAI”-relevant research project.
For the record, I do think you’re unspeakably cool, with multiple connotations included. I just think becoming more like you is something the average LWer should approach with awareness and no small measure of trepidation.
What? Since when? Probability is in the mind.
I dunno, those seem pretty different.
“QM is inseperable from probability” == “you can’t do QM without probability,” not “you can’t do probability without QM.”
Will and Vassar aren’t the first to think of it. Deutsch and Wallace were doing it years ago; it’s even made it into Discover Magazine.
I think your pretty cool, actually, but I also think you are nutty.