Also, why are you ignoring the $1000 checkup cost in the cosmic ray problem? That’s the correct way to reason, but you haven’t provided a justification for it.
do the opposite of what she would have done otherwise
might mean, and came up with
Deciding and attempting to do X, but ending up doing the opposite of X and realizing it after the fact.
which does not depend on which decision is made, and so the checkup cost has no bearing on the decision. Again, if you want to specify the problem differently but still precisely (as in, where it is possible to write an algorithm that would unambiguously calculate expected utilities given the inputs), by all means, do, we can apply the same approach to your favorite setup.
My issue is that you are doing implicit pre-processing on some of these problems and sweeping it under the rug. Do you actually have any kind of generalised scheme, including all pre-processing steps?
I… do not follow. Unlike the FDT paper, I try to write out every assumption. I certainly may have missed something, but it is not clear to me what. Can you point out something specific? I have explained the missing $1000 checkup cost: it has no bearing on decision making because the cosmic ray strike making one somehow do the opposite of what they intended and hence go and get examined can happen with equal (if small) probability whether they take $1 or $100. If the cosmic ray strikes only those who take $100, or if those who take $100 while intending to take $1 do not bother with the checkup, this can certainly be included in the calculations.
I know that you removed the $1000 in that case. But what is the general algorithm or rule that causes you to remove the $1000? What if the hospital cost $999 if you chose $1 or $1000 otherwise.
I guess it seems to me that once you’ve removed the $1000 you’ve removed the challenging element of the problem, so solving it doesn’t count for very much.
Also, why are you ignoring the $1000 checkup cost in the cosmic ray problem? That’s the correct way to reason, but you haven’t provided a justification for it.
I tried to operationalize what
might mean, and came up with
which does not depend on which decision is made, and so the checkup cost has no bearing on the decision. Again, if you want to specify the problem differently but still precisely (as in, where it is possible to write an algorithm that would unambiguously calculate expected utilities given the inputs), by all means, do, we can apply the same approach to your favorite setup.
My issue is that you are doing implicit pre-processing on some of these problems and sweeping it under the rug. Do you actually have any kind of generalised scheme, including all pre-processing steps?
I… do not follow. Unlike the FDT paper, I try to write out every assumption. I certainly may have missed something, but it is not clear to me what. Can you point out something specific? I have explained the missing $1000 checkup cost: it has no bearing on decision making because the cosmic ray strike making one somehow do the opposite of what they intended and hence go and get examined can happen with equal (if small) probability whether they take $1 or $100. If the cosmic ray strikes only those who take $100, or if those who take $100 while intending to take $1 do not bother with the checkup, this can certainly be included in the calculations.
I know that you removed the $1000 in that case. But what is the general algorithm or rule that causes you to remove the $1000? What if the hospital cost $999 if you chose $1 or $1000 otherwise.
I guess it seems to me that once you’ve removed the $1000 you’ve removed the challenging element of the problem, so solving it doesn’t count for very much.
Let’s try to back up a bit. What, in your mind, does the sentence
mean observationally? What does the agent intend to do and what does actually happen?