What does that even mean? Does that mean something like: hypothetical lunar farmers in a hypothetical lunar utopia should send down some ore to Earth, and that actual people hundreds of years earlier in a representative body voted 456-450 not to fund a lunar expedition even with a rider to the bill requiring future farmers to send down ore, but the farmer votes from the future+450 > 456? So the farmers “promised’ to send ore?
acausal blackmail
It seems more like a real self inflicted wound than a fallacy or fake blackmail to me, perhaps we don’t disagree. it’s something that is real if one has certain patterns of mind that one could self modify away from, I think.
By “acausal democracy”, I mean the attempt to justify the practice of democracy—specifically, the act of voting—with timeless decision theory. No-one until you has attempted to depict a genuinely acausal democracy :-) This doesn’t involve the “fallacy of selective attention”, it’s another sort of error, or combination of errors, in which TDT reasoning is supposed to apply to agents with only a bare similarity to yourself. See discussion here for a related example.
I also think we agree regarding acausal blackmail, that for a human being it can only be a mistake. Only one of those “eccentric agents” with a very peculiar utility function or decision architecture could rationally be susceptible to acausal blackmail—its decision procedure would have to insist that “selective attention” (to just those possible worlds where the specific blackmail threat is being made) is important, rather than attending to other worlds where contrary threats are being made, or to worlds where the action under consideration will be rewarded rather than punished, or to worlds where the agent is simply a free agent not being threatened or enticed by a captor who cares about acausal dealmaking (and those worlds should be in the vast majority).
What does that even mean? Does that mean something like: hypothetical lunar farmers in a hypothetical lunar utopia should send down some ore to Earth, and that actual people hundreds of years earlier in a representative body voted 456-450 not to fund a lunar expedition even with a rider to the bill requiring future farmers to send down ore, but the farmer votes from the future+450 > 456? So the farmers “promised’ to send ore?
It seems more like a real self inflicted wound than a fallacy or fake blackmail to me, perhaps we don’t disagree. it’s something that is real if one has certain patterns of mind that one could self modify away from, I think.
By “acausal democracy”, I mean the attempt to justify the practice of democracy—specifically, the act of voting—with timeless decision theory. No-one until you has attempted to depict a genuinely acausal democracy :-) This doesn’t involve the “fallacy of selective attention”, it’s another sort of error, or combination of errors, in which TDT reasoning is supposed to apply to agents with only a bare similarity to yourself. See discussion here for a related example.
I also think we agree regarding acausal blackmail, that for a human being it can only be a mistake. Only one of those “eccentric agents” with a very peculiar utility function or decision architecture could rationally be susceptible to acausal blackmail—its decision procedure would have to insist that “selective attention” (to just those possible worlds where the specific blackmail threat is being made) is important, rather than attending to other worlds where contrary threats are being made, or to worlds where the action under consideration will be rewarded rather than punished, or to worlds where the agent is simply a free agent not being threatened or enticed by a captor who cares about acausal dealmaking (and those worlds should be in the vast majority).
Right, humans can’t even do straightforward causal reasoning, let alone weird superrational reasoning.