This doesn’t seem right. Suppose there are two main candidates for how to get there, I-5 and J-6 (but who knows, maybe we’ll be surprised by a K-7) and I don’t know which Alice will choose. Suppose I know there’s already a Very General Helper and Kinda Decent Generalizer, then I might say “I assign 65% chance that Alice is going to choose the I-5 and will try to contribute having conditioned on that”. This seems like a reasonable thing to do. It might be for naught, but I’d guess in many case the EV of something definitely helpful if we go down Route A is better than the EV of finding something that’s helpful no matter the choice.
One should definitely track the major route they’re betting on and make updates and maybe switch, but seems okay to say your plan is conditioning on some bigger plan.
Yup, if you actually have enough knowledge to narrow it down to e.g. a 65% chance of one particular major route, then you’re good. The challenging case is when you have no idea what the options even are for the major route, and the possibility space is huge.
This doesn’t seem right. Suppose there are two main candidates for how to get there, I-5 and J-6 (but who knows, maybe we’ll be surprised by a K-7) and I don’t know which Alice will choose. Suppose I know there’s already a Very General Helper and Kinda Decent Generalizer, then I might say “I assign 65% chance that Alice is going to choose the I-5 and will try to contribute having conditioned on that”. This seems like a reasonable thing to do. It might be for naught, but I’d guess in many case the EV of something definitely helpful if we go down Route A is better than the EV of finding something that’s helpful no matter the choice.
One should definitely track the major route they’re betting on and make updates and maybe switch, but seems okay to say your plan is conditioning on some bigger plan.
Yup, if you actually have enough knowledge to narrow it down to e.g. a 65% chance of one particular major route, then you’re good. The challenging case is when you have no idea what the options even are for the major route, and the possibility space is huge.