My introductory textbook to decision theory was an attempt to build for CDT an elegant mathematical foundation to rival the jeffrey-bolker axioms for EDT. And why do this? It said, basically, “EDT gives the wrong answer in Newcomb’s Problem and other problems, so we need to find a way to make some version of CDT mathematically respectable.”
Joyce’s Foundations of Causal Decision Theory, right? That was the book I bought to learn decision theory too. My focus was on anthropic reasoning instead of Newcomb’s problem at the time, so I just uncritically accepted the book’s contention that two-boxing is the rational thing to do. As a result, while trying to formulate my own decision theory, I had to come up with complicated ways to force it to two-box. It was only after reading Eliezer’s posts about Newcomb’s problem that I realized that if one-boxing is actually the right thing to do, the decision theory could be made much more elegant. (Too bad it turns out to still have a number of problems that we don’t know how to solve.)
Joyce’s Foundations of Causal Decision Theory, right? That was the book I bought to learn decision theory too. My focus was on anthropic reasoning instead of Newcomb’s problem at the time, so I just uncritically accepted the book’s contention that two-boxing is the rational thing to do. As a result, while trying to formulate my own decision theory, I had to come up with complicated ways to force it to two-box. It was only after reading Eliezer’s posts about Newcomb’s problem that I realized that if one-boxing is actually the right thing to do, the decision theory could be made much more elegant. (Too bad it turns out to still have a number of problems that we don’t know how to solve.)
Yep, that’s the one! :)