There’s new grass planted in your apartment block’s front yard. If everyone walks over it, it will die, but if just a couple of people walk over it, it’ll be okay. Your way would be shorter if you walked over the grass. (Tragedy of the commons situation),
And you’ve read about funky decision theories on Less Wrong, and decide to avoid the grass because you’ve decided that you follow TDT.
Does this acausally make the other residents avoid the grass as well because they decide in approximately the same way when encountering the grass, or does it not because they haven’t even heard of TDT?
If my decision process uses UDT-type reasoning, do I have a chance of acausally influencing people who don’t know about UDT-type reasoning?
#lesswrong
There’s new grass planted in your apartment block’s front yard. If everyone walks over it, it will die, but if just a couple of people walk over it, it’ll be okay. Your way would be shorter if you walked over the grass. (Tragedy of the commons situation),
And you’ve read about funky decision theories on Less Wrong, and decide to avoid the grass because you’ve decided that you follow TDT.
Does this acausally make the other residents avoid the grass as well because they decide in approximately the same way when encountering the grass, or does it not because they haven’t even heard of TDT?
What if all the residents were LW posters??
One thing I’ve long wondered: in cases like these is TDT equivalent to your mom saying ‘and what if everyone walked on the grass?’
I think that’s exactly what you would go around asking yourself if you were a TDT-using human in a community of TDT-using humans.
No, although it is often used in that sort of way.
This is actually a good question. Gary Drescher seems to think you can, but I think Eliezer is more skeptical.
Is this a topic in Good and Real?
Yes– it’s in the account of ethics, near the end.