UDT doesn’t really counter my claim that Newcomb-like problems are problems in which we can’t ignore that our decisions aren’t independent of the state of the world when we make that decision, even though in UDT we know less. To make this clear in the example of Newcomb’s, the policy we pick affects the prediction which then affects the results of the policy when the decision is made. UDT isn’t ignoring the fact that our decision and the state of the world are tied together, even if it possibly represents it in a different fashion. The UDT algorithm takes this into account regardless of whether the UDT agent models this explicitly.
I’ll get to talking about UDT rather than TDT soon. I intend for my next post to be about Counterfactual Mugging and why this is such a confusing problem.
UDT still doesn’t forget enough. Variations on UDT that move towards acausal trade with arbitrary agents are more obviously needed because UDT forgets too much, since that makes it impossible to compute in practice and forgetting less poses a new issue of choosing a particular updateless-to-some-degree agent to coordinate with (or follow). But not forgetting enough can also be a problem.
In general, an external/updateless agent (whose suggested policy the original agent follows) can forget the original preference, pursue a different version of it that has undergone an ontological shift. So it can forget the world and its laws, as long as the original agent would still find it to be a good idea to follow its policy (in advance, based on the updateless agent’s nature, without looking at the policy). This updateless agent is shared among the counterfactual variants of the original agent that exist in the updateless agent’s ontology, it’s their chosen updateless core, the source of coherence in their actions.
UDT doesn’t really counter my claim that Newcomb-like problems are problems in which we can’t ignore that our decisions aren’t independent of the state of the world when we make that decision, even though in UDT we know less. To make this clear in the example of Newcomb’s, the policy we pick affects the prediction which then affects the results of the policy when the decision is made. UDT isn’t ignoring the fact that our decision and the state of the world are tied together, even if it possibly represents it in a different fashion. The UDT algorithm takes this into account regardless of whether the UDT agent models this explicitly.
I’ll get to talking about UDT rather than TDT soon. I intend for my next post to be about Counterfactual Mugging and why this is such a confusing problem.
UDT still doesn’t forget enough. Variations on UDT that move towards acausal trade with arbitrary agents are more obviously needed because UDT forgets too much, since that makes it impossible to compute in practice and forgetting less poses a new issue of choosing a particular updateless-to-some-degree agent to coordinate with (or follow). But not forgetting enough can also be a problem.
In general, an external/updateless agent (whose suggested policy the original agent follows) can forget the original preference, pursue a different version of it that has undergone an ontological shift. So it can forget the world and its laws, as long as the original agent would still find it to be a good idea to follow its policy (in advance, based on the updateless agent’s nature, without looking at the policy). This updateless agent is shared among the counterfactual variants of the original agent that exist in the updateless agent’s ontology, it’s their chosen updateless core, the source of coherence in their actions.
How much do you think we should forget?