Don’t you think that others working on Sleeping Beauty, absent-minded driver, Parfit’s hitchhiker etc. helped pave the way for UDT by providing a list of questions for UDT to answer?
I mean, I’m not saying that one shouldn’t try to do better than the people who worked on all these problems (I might even be tempted to agree with what Jeffreyssai might say on the subject, though I expect you wouldn’t go that far) but it seems like even in a reasonably efficient way to approach the problem, “searching under the streetlight” by playing with some crisply formulated problems may help pave the way to deeper answers.
(In particular, I think that MIRI’s current research strategy is not-completely-crazy in starting under the streetlight in various respects; e.g., I’d be rather surprised if the modal agent formulation turned out to be useful as is for FAI, but I do think there’s a reasonable chance that it will help pave the way to deeper insights; and I agree with you that it may well turn out that probability is the wrong tool for handling logical uncertainty, but I feel that trying to use probability and seeing what results we can get is an obviously useful thing to do; and I think that it’s sufficiently likely that diagonalization problems will bite a wide range of attempts to handle logical uncertainty that I think working on workarounds to diagonalization makes sense to do in parallel with work on logical uncertainty, rather than trying to solve logical uncertainty first.)
Keep in mind that generally I advocate “Explore multiple approaches simultaneously” and “Trust your intuitions, but don’t waste too much time arguing for them”. Sometimes I do feel obligated to explain why I’m not as excited about some research direction as might be expected given my interests (and in the case of “probabilistic reflection” there’s the additional issue that I’m having trouble making intuitive sense of what the formalism is saying), but I don’t mean to discourage other people from exploring their ideas if they still think it’s worthwhile after hearing what I have to say.
Don’t you think that others working on Sleeping Beauty, absent-minded driver, Parfit’s hitchhiker etc. helped pave the way for UDT by providing a list of questions for UDT to answer?
I’m certainly not disputing that having those questions available was helpful, but just want to point out that there seems to be a danger where people focus on these relatively “crisp” problems too much, think they have solutions, and then argue over them endlessly, where they might have made better progress by zooming out and looking at the bigger picture. If you consider the dozens of academic papers published on the Sleeping Beauty, I don’t think the majority of them (i.e., beyond the first few) can be said to have helped pave the way for UDT.
Keep in mind that generally I advocate “Explore multiple approaches simultaneously” and “Trust your intuitions, but don’t waste too much time arguing for them”.
Fair enough!
(Re your last paragraph, it sounds like we’re in pretty perfect agreement about the usefulness of previous research. I suppose that upthread, you were saying “these people were following a streetlight/shadow strategy and it didn’t actually work” and I was saying “retrospectively, it looks like the correct strategy would have been to first explore some anthropic problems and then try to find a common answer to all of them, which sounds like it can be described as starting under the streetlight, then moving into the shadows”. So it sounds like we agree about the actual subject matter and any apparent disagreement is either due to talking about different things or due to disagreement about how to best apply the metaphor to the example, so it looks like there’s nothing that would actually be useful to debate. Cool! :-))
Don’t you think that others working on Sleeping Beauty, absent-minded driver, Parfit’s hitchhiker etc. helped pave the way for UDT by providing a list of questions for UDT to answer?
I mean, I’m not saying that one shouldn’t try to do better than the people who worked on all these problems (I might even be tempted to agree with what Jeffreyssai might say on the subject, though I expect you wouldn’t go that far) but it seems like even in a reasonably efficient way to approach the problem, “searching under the streetlight” by playing with some crisply formulated problems may help pave the way to deeper answers.
(In particular, I think that MIRI’s current research strategy is not-completely-crazy in starting under the streetlight in various respects; e.g., I’d be rather surprised if the modal agent formulation turned out to be useful as is for FAI, but I do think there’s a reasonable chance that it will help pave the way to deeper insights; and I agree with you that it may well turn out that probability is the wrong tool for handling logical uncertainty, but I feel that trying to use probability and seeing what results we can get is an obviously useful thing to do; and I think that it’s sufficiently likely that diagonalization problems will bite a wide range of attempts to handle logical uncertainty that I think working on workarounds to diagonalization makes sense to do in parallel with work on logical uncertainty, rather than trying to solve logical uncertainty first.)
Keep in mind that generally I advocate “Explore multiple approaches simultaneously” and “Trust your intuitions, but don’t waste too much time arguing for them”. Sometimes I do feel obligated to explain why I’m not as excited about some research direction as might be expected given my interests (and in the case of “probabilistic reflection” there’s the additional issue that I’m having trouble making intuitive sense of what the formalism is saying), but I don’t mean to discourage other people from exploring their ideas if they still think it’s worthwhile after hearing what I have to say.
I’m certainly not disputing that having those questions available was helpful, but just want to point out that there seems to be a danger where people focus on these relatively “crisp” problems too much, think they have solutions, and then argue over them endlessly, where they might have made better progress by zooming out and looking at the bigger picture. If you consider the dozens of academic papers published on the Sleeping Beauty, I don’t think the majority of them (i.e., beyond the first few) can be said to have helped pave the way for UDT.
Fair enough!
(Re your last paragraph, it sounds like we’re in pretty perfect agreement about the usefulness of previous research. I suppose that upthread, you were saying “these people were following a streetlight/shadow strategy and it didn’t actually work” and I was saying “retrospectively, it looks like the correct strategy would have been to first explore some anthropic problems and then try to find a common answer to all of them, which sounds like it can be described as starting under the streetlight, then moving into the shadows”. So it sounds like we agree about the actual subject matter and any apparent disagreement is either due to talking about different things or due to disagreement about how to best apply the metaphor to the example, so it looks like there’s nothing that would actually be useful to debate. Cool! :-))