As one of the “academics” (scare quotes because I’m unfortunately quite academically uncredentialed), I just wanna note that our entire team actually cares a lot about this past an intellectual exercise in case people will read this as implying the opposite! I think of the entire point of my career as making decision theory and acausal dynamics go well in AIs (while also hopefully helping with automating alignment as a massive positive side effect) and I think others on the team feel similarly.
Yudkowsky notes that, given only responses to academically classic dilemmas, someone skilled in the art could still spot-check for FDT cross-patterns of responses [...] The better you understand decision theory, the more you do… something that EDT-vs-CDT cannot quite measure. IYKYK.
On a different note, I think the difference between FDT and empirically updateless EDT often feels overblown on LessWrong. I don’t actually know of cases where the two very clearly come apart, so I’m often confused when people seem confident in FDT’s superiority. There are cases where I’m not super sure what FDT would do, so they might come apart in those but if so, I think these cases haven’t been clearly articulated.
Hello! Just chiming in here to add a few things.
As one of the “academics” (scare quotes because I’m unfortunately quite academically uncredentialed), I just wanna note that our entire team actually cares a lot about this past an intellectual exercise in case people will read this as implying the opposite! I think of the entire point of my career as making decision theory and acausal dynamics go well in AIs (while also hopefully helping with automating alignment as a massive positive side effect) and I think others on the team feel similarly.
On a different note, I think the difference between FDT and empirically updateless EDT often feels overblown on LessWrong. I don’t actually know of cases where the two very clearly come apart, so I’m often confused when people seem confident in FDT’s superiority. There are cases where I’m not super sure what FDT would do, so they might come apart in those but if so, I think these cases haven’t been clearly articulated.