Yup, my position is that Beauty should accept the meal lottery but not the dollar lottery (and in general I claim the thing I am proposing agrees with EDT+FNC in the original examples and doesn’t get dutch booked).
But I don’t think this is about altruistic vs. hedonistic—the setup in either case is that Wednesday Beauty remembers nothing of the Monday or Tuesday experiences. In the original setup with dollar lottery, there’s nothing positive or negative that happens to Monday Beauty either way, so she might as well choose for Wednesday Beauty. In the meal lottery, there’s nothing that Wednesday Beauty remembers either way, so Monday Beauty might as well choose for Monday Beauty.
I think you’re saying you’re not convinced by this, but I’m saying that you shouldn’t need a particularly strong or good reason to be convinced—realityfluid doesn’t directly translate to a posterior probability that has to be “overcome”.
Maybe there’s a mixed dollar / meal case where the philosophical question about to what degree, if any, Monday Beauty considers herself to have altruisitc preferences about Wednesday Beauty or considers herself to be Wednesday Beauty matters more. But in the original dollar lottery, unless Monday Beauty specifically wants to spite Wednesday Beauty, she only has to weakly believe that she’s at least a little bit Wednesday Beauty to reject it.
More specifically, I’m not convinced computing the reality fluid distribution is helpful for making decisions. If “realityfluid doesn’t directly translate to a posterior probability that has to be ‘overcome’” then why don’t I skip the step of computing realityfluid, and do CDT+SIA or EDT+FNC, or just UDT (compute ex ante optimal policy, consider anthropic probabilities extraneous)?
I’m not sure how relevant Wednesday Beauty’s memories are; we could either imagine she remembers Heads+Monday and Tails+Tuesday, or not. If she doesn’t remember it seems somewhat like shrimp welfare, where if Monday Beauty contributes to a shrimp welfare fund, the shrimp don’t remember being her.
So in the shrimp welfare case (or Wednesday beauty remembers nothing case) it seems you’re agreeing with EDT+FNC which means the reality fluid distribution (SSA / single-halfing) is irrelevant. So we can just skip the reality fluid computation here.
In the meal case, it seems you are using reality fluid as an input to the utility function? You said earlier that reality fluid doesn’t translate to posterior probabilities, in which case, it could only be relevant for the utility function. In which case, I’m not convinced that these are preferences that meet the reasonable person standard.
Let’s accept “Monday Beauty might as well choose for Monday Beauty”. So then it seems her utility function is “meal quality for Monday Beauty”. Since reality fluid is irrelevant for posterior probabilities in your view, this raises the question of why she doesn’t use EDT+FNC to maximize expected meal quality for Monday Beauty. That computation would be as follows: (1) compute FNC probabilities: “50% on Heads+Monday, 50% on Tails+Monday”, (2) apply EDT: “Expected Monday Beauty meal quality given I take the bet < 0, so I reject”. In which case she would reject the bet.
Now, there is a possible utility function which considers meal quality for Heads+Monday Beauty twice as important as meal quality for Tails+Monday Beauty. But it is (a) not reasonable to summarize that as “Monday Beauty might as well choose for Monday Beauty”, (b) I don’t think it meets the reasonable person standard (assuming both meals are being forgotten anyway).
We could also think of a variation of meal quality where these are meals for shrimp, in which case it looks more like the altruistic case. Then the question is: “If you accept the Monday bet for yourself, why do you reject it for shrimp?”. And the possible answer seems to be “Inherently, I value Heads+Monday version of myself having a good meal more than Tails+Monday version of myself having a good meal, whereas I have no such discrimination for meals fed to shrimp given Heads or Tails.”. Which… again, I don’t see the point of, as a preference.
I’m not sure how relevant Wednesday Beauty’s memories are; we could either imagine she remembers Heads+Monday and Tails+Tuesday, or not. If she doesn’t remember it seems somewhat like shrimp welfare, where if Monday Beauty contributes to a shrimp welfare fund, the shrimp don’t remember being her.
Hmm, we are maybe not on the same page then, because I think the memories vs. not is fundamental and what makes the original setup interesting as an anthropics problem in the first place? If there’s no amnesia drugs at all, then there aren’t really distinct Mon-Tues-Weds Beauties, just a single Beauty being offered a negative EV lottery. If you’re postulating something else where Beauty regains memories of valenced experiences that she had during the wakings after the fact, that’s different / more complicated.
Either way, I don’t see what the comparison to shrimp welfare is doing; I think the interesting setups are well-captured by (a) something happens which has a lasting impact on Wednesday Beauty (bank account balance) vs. (b) something happens which affects only the temporary / memory-erased Beauties (meal quality), or some mixture of the two.
I’m not saying “no amnesia drugs at all”, I’m trying to disambiguate whether, if Heads, then she is administered amnesia drugs during Monday night. Similarly, if Tails, is she administered drugs during Tuesday night?
The most straightforward answer to those is “no to both” because that reduces complications of “maybe it is Wednesday?” upon waking up. Which is fine for bank balance purposes. However when reasoning about meals it’s harder because then Monday Beauty might take into account that, since she might not be administered amnesia drugs (in the Heads case), then she is going to remember this meal on Wednesday, and that might affect things.
That’s part of why I brought up shrimp welfare: it means we can assume no amnesia drugs on Heads+Monday night or Tails+Tuesday night.
In case (a) it seems you agree with EDT+FNC and that reality fluid is irrelevant to computing anthropic probabilities, so I don’t see any purpose in computing reality fluid at all. In case (b) it seems, if you are (consistently with (a)) saying reality fluid is irrelevant to computing anthropic probabilities, then reality fluid could only be relevant to the utility function (if it is relevant at all), and then my puzzlement re: this looking like an arbitrary preference (for Heads+Monday meal quality being more important than Tails+Monday meal quality) applies.
I’m not saying “no amnesia drugs at all”, I’m trying to disambiguate whether, if Heads, then she is administered amnesia drugs during Monday night. Similarly, if Tails, is she administered drugs during Tuesday night?
The most straightforward answer to those is “no to both” because that reduces complications of “maybe it is Wednesday?” upon waking up.
Ah OK, I was assuming the opposite, because the original setup and most variations of Sleeping Beauty I am aware of stipulate that amnesia drugs follow every waking, not all but the last. I would have to reconsider your variant. I don’t think “maybe it’s Wednesday” is very complicated either way though, other than maybe momentarily. On Wednesday the experiment is over and Beauty leaves the research facility...
Ah. Yeah, reading the original again, I do see the amnesia drugs are administered on every awakening, and that can affect probabilities! (Since one can reason: “either Heads+Monday, Heads+Tuesday, Tails+Monday, Tails+Tuesday, Tails+Wednesday”, so ‘thirder’/SIA rules will say 2⁄5 heads… until they observe it’s not Wednesday, and then they go back to 1⁄3. )
In that scenario I think my comments still apply. With (a) you’re saying that reality fluid is irrelevant to anthropic probabilities, and that your decision rule matches EDT+FNC. With (b) it seems, to be consistent, you should also say reality fluid is irrelevant to anthropic probabilities, so the question is, why take the Monday bet? It looks like an arbitrary preference that the Tails+Monday meal is more important than the Heads+Monday meal.
Yup, my position is that Beauty should accept the meal lottery but not the dollar lottery (and in general I claim the thing I am proposing agrees with EDT+FNC in the original examples and doesn’t get dutch booked).
But I don’t think this is about altruistic vs. hedonistic—the setup in either case is that Wednesday Beauty remembers nothing of the Monday or Tuesday experiences. In the original setup with dollar lottery, there’s nothing positive or negative that happens to Monday Beauty either way, so she might as well choose for Wednesday Beauty. In the meal lottery, there’s nothing that Wednesday Beauty remembers either way, so Monday Beauty might as well choose for Monday Beauty.
I think you’re saying you’re not convinced by this, but I’m saying that you shouldn’t need a particularly strong or good reason to be convinced—realityfluid doesn’t directly translate to a posterior probability that has to be “overcome”.
Maybe there’s a mixed dollar / meal case where the philosophical question about to what degree, if any, Monday Beauty considers herself to have altruisitc preferences about Wednesday Beauty or considers herself to be Wednesday Beauty matters more. But in the original dollar lottery, unless Monday Beauty specifically wants to spite Wednesday Beauty, she only has to weakly believe that she’s at least a little bit Wednesday Beauty to reject it.
More specifically, I’m not convinced computing the reality fluid distribution is helpful for making decisions. If “realityfluid doesn’t directly translate to a posterior probability that has to be ‘overcome’” then why don’t I skip the step of computing realityfluid, and do CDT+SIA or EDT+FNC, or just UDT (compute ex ante optimal policy, consider anthropic probabilities extraneous)?
I’m not sure how relevant Wednesday Beauty’s memories are; we could either imagine she remembers Heads+Monday and Tails+Tuesday, or not. If she doesn’t remember it seems somewhat like shrimp welfare, where if Monday Beauty contributes to a shrimp welfare fund, the shrimp don’t remember being her.
So in the shrimp welfare case (or Wednesday beauty remembers nothing case) it seems you’re agreeing with EDT+FNC which means the reality fluid distribution (SSA / single-halfing) is irrelevant. So we can just skip the reality fluid computation here.
In the meal case, it seems you are using reality fluid as an input to the utility function? You said earlier that reality fluid doesn’t translate to posterior probabilities, in which case, it could only be relevant for the utility function. In which case, I’m not convinced that these are preferences that meet the reasonable person standard.
Let’s accept “Monday Beauty might as well choose for Monday Beauty”. So then it seems her utility function is “meal quality for Monday Beauty”. Since reality fluid is irrelevant for posterior probabilities in your view, this raises the question of why she doesn’t use EDT+FNC to maximize expected meal quality for Monday Beauty. That computation would be as follows: (1) compute FNC probabilities: “50% on Heads+Monday, 50% on Tails+Monday”, (2) apply EDT: “Expected Monday Beauty meal quality given I take the bet < 0, so I reject”. In which case she would reject the bet.
Now, there is a possible utility function which considers meal quality for Heads+Monday Beauty twice as important as meal quality for Tails+Monday Beauty. But it is (a) not reasonable to summarize that as “Monday Beauty might as well choose for Monday Beauty”, (b) I don’t think it meets the reasonable person standard (assuming both meals are being forgotten anyway).
We could also think of a variation of meal quality where these are meals for shrimp, in which case it looks more like the altruistic case. Then the question is: “If you accept the Monday bet for yourself, why do you reject it for shrimp?”. And the possible answer seems to be “Inherently, I value Heads+Monday version of myself having a good meal more than Tails+Monday version of myself having a good meal, whereas I have no such discrimination for meals fed to shrimp given Heads or Tails.”. Which… again, I don’t see the point of, as a preference.
Hmm, we are maybe not on the same page then, because I think the memories vs. not is fundamental and what makes the original setup interesting as an anthropics problem in the first place? If there’s no amnesia drugs at all, then there aren’t really distinct Mon-Tues-Weds Beauties, just a single Beauty being offered a negative EV lottery. If you’re postulating something else where Beauty regains memories of valenced experiences that she had during the wakings after the fact, that’s different / more complicated.
Either way, I don’t see what the comparison to shrimp welfare is doing; I think the interesting setups are well-captured by (a) something happens which has a lasting impact on Wednesday Beauty (bank account balance) vs. (b) something happens which affects only the temporary / memory-erased Beauties (meal quality), or some mixture of the two.
I’m not saying “no amnesia drugs at all”, I’m trying to disambiguate whether, if Heads, then she is administered amnesia drugs during Monday night. Similarly, if Tails, is she administered drugs during Tuesday night?
The most straightforward answer to those is “no to both” because that reduces complications of “maybe it is Wednesday?” upon waking up. Which is fine for bank balance purposes. However when reasoning about meals it’s harder because then Monday Beauty might take into account that, since she might not be administered amnesia drugs (in the Heads case), then she is going to remember this meal on Wednesday, and that might affect things.
That’s part of why I brought up shrimp welfare: it means we can assume no amnesia drugs on Heads+Monday night or Tails+Tuesday night.
In case (a) it seems you agree with EDT+FNC and that reality fluid is irrelevant to computing anthropic probabilities, so I don’t see any purpose in computing reality fluid at all. In case (b) it seems, if you are (consistently with (a)) saying reality fluid is irrelevant to computing anthropic probabilities, then reality fluid could only be relevant to the utility function (if it is relevant at all), and then my puzzlement re: this looking like an arbitrary preference (for Heads+Monday meal quality being more important than Tails+Monday meal quality) applies.
Ah OK, I was assuming the opposite, because the original setup and most variations of Sleeping Beauty I am aware of stipulate that amnesia drugs follow every waking, not all but the last. I would have to reconsider your variant. I don’t think “maybe it’s Wednesday” is very complicated either way though, other than maybe momentarily. On Wednesday the experiment is over and Beauty leaves the research facility...
Ah. Yeah, reading the original again, I do see the amnesia drugs are administered on every awakening, and that can affect probabilities! (Since one can reason: “either Heads+Monday, Heads+Tuesday, Tails+Monday, Tails+Tuesday, Tails+Wednesday”, so ‘thirder’/SIA rules will say 2⁄5 heads… until they observe it’s not Wednesday, and then they go back to 1⁄3. )
In that scenario I think my comments still apply. With (a) you’re saying that reality fluid is irrelevant to anthropic probabilities, and that your decision rule matches EDT+FNC. With (b) it seems, to be consistent, you should also say reality fluid is irrelevant to anthropic probabilities, so the question is, why take the Monday bet? It looks like an arbitrary preference that the Tails+Monday meal is more important than the Heads+Monday meal.