I’m not sure that “Newcomblike problems are common” was intended as an argument about heuristics. To me it’s more of an argument about which idealization we want to be studying in the long run.
A simpler version of the argument could go like this. When we build an AI, it will be able to make indistinguishable copies of itself, and the existence of these copies might depend on the AI’s decisions and on facts about the world. VNM utility maximization doesn’t cover such situations, so we need a more general theory that’s as mathematically nice and reduces to VNM utility maximization when you have only one copy.
To be more precise, by “copies” I mean multiple decision nodes belonging to the same information set, as described in this post. These can also arise from mechanisms other than copying, such as forgetting things (AMD problem), having one agent simulate another (Newcomb’s problem), or just putting multiple agents in the same situation (anthropic problems).
Does that answer your question about when UDT should be used?
I’m not sure that “Newcomblike problems are common” was intended as an argument about heuristics. To me it’s more of an argument about which idealization we want to be studying in the long run.
A simpler version of the argument could go like this. When we build an AI, it will be able to make indistinguishable copies of itself, and the existence of these copies might depend on the AI’s decisions and on facts about the world. VNM utility maximization doesn’t cover such situations, so we need a more general theory that’s as mathematically nice and reduces to VNM utility maximization when you have only one copy.
To be more precise, by “copies” I mean multiple decision nodes belonging to the same information set, as described in this post. These can also arise from mechanisms other than copying, such as forgetting things (AMD problem), having one agent simulate another (Newcomb’s problem), or just putting multiple agents in the same situation (anthropic problems).
Does that answer your question about when UDT should be used?