I’m sympathetic to this claim, but hopefully you can see the thing that I’m trying to point to here, which is this: there really are scenarios where there are acausal logical connections (that we care about) in the world.
I agree with this—I think the absentminded driver is a particularly clean-cut case.
I was partly trying to offer an explanation of what was going on in e.g. discussions of Newcomb’s problem where people contrast CDT with EDT. Given that you say EDT isn’t even fully specified, it seems pretty clear that they’re interpreting it as a heuristic, but I’m not sure they’re always aware of that.
Surely you agree that information can propagate acausally
Yes—nice example.
We will inevitably eventually need to use decision making heuristics, but at this point we don’t even know what we’re approximating, and We’re decidedly not looking specifically for “good decision-making heuristics” right now.
I’m not entirely convinced by this. We can evaluate heuristics by saying “how well does implementing them perform?” (which just needs us to have models of the world and of value). I certainly think we can make meaningful judgements that some heuristics are better than others without knowing what the idealised form is.
That said, I’m sympathetic to the idea that studying the idealised form might be more valuable (although I’m not certain about that). The thrust of my post arguing that understanding the heuristics is valuable was to make it clear that I was trying to clarify the fact that some people end up discussing heuristics without realising it, rather than to attack such people.
I agree with this—I think the absentminded driver is a particularly clean-cut case.
I was partly trying to offer an explanation of what was going on in e.g. discussions of Newcomb’s problem where people contrast CDT with EDT. Given that you say EDT isn’t even fully specified, it seems pretty clear that they’re interpreting it as a heuristic, but I’m not sure they’re always aware of that.
Yes—nice example.
I’m not entirely convinced by this. We can evaluate heuristics by saying “how well does implementing them perform?” (which just needs us to have models of the world and of value). I certainly think we can make meaningful judgements that some heuristics are better than others without knowing what the idealised form is.
That said, I’m sympathetic to the idea that studying the idealised form might be more valuable (although I’m not certain about that). The thrust of my post arguing that understanding the heuristics is valuable was to make it clear that I was trying to clarify the fact that some people end up discussing heuristics without realising it, rather than to attack such people.