Could you elaborate on the point in footnote 11 about why you think it doesn’t work? In any concrete problem (Newcomb’s paradox, prisoner’s dilemma, XOR blackmail etc) it seems like all that’s needed is to imagine you made the precommitment at any time before you first had an experience that made you know you’d be facing this problem and need to make a choice (eg before you got the letter in XOR blackmail, but not necessarily before your house was or wasn’t infested with termites since that fact is unknown to you until after getting the letter and making the choice). In what circumstances would you need to think about going further back than that, or some kind of “choice made outside time” perspective? When you worry that agents “might already be in the midst of executing strategies that they might together have precommitted to not doing in advance”, is this not about concrete problems that are sharply bounded in time and have a finite set of well-defined choices like the examples I mentioned, but more like attempts to apply decision theory to ongoing situations that are less well-defined, eg tactics of political negotiation and military aggression in an era of mutually assured nuclear destruction?
If I’m understanding correctly, if we are thinking about the ECL problem with a one-shot prisoner’s dilemma, the main new wrinkles relative to other problems are that 1) each agent is unsure that the other will actually make the choice recommended by FDT/the great commitment, 2) observing one’s own choice may provide some new evidence about the probability the other agent will make a given choice (probably modeled as a Bayesian update, which some might think of as an ‘acausal influence’), and finally 3) the original FDT/great commitment recommendation has to take all this into account somehow.
It seems likely to me that one could analyze such a problem in an EDT framework with pre-commitments, where both agents have some probability of backing out of the pre-commitments, and don’t know for sure what those probabilities are so they have to estimate them in making their choice. But in such an analysis I wouldn’t think there’d be any need for consideration of the “metaphysical” issues you talk about in footnote 11 about considering the past long before entering this particular prisoner’s dilemma problem. So is your view that such considerations would be needed to deal with the issues 1), 2), 3) I listed above, or do you see separate issues in an ECL prisoner’s dilemma problem?
Hm, okay I think you’re right actually. Thank you for prodding at this. I mean, it’s not even clear what distinguishes ECL from the prisoner’s dilemma with a twin (modulo counterfactuals). So I think you’re right that updatelessness isn’t needed there, and you only need the correct counterfactuals (the EDT vs CDT dimension), as you said. So there’s no son-of-CDT issue at all for humans (which is actually great news for commitment theory!). I’ll rewrite that footnote.
Could you elaborate on the point in footnote 11 about why you think it doesn’t work? In any concrete problem (Newcomb’s paradox, prisoner’s dilemma, XOR blackmail etc) it seems like all that’s needed is to imagine you made the precommitment at any time before you first had an experience that made you know you’d be facing this problem and need to make a choice (eg before you got the letter in XOR blackmail, but not necessarily before your house was or wasn’t infested with termites since that fact is unknown to you until after getting the letter and making the choice). In what circumstances would you need to think about going further back than that, or some kind of “choice made outside time” perspective? When you worry that agents “might already be in the midst of executing strategies that they might together have precommitted to not doing in advance”, is this not about concrete problems that are sharply bounded in time and have a finite set of well-defined choices like the examples I mentioned, but more like attempts to apply decision theory to ongoing situations that are less well-defined, eg tactics of political negotiation and military aggression in an era of mutually assured nuclear destruction?
No, it’s not about complex vs simple situations, it’s just aboutECLspecifically (at least for humans that’s the only son-of-CDT issue).If I’m understanding correctly, if we are thinking about the ECL problem with a one-shot prisoner’s dilemma, the main new wrinkles relative to other problems are that 1) each agent is unsure that the other will actually make the choice recommended by FDT/the great commitment, 2) observing one’s own choice may provide some new evidence about the probability the other agent will make a given choice (probably modeled as a Bayesian update, which some might think of as an ‘acausal influence’), and finally 3) the original FDT/great commitment recommendation has to take all this into account somehow.
It seems likely to me that one could analyze such a problem in an EDT framework with pre-commitments, where both agents have some probability of backing out of the pre-commitments, and don’t know for sure what those probabilities are so they have to estimate them in making their choice. But in such an analysis I wouldn’t think there’d be any need for consideration of the “metaphysical” issues you talk about in footnote 11 about considering the past long before entering this particular prisoner’s dilemma problem. So is your view that such considerations would be needed to deal with the issues 1), 2), 3) I listed above, or do you see separate issues in an ECL prisoner’s dilemma problem?
Hm, okay I think you’re right actually. Thank you for prodding at this. I mean, it’s not even clear what distinguishes ECL from the prisoner’s dilemma with a twin (modulo counterfactuals). So I think you’re right that updatelessness isn’t needed there, and you only need the correct counterfactuals (the EDT vs CDT dimension), as you said. So there’s no son-of-CDT issue at all for humans (which is actually great news for commitment theory!). I’ll rewrite that footnote.
Yeah, I also changed the ECL example screenshot. This is much better, thanks a lot.