Let’s say you “care” about some hypothetical if you’d be willing to pay a penny today unconditionally in order to prevent your loved ones from dying in that hypothetical. If we take some faraway digit of pi, you’ll find that you “care” about both the hypothetical where it’s even and the hypothetical where it’s odd, even though you know in advance that one of those provably does not “exist”. And if you only had a limited time to run a decision theory, you wouldn’t want to run any decision theory that threw away these facts about your “care”. That’s one of the reasons why it seems more natural to me to use “care” rather than “existence” as the input for a decision theory.
Sounds like both of us could use either interpretation without any difference in conclusion, and just find different abstractions useful for thinking about it due to small differences in what other kinds of intuitions we’ve previously trained. Just a minor semantic hiccup and nothing more.
Let’s say you “care” about some hypothetical if you’d be willing to pay a penny today unconditionally in order to prevent your loved ones from dying in that hypothetical. If we take some faraway digit of pi, you’ll find that you “care” about both the hypothetical where it’s even and the hypothetical where it’s odd, even though you know in advance that one of those provably does not “exist”. And if you only had a limited time to run a decision theory, you wouldn’t want to run any decision theory that threw away these facts about your “care”. That’s one of the reasons why it seems more natural to me to use “care” rather than “existence” as the input for a decision theory.
Sounds like both of us could use either interpretation without any difference in conclusion, and just find different abstractions useful for thinking about it due to small differences in what other kinds of intuitions we’ve previously trained. Just a minor semantic hiccup and nothing more.