https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/functional-decision-theory argues for choosing as if you’re choosing the policy you’d follow in some situation before you learnt any of the relevant infortmation. In many games, having a policy of making certain choicese (that others could perhaps predict, and adjust their own choices accordingly) gets you better outcomes then just always doing what seems like a good idea ta the time. For example if someone credibly threatens you might be better off paying them to go away, but before you got the threat you would’ve prefered to commit yourself to never pay up so that people don’t threaten you in the first place.
A problem with arguments of the form “I expect that predictably not paying up will cause them not to threaten me” is that at the time you recieve the threat, you now know that argument to be wrong. They’ve proven to be somebody who still threatens you even though you do FDT, at which point you can simultaneously prove that refusing the threat doesn’t work and so you should pay up (because you’ve already seen the threat) and that you shouldn’t pay up for whatever FDT logic you were using before. Behaviour of agents who can prove a contradiction that is directly relevant to their decision function seems undefined. There needs to be some logical structure that lets you pick which information causes your choice, despite having enough in total to derive contradictions.
My alternative solution is that you aren’t convinced by the information you see, that they’ve actually already threatened you. It’s also possible you’re still inside their imagination as they decide whether to issue the threat. Whenever something is conditional on your actions in an epistemic state without being conditional on that epistemic state actually being valid (such as if someone predicts how you’d respond to a hypothetical threat before they issue it, knowing you’ll know it’s too late to stop when you get it) then there’s a ghost being lied to and you should think maybe you’re that ghost to justify ignoring the threat, rather than try to make decisions during a logically impossible situation.
hmm… Which part of that is a counterfactual conditional statement, as in, a statement of the form ” If kangaroos had no tails, they would topple over”?
The regular counterfactual part as I understand it is: ”If I ignore threats, people won’t send me threats” “I am an agent who ignores threats” ”I have observed myself recieve a threat” You can at most pick 2, but FDT needs all 3 to justify that it should ignoring it. It wants to say “If I were someone who responds to threats when I get them, then I’ll get threats, so instead I’ll be someone who refuses threats when I get threats so I don’t get threats” but what you do inside of logically impossible situations isn’t well defined.
The logical counterfactual part is this: ”What would the world be like if f(x)=b instead of a?” specifically, FDT requires asking what you’d expect things to be like if FDT outputted different results, and then it outputs the result where you say the world would be best if it outputted that result. The contradictions here is that you can prove what FDT outputs, and so prove that it doesn’t actually output all the other results, and the question again isn’t well defined.
I am by no means an expert on decision theories… What problems that FDT purports to solve require logical counterfactuals, let alone ghosts?
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/functional-decision-theory argues for choosing as if you’re choosing the policy you’d follow in some situation before you learnt any of the relevant infortmation. In many games, having a policy of making certain choicese (that others could perhaps predict, and adjust their own choices accordingly) gets you better outcomes then just always doing what seems like a good idea ta the time. For example if someone credibly threatens you might be better off paying them to go away, but before you got the threat you would’ve prefered to commit yourself to never pay up so that people don’t threaten you in the first place.
A problem with arguments of the form “I expect that predictably not paying up will cause them not to threaten me” is that at the time you recieve the threat, you now know that argument to be wrong. They’ve proven to be somebody who still threatens you even though you do FDT, at which point you can simultaneously prove that refusing the threat doesn’t work and so you should pay up (because you’ve already seen the threat) and that you shouldn’t pay up for whatever FDT logic you were using before. Behaviour of agents who can prove a contradiction that is directly relevant to their decision function seems undefined. There needs to be some logical structure that lets you pick which information causes your choice, despite having enough in total to derive contradictions.
My alternative solution is that you aren’t convinced by the information you see, that they’ve actually already threatened you. It’s also possible you’re still inside their imagination as they decide whether to issue the threat. Whenever something is conditional on your actions in an epistemic state without being conditional on that epistemic state actually being valid (such as if someone predicts how you’d respond to a hypothetical threat before they issue it, knowing you’ll know it’s too late to stop when you get it) then there’s a ghost being lied to and you should think maybe you’re that ghost to justify ignoring the threat, rather than try to make decisions during a logically impossible situation.
hmm… Which part of that is a counterfactual conditional statement, as in, a statement of the form ” If kangaroos had no tails, they would topple over”?
The regular counterfactual part as I understand it is:
”If I ignore threats, people won’t send me threats”
“I am an agent who ignores threats”
”I have observed myself recieve a threat”
You can at most pick 2, but FDT needs all 3 to justify that it should ignoring it.
It wants to say “If I were someone who responds to threats when I get them, then I’ll get threats, so instead I’ll be someone who refuses threats when I get threats so I don’t get threats” but what you do inside of logically impossible situations isn’t well defined.
The logical counterfactual part is this:
”What would the world be like if f(x)=b instead of a?”
specifically, FDT requires asking what you’d expect things to be like if FDT outputted different results, and then it outputs the result where you say the world would be best if it outputted that result. The contradictions here is that you can prove what FDT outputs, and so prove that it doesn’t actually output all the other results, and the question again isn’t well defined.