Yes, I think that there is a time and place for these two stances toward agents
Agreed. The core lesson for me is that you can’t mix and match—you need to clearly separate out when you are using one stance or another.
I don’t especially care.
I can understand this perspective, but perhaps if there’s a relatively accessible way of explaining why this (or something similar to this) isn’t self-defeating, then maybe we should go with that?
Is naive thinking about the troll bridge problem a counterexample to this? There, the counterfactual stems from a contradiction.
I don’t quite your point. Any chance you could clarify? Like sure we can construct counterfactuals within an inconsistent system and sometimes this may even be a nifty trick for getting the right answer if we can avoid the inconsistency messing us up, but outside of this, why is this something that we should we care about this?
I think that no general type of decision theory worth two cents always does recommend itself
Good point, now that you’ve said it I have to agree that I was too quick to assume that the outside-of-the-universe decision theory should be the same as the inside-of-the-universe decision theory.
Thinking this through, if we use CDT as our outside decision theory to pick an inside decision theory, then we need to be able to justify why we were using CDT. Similarly, if we were to use another decision theory.
One thing I’ve just realised is that we don’t actually have to use CDT, EDT or FDT to make our decision. Since there’s no past for the meta-decider, we can just use our naive decision theory which ignores the past altogether. And we can justify this choice based on the fact that we are reasoning from where we are. This seems like it would avoid the recursion.
Except I don’t actually buy this, as we need to be able to provide a justification of why we would care about the result of a meta-decider outside of the universe when we know that isn’t the real scenario. I guess what we’re doing is making an analogy with inside the universe situations where we can set the source code of a robot before it goes and does some stuff. And we’re noting that a robot probably has a good algorithm if its code matches what a decider would choose if they had to be prepared for a wide variety of circumstances and then trying to apply this more broadly.
I don’t think I’ve got this precise yet, but I guess the key point is that this model doesn’t appear out of thin air, but that the model has a justification and that this justification involves a decision and hence some kind of decision theory where the actual decision is inside of the universe. So there is after all a reason to want the inside and outside theories to match up.
In the troll bridge problem, the counterfactual (the agent crossing the bridge) would indicate the inconsistency of the agent’s logical system of reasoning. See this post and what demski calls a subjective theory of counterfactuals.
Agreed. The core lesson for me is that you can’t mix and match—you need to clearly separate out when you are using one stance or another.
I can understand this perspective, but perhaps if there’s a relatively accessible way of explaining why this (or something similar to this) isn’t self-defeating, then maybe we should go with that?
I don’t quite your point. Any chance you could clarify? Like sure we can construct counterfactuals within an inconsistent system and sometimes this may even be a nifty trick for getting the right answer if we can avoid the inconsistency messing us up, but outside of this, why is this something that we should we care about this?
Good point, now that you’ve said it I have to agree that I was too quick to assume that the outside-of-the-universe decision theory should be the same as the inside-of-the-universe decision theory.
Thinking this through, if we use CDT as our outside decision theory to pick an inside decision theory, then we need to be able to justify why we were using CDT. Similarly, if we were to use another decision theory.
One thing I’ve just realised is that we don’t actually have to use CDT, EDT or FDT to make our decision. Since there’s no past for the meta-decider, we can just use our naive decision theory which ignores the past altogether. And we can justify this choice based on the fact that we are reasoning from where we are. This seems like it would avoid the recursion.
Except I don’t actually buy this, as we need to be able to provide a justification of why we would care about the result of a meta-decider outside of the universe when we know that isn’t the real scenario. I guess what we’re doing is making an analogy with inside the universe situations where we can set the source code of a robot before it goes and does some stuff. And we’re noting that a robot probably has a good algorithm if its code matches what a decider would choose if they had to be prepared for a wide variety of circumstances and then trying to apply this more broadly.
I don’t think I’ve got this precise yet, but I guess the key point is that this model doesn’t appear out of thin air, but that the model has a justification and that this justification involves a decision and hence some kind of decision theory where the actual decision is inside of the universe. So there is after all a reason to want the inside and outside theories to match up.
In the troll bridge problem, the counterfactual (the agent crossing the bridge) would indicate the inconsistency of the agent’s logical system of reasoning. See this post and what demski calls a subjective theory of counterfactuals.