Schwarz himself demonstrates just how hard it is to question this assumption: even when the opposing argument was laid right in front of him, he managed to misunderstand the point so hard that he actually used the very mistaken assumption the paper was criticizing as ammunition against the paper.
Yes, FDT rejects some pretty foundational principles, yes, it’s wild, yes we know, we really do think those principles might be wrong. Would you be willing to explain what’s so important about guaranteed payoffs?
CDT makes its decisions as a pure function of the present and future, this seems reasonable and people use that property to simplify their decisionmaking all of the time, but it requires them to ignore promises that we would have liked them to have made in the past. This seems very similar to being unable to sign contracts or treaties because no one can trust you to keep to it when it becomes convenient for you to break it. It’s a missing capability. Usually, missing a capability is not helpful.
I note that there is a common kind of agent that is cognitively transparent enough to prove whether or not it can keep a commitment; governments. They need to be able to make and hold commitments all of the time. I’d conject that maybe most discourse about decisionmaking is about the decisions of large organisations rather than individuals.
Regarding the difficulty of robustly identifying algorithms in physical process… I’m fairly sure having that ability is going to be a fairly strict pre-requisite to being able to reason abstractly about anything at all. I’m not sure how to justify this, but I might be able to disturb your preconceptions with a paradox if… I’ll have to ask first, do you consider there to be anything mysterious about consciousness? If you’re a dennetian, the paradox I have in mind wont land for you and I’ll have to try to think of another one.
Regarding Guaranteed Payoffs (if I am understanding what that means), I think a relevant point was made in response to a previous review https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BtN6My9bSvYrNw48h/open-thread-january-2019#7LXDN9WHa2fo7dYLk
Yes, FDT rejects some pretty foundational principles, yes, it’s wild, yes we know, we really do think those principles might be wrong. Would you be willing to explain what’s so important about guaranteed payoffs?
CDT makes its decisions as a pure function of the present and future, this seems reasonable and people use that property to simplify their decisionmaking all of the time, but it requires them to ignore promises that we would have liked them to have made in the past. This seems very similar to being unable to sign contracts or treaties because no one can trust you to keep to it when it becomes convenient for you to break it. It’s a missing capability. Usually, missing a capability is not helpful.
I note that there is a common kind of agent that is cognitively transparent enough to prove whether or not it can keep a commitment; governments. They need to be able to make and hold commitments all of the time. I’d conject that maybe most discourse about decisionmaking is about the decisions of large organisations rather than individuals.
Regarding the difficulty of robustly identifying algorithms in physical process… I’m fairly sure having that ability is going to be a fairly strict pre-requisite to being able to reason abstractly about anything at all. I’m not sure how to justify this, but I might be able to disturb your preconceptions with a paradox if… I’ll have to ask first, do you consider there to be anything mysterious about consciousness? If you’re a dennetian, the paradox I have in mind wont land for you and I’ll have to try to think of another one.