Decision Theory: Newcomb’s Problem

Decisions need to be modeled with some structure in order to be scrutinized and systematically improved; simply “intuiting” the answers to decision problems by ad-hoc methods is not conducive to thorough analysis.

For this, we formulate decision theories. This sequence, themed with an analysis of Newcomb’s problem, is a consolidated summary and context for the many decision theory discussions found on LessWrong at the time of writing.

De­ci­sion the­ory: An out­line of some up­com­ing posts

Con­fu­sion about New­comb is con­fu­sion about counterfactuals

De­ci­sion the­ory: Why we need to re­duce “could”, “would”, “should”

De­ci­sion the­ory: Why Pearl helps re­duce “could” and “would”, but still leaves us with at least three alternatives