DothYsTainGk

• DothYsTainGk 9 Jul 2026 20:50 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Elias Schmied’s comment on: Refram­ing LessWrong-style de­ci­sion the­ory as “com­mit­ment the­ory”

  I though the answer was “assume you’re simulated and follow FDT to save real-you the trouble of ever getting into this situation in real life”. Out of the all arguments to take the bomb this is the only one I’ve ever heard which I can at least understand where it’s coming from.

  If that is not the FDT response then, I guess I don’t know why you’d ever really blow yourself up. I did read the whole post, including rereading the example against just now.

  But what I got from it was mostly the insight that FDT kind of answers a different question than CDT, in that it’s goal is to shape what situations you end up in, not necessarily how to get the best result out of a given situation.

• DothYsTainGk 9 Jul 2026 6:46 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: alexfeghhi’s comment on: Refram­ing LessWrong-style de­ci­sion the­ory as “com­mit­ment the­ory”

  I believe they way it works is that FDT tells you to make the bad decision (here: suicide) if faced with the actual situation, but the argument is that you won’t get into the situation at all or less often because you’re playing FDT.

  By the time you find yourself facing the problem in which FDT recommends killing yourself something’s already gone wrong, because the situation ought to be prevented by playing FDT in the first place.

  But of course the question always is: should you actually find yourself in the decision problem, despite being an FDT-agent that ought to never get here, should you still follow FDT?

  I’d argue the answer is “lol no” but I believe the argument in favor is to assume you’re just “hypothetical you”, evaluating the situation without having to bear the cost. E.g. you’re just a simulated version omega spon up to check how you’d react in this decision, not “actual you” who’s faced with the decision. After all “actual you” is not supposed to even get into the situation. If you truly believe that, then chances are you’re not you, because that’d mean omega is wrong, which is extremely unlikely.

• DothYsTainGk 9 Nov 2025 15:34 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: julius vidal’s comment on: Pythia

  As an agent when you think about the aspects of the future that you yourself may be able to influence, your predictions have to factor in what actions you will take. But your choices about what actions to take will in turn be influenced by these predictions.

  To achieve an equilibrium you are restricted to predicting a future such that your predicting it will not cause you to also predict yourself taking actions that will prevent it (otherwise you would have to change predictions).

  Do you have an example for that? It seems to me you’re describing circular process, in which you’d naturally look for stable equilibria. Basically prediction will influence action, action will influence prediction, something like that. But I don’t quite get it how the circle works.

  Say I’m the agent faced with a decision. I have some options, I think through the possible consequences of each, and I choose the option that leads to the best outcome according to some metric. I feel it would be fair to say that the predictions I’m making about the future determine which choice I’ll make.

  What I don’t see is how the choice I end up making influences my prediction about the future. From my perspective the first step is predicting all possible futures and the second step execution the action that leads to the best future. Whatever option I end up selecting, it was already reasoned through beforehand, as were all the other options I ended up not selecting. Where’s the feedback loop?

• DothYsTainGk 11 Jul 2025 21:30 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Mea­sur­ing the Im­pact of Early-2025 AI on Ex­pe­rienced Open-Source Devel­oper Productivity

  (I’ll admit, there’s another reason for programmers to want to use AI even if it did make them worse at their jobs: it outsources some of the most unpleasant programming labor, so even if it’s slower, it’s worth it in the eyes of a programmer because their experience of programming feels better when they use AI because they didn’t spend a lot of time doing tasks they didn’t enjoy doing, like typing out the code changes they already figured out in their head.)

  Basically that’s proposing to take the programmer job description and move it from hands-on write the code yourself to hands-off review and adjust the code the AI agents are writing.

  Many people currently employed as programmers actually do enjoy the hands-on part and I suspect that even those doing it mostly for the money tend to like it more than code reviews. Code reviews are probably just below writing documentation and writing tests on the list of things most programmers don’t like doing.

  Now, personally I don’t mind writing tests and don’t mind doing code reviews myself, probably more so than most people I’ve worked with, and yet if that’s what the job morphs into I’ll probably change careers, circumstances permitting.

  What I could see is that, as the job description changes, the kind of people who get into the job also changes with it. And there’s certainly people who do think like you describe. Just not many of them in my bubble.