Steve_Rayhawk comments on Towards a New Decision Theory - Less Wrong
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I thought the answer Vladimir Nesov already posted solved Counterfactual Mugging for a quantum coin?
In this solution, there is no belief updating; there is just decision theory. (All probabilities are "timestamped" to the beliefs of the agent's creator when the agent was created.) This means that the use of Bayesian belief updating with expected utility maximization may be just an approximation that is only relevant in special situations which meet certain independence assumptions around the agent's actions. In the more general Newcomb-like family of situations, computationally efficient decision algorithms might use a family of approximations more general than Bayesian updating.
There would, for example, be no such thing as "posterior probability of 'coin comes up heads'" or "probability that you are a Boltzmann brain"; there would only be a fraction of importance-measure that brains with your decision algorithm could affect. As Vladimir Nesov commented:
Anna and I noticed this possible decision rule around four months before Vladimir posted it (with "possible observations" replaced by "partial histories of sense data and actions", and also some implications about how to use limited computing power on "only what the decisions in a given (counterfactual) branch can affect" while still computing predicted decisions on one's other counterfactual branches well enough to coordinate with them). But we didn't write it up to a polished state, partly because we didn't think it seemed enough like it was the central insight in the area. Mostly, that was because this decision rule doesn't explain how to think about any logical paradoxes of self-reference, such as algorithms that refer to each others' output. It also doesn't explain how to think about logical uncertainty, such as the parity of the trillionth digit of pi, because the policy optimization is assumed to be logically omniscient. But maybe we were wrong about how central it was.
(It's strange that I can use the language of possibility like that!)