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orthonormal comments on Ingredients of Timeless Decision Theory - Less Wrong
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Comments (226)
Creating a counterfactual similar to a situation we're familiar with helps us form intuitions about it more easily. You could replace the problem, perhaps, with the old saw about the Calvinist deity, predetermination, and the decision to enjoy a life of sin.
Doesn't evidential decision theory get the right answer in that problem, and causal the wrong one? in which case it's the opposite of the smoking lesion problem.
That's correct. I don't know what the person who wrote the grandparent of this comment could have been thinking; it's as if he didn't understand decision theory...
Why use a counterfactual example at all? Surely there's no need to have an example that contains falsehoods - it just creates unnecessary problems.
My reaction was more along the lines of: this author just tried to subliminally slip me some potentially damaging health advice! I had better watch out for other lies they might want to subliminally feed me for their own nefarious ends!
Then you might want to recalibrate your deception-detection heuristics.
What - and have them so they don't trigger even on outrageous falsehoods? That sounds as though it would be a dubious plan. Isn't determining when people are lying to you an important skill? I can put up with a few false positives - and that seems preferable to missing deceptions.
Maybe just so they don't trigger on outrageous counterfactuals.
Yeah— and what gives that Einstein guy the right to make me imagine riding a beam of light? That's outrageously impossible— he must be trying to make me attempt lightspeed travel so that I'll die!
Or the journalistic ethics counterfactual "What if you found conclusive evidence that the Diary of Anne Frank was a fake?"— the ethics professor must be a neo-Nazi!