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PhilGoetz comments on Decision theory: Why Pearl helps reduce “could” and “would”, but still leaves us with at least three alternatives - Less Wrong
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Comments (70)
Counterfactuals don't need to be about impossible things - and agents do calculate what would have happened, if something different had happened. And it is very hard to know whether it would have been possible for something different to happen.
The problem of counterfactuals is not actually a problem. Goodman's book is riddled with nonsensical claims.
What can Pearl's formalism accomplish, that earlier logics could not? As far as I can tell, "Bayes nets" just means that you're going to make as many conditional-independence assumptions as you can, use an acyclic graph, and ignore time (or use a synchronous clock). But nothing changes about the logic.
I am not sure. I haven't got much from Pearl so far. I did once try to go through The Art and Science of Cause and Effect - but it was pretty yawn-inducing.
I was replying to this bit in the post:
...and this bit:
It is true that agents do sometimes calculate what would have happened if something in the past had happened a different way - e.g. to help analyse the worth of their decision retrospectively. That is probably not too common, though.