SilasBarta comments on Anthropic reasoning and correlated decision making - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 23 September 2009 03:10PM

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Comment author: SilasBarta 23 September 2009 05:38:35PM 0 points [-]

I didn't check your application of CDP to the problems, but I think you erred at the beginning:

If you are part of a group of N individuals whose decision is perfectly correlated, then you should reason as if you had a 1/N chance of being the dictator of the group (in which case your decision is applied to all) and a (N-1)/N chance of being a dictatee (in which case your decision is ignored).

If your decisions are perfectly correlated (I assume that means they're all the same), then you are deciding for the group, because you make the same decision as everyone else. So you should treat it as a 100% chance of being the dictator of the group.

If you apply this dictator filter any situation S, then in "S + dictator filter", you should reason as in the CDP. If you apply it to perfectly correlated decision making, however, then the dictator filter changes nothing at all to anyone's decision - hence we should treat "perfectly correlated" as isomorphic to "perfectly correlated + dictator filter", which establishes the CDP.

Wouldn't it also mean that we should treat "perfectly correlated" as isomorphic to "uncorrelated + dictator filter", since you always believe your vote determined the outcome?

(Again, I don't know how this affects your application of it.)

By the way, how would your application of CDP/SIA to the Absent-minded Driver problem take into account additional evidence fed to you about what intersection you're at? (Say, someone shows you something that amplifies the odds of being at X by a factor of [aka has a Bayes factor/likelihood ratio of] L.)

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 23 September 2009 06:14:44PM 3 points [-]

If your decisions are perfectly correlated (I assume that means they're all the same), then you are deciding for the group

He's proposing a way of thinking about implementing Bostrom's division-of-responsibility principle.

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 24 September 2009 08:13:42PM 0 points [-]

By the way, how would your application of CDP/SIA to the Absent-minded Driver problem take into account additional evidence fed to you about what intersection you're at? (Say, someone shows you something that amplifies the odds of being at X by a factor of [aka has a Bayes factor/likelihood ratio of] L.)

I think my extended set-up can deal with that, too - I'll write it up in a subsequent post.

Comment author: SilasBarta 24 September 2009 08:16:34PM 1 point [-]

Okay. Just so you know, I attacked that problem, though not with your method, and presented the solution here. You will probably need to read this to understand the variables.

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 24 September 2009 06:37:47AM 0 points [-]

Wouldn't it also mean that we should treat "perfectly correlated" as isomorphic to "uncorrelated + dictator filter", since you always believe your vote determined the outcome?

Not ahead of time - you know, ahead of time, that your vote has only one chance in N of determining the result (if you want, drop the "rewriting people's memories" part of the dictator filter; it's not really needed).

By the way, how would your application of CDP/SIA to the Absent-minded Driver problem take into account additional evidence fed to you about what intersection you're at?

Let me think about that for a bit.

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