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RobinHanson comments on What Program Are You? - Less Wrong
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Perhaps one could have as special "how to write a program" decision theory, but that would not be a general decision theory applicable to all other decisions.
Isn't this like criticizing Bayesianism because it doesn't tell you how to select your initial prior? For practical purposes, that doesn't matter because you already have a prior; and once you have a prior, Bayesianism is enough to go on from there.
Similarly, you already decompose at least some part of yourself into program and data (don't you?). This is enough for that part of yourself to work with these decision theories. And using them, you can proceed to decide how to decompose the rest of yourself, or even to reflect on the original decomposition and choose a new one.
The following is slightly tongue in cheek, but I don't normally place a stable boundary between program and data on myself, I revise it depending on purpose. The following is one view I find useful sometimes
Nope, I'm all program. What you would call data is just programming in weaker languages than Turing complete ones. I can rewrite my programming, do meta analysis on it.
The information streaming into my eyes is a program that I don't know what it will make me do, it could make me flinch or it change the conceptual way that I see the world. The visual system is just an interpreter for the programming optical signals.
"Prior" is like a get out of jail card. Whenever the solution to some problem turns out to conveniently depend on an unknown probability distribution, you can investigate further, or you can say "prior" and stop there. For example, the naive Bayesian answer to game theory would be "just optimize based on your prior over the enemy's actions", which would block the route to discovering Nash equilibria.
It's true that it's worthwhile to investigate where priors ought to come from. My point is only that you can still put Bayesianism to work even before you've made such investigations.