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Wei_Dai comments on A problem with Timeless Decision Theory (TDT) - Less Wrong
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And this was my reply:
This is an unfinished part of the theory that I've also thought about, though your example puts it very crisply (you might consider posting it to LW?)
My current thoughts on resolution tend to see two main avenues:
1) Construct a full-blown DAG of math and Platonic facts, an account of which mathematical facts make other mathematical facts true, so that we can compute mathematical counterfactuals.
2) Treat differently mathematical knowledge that we learn by genuinely mathematical reasoning and by physical observation. In this case we know (D xor E) not by mathematical reasoning, but by physically observing a box whose state we believe to be correlated with D xor E. This may justify constructing a causal DAG with a node descending from D and E, so a counterfactual setting of D won't affect the setting of E.
Currently I'd say that (2) looks like the better avenue. Can you come up with an improper mathematical dependency where E is inferred from D, and shouldn't be seen as counterfactually affected, based on mathematical reasoning only without postulating the observation of a physical variable that descends from both E and D?
Incidentally, note that an unsolvable problem that should stay unsolvable is as follows: I'm asked to pick red or green, and told "A simulation of you given this information as well picked the wrong color and got shot." Whichever choice I make, I deduce that the other choice was better. The exact details here will depend on how I believe the simulator chose to tell me this, but ceteris paribus it's an unsolvable problem.
“Makes true” means logically implies? Why would that graph be acyclic? [EDIT: Wait, maybe I see what you mean. If you take a pdf of your beliefs about various mathematical facts, and run Pearl's algorithm, you should be able to construct an acyclic graph.]
Although I know of no worked-out theory that I find convincing, I believe that counterfactual inference (of the sort that's appropriate to use in the decision computation) makes sense with regard to events in universes characterized by certain kinds of physical laws. But when you speak of mathematical counterfactuals more generally, it's not clear to me that that's even coherent.
Plus, if you did have a general math-counterfactual-solving module, why would you relegate it to the logical-dependency-finding subproblem in TDT, and then return to the original factored causal graph? Instead, why not cast the whole problem as a mathematical abstraction, and then directly ask your math-counterfactual-solving module whether, say, (Platonic) C's one-boxing counterfactually entails (Platonic) $1M? (Then do the argmax over the respective math-counterfactual consequences of C's candidate outputs.)
I've been reviewing some of this discussion, and noticed that Eliezer hasn't answered the question in your last paragraph. Here is his answer to one of my questions, which is similar to yours. But I'm afraid I still don't have a really good understanding of the answer. In other words, I'm still not really sure why we need all the extra machinery in TDT, when having a general math-counterfactual-solving module (what I called "mathematical intuition module") seems both necessary and sufficient.
I wonder if you, or anyone else, understands this well enough to try to explain it. It might help me, and perhaps others, to understand Eliezer's approach to see it explained in a couple of different ways.
This is basically the approach I took in (what I now call) UDT1.