Stuart_Armstrong comments on What is Wei Dai's Updateless Decision Theory? - Less Wrong

37 Post author: AlephNeil 19 May 2010 10:16AM

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Comment author: AlephNeil 19 May 2010 11:35:24AM *  3 points [-]

Thanks very much! I'm especially pleased that you thought it was accurate.

As for the second point - yeah it seems everyone wants to disagree with me on that :-/

What I describe (perhaps unclearly) is a 'standard recipe' for attaching meaning to statements about indexical probabilities (like "I am at the second intersection" in the absent-minded driver problem) which doesn't depend on decision theory (except in way I noted as the 'caveat').

Perhaps it may be objected that there are other recipes. (One such recipe might be 'take a random branch that has at least one player node on it, then take a random player-instance somewhere along that branch'. This of course gives 1/2 as the answer the Sleeping Beauty problem.)

I don't really have any 'absolute justification' for mine, except that it gives the solution to an elegant decision problem: "At every player-instance, try to work out which player-instance you are, so as to minimize -log(subjective probability) at that instance." (With it being implicit that your final utility is the sum of all such 'log(subjective probability)' expressions along the branch.)

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 22 May 2010 08:39:38AM 2 points [-]

Have you seen Full Non-Idexical Conditioning? (http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~radford/ftp/anth.pdf) Though the theory is mathematically incorrect, it's very nearly right, and it's very similar to your sleeping beaty approach...