Vladimir_Nesov comments on UDT agents as deontologists - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Tyrrell_McAllister 10 June 2010 05:01AM

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Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 10 June 2010 10:40:25AM 1 point [-]

If it's any consolation, the last bit of understanding of the original Wei Dai's post (the role of execution histories, prerequisite to being able to make this correction) dawned on me only last week, as a result of a long effort for developing a decision theory of my own that only in retrospect turned out to be along roughly the same lines as UDT.

Comment author: khafra 10 June 2010 01:44:45PM 0 points [-]

A convergence like that makes both UDT and your decision theory more interesting to me. Is the process of your decision theory's genesis detailed on your personal blog? In retrospect, was your starting place and development process influenced heavily enough by LW/OB/Wei Dai to screen out the coincidence?

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 10 June 2010 02:29:36PM *  2 points [-]

I call it "ambient control". This can work as an abstract:

You, as an agent, determine what you do, and so have the power to choose which statements about you are true. By making some statements true and not others, you influence the truth of other statements that logically depend on the statements about you. Thus, if you have preference about what should be true about the world, you can make some of those things true by choosing what to do. Theories of consequences (partially) investigate what becomes true if you make a particular decision. (Of course, you can't change what's true, but you do determine what's true, because some truths are about you.)

Longer description here. I'll likely post on some aspects of it in the future, as the idea gets further developed. There is a lot of trouble with logical strength of theories of consequences, for example. There is also some hope to unify logical and observational uncertainty here, at the same time making the decision algorithm computationally feasible (it's not part of the description linked above).

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