Will_Sawin comments on When is further research needed? - Less Wrong
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This is a little interesting. The snap reply is that correlation does not imply causation, and we are discussing causation. But this snap reply implicitly privileges CDT over EDT and hence indirectly denigrates TDT/UDT. So, OK, your receiving information, through the correlation with someone else receiving information, is negatively correlated with your expected utility. And I continue to claim that you receiving the information doesn't really cause the harm only because I still don't understand the virtues of TDT/UDT.
Even more interesting. Are you thinking of cases in which my enjoyment of a movie is ruined because someone has given me an unwanted 'spoiler'? Yes, that is a counterexample to the theorem. But I think that the reason why the theorem fails is that in this case naive consequentialism fails. It isn't the end-result that generates utility. It is the path to that result. And possession of the spoiler information short-circuits the high utility pathway.
You can treat TDT/UDT as a causal thing, just with the causal arrows pointing in different directions. This theorem means SOMETHING in TDT, just not the same thing as it means in CDT.
(If my first statement is untrue, you can append "In most circumstances" or some other qualifier.)