Will_Sawin comments on When is further research needed? - Less Wrong

0 Post author: RichardKennaway 17 June 2011 03:01PM

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Comment author: Perplexed 18 June 2011 01:01:08PM *  0 points [-]

Does their thinking you received information have anything at all to do with your receiving information, even slightly correlated? If it does, then you have a situation in which receiving information hurts you and the proof only goes through because it doesn't consider the other agents.

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.

It explicitly considers only cases where the information does not change payoffs.

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.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 18 June 2011 02:21:25PM 0 points [-]

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.)