orthonormal comments on Decision Theories: A Less Wrong Primer - Less Wrong

69 Post author: orthonormal 13 March 2012 11:31PM

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Comment author: orthonormal 13 March 2012 04:50:40AM 0 points [-]

You know, you're right. The independence assumption doesn't follow from time-causality; it's the main assumption itself. (X's programmer writing a CDT agent is a past cause of both the prediction and the action.) I'll fix the post.

Comment author: timtyler 13 March 2012 01:27:00PM *  2 points [-]

Thanks. I was interested in where the "independent decisions" idea comes from. This page on Causal Decision Theory suggests that it probably came from Robert Stalnaker in the 1970s - and was rolled into CDT in:

  • Gibbard, Allan and William Harper. [1978] 1981. “Counterfactuals and Two Kinds of Expected Utility.”