twanvl 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: twanvl 15 March 2012 11:16:56AM *  0 points [-]

edit: ahh, wait, the EDT is some pretty naive theory that can not even process anything as complicated as evidence for causality working in our universe.

Can you explain this?

EDT is described as $V(A) = \sum_{j} P(O_j | A) U(O_j)$. If you have knowledge about the mechanisms behind the how the lesion causes smoking, that would change $P(A | O_j)$ and therefore also $P(O_j | A)$.

Comment author: Dmytry 15 March 2012 11:24:44AM *  0 points [-]

I don't see how knowledge how the lesion works would affect the probabilities when you don't know if you have lesion and the probability of having lesion.

Comment author: twanvl 15 March 2012 11:55:21AM 0 points [-]

Also:

when you don't know if you have lesion and the probability of having lesion.

You would still have priors for all of these things.

Comment author: Dmytry 15 March 2012 12:07:15PM *  0 points [-]

Even if you do, how is knowing that the lesion causes cancer going to change anything about P(smokes|gets cancer) ? The issue is that you need to do two equations, one for case when you do have lesion, and other for when you don't have lesion. The EDT just confuses those together.