Quantum Immortality/Suicide
This doesn't seem to fit. There isn't anything about Quantum Immortality that requires UDT (except in as much as any decision requires at least some kind of decision theory). The difficulty (and common confusion) is around translating primitive preference-intuitions into preference-beliefs about wavefunctions or branches. Once the values are given, both CDT and EDT will just result in the same decision that UDT would make (unless the specific decision also combines one of the other issues UDT is required for.)
There isn't anything about Quantum Immortality that requires UDT (except in as much as any decision requires at least some kind of decision theory). The difficulty (and common confusion) is around translating primitive preference-intuitions into preference-beliefs about wavefunctions or branches. Once the values are given, both CDT and EDT will just result in the same decision that UDT would make (unless the specific decision also combines one of the other issues UDT is required for.)
I think UDT makes it possible to understand what decisions are, and how wavefunctions can depend on one's decisions. Before I came up UDT ideas, this was really unclear to me, and I had considered some other decision theory approaches where Quantum Immortality was sort of baked in. For example I had the idea that the wavefunction couldn't be changed, but when you make decisions, you're choosing which branch of the wavefunction your consciousness continues into.
Is there a post on the relative strengths/weaknesses of UDT and TDT? I've searched but haven't found one.
This reminds me of the debate between programmers who want to design an elegant system that accomplishes all the desired functions as consequences of a fundamentally simple design, and the programmers who just want to make it work and ship. Depending on the problem you're solving, and the constraints you're working under, I think either approach can be appropriate. Peter Norvig's sudoku solver is in the "elegant" school, but if I were writing one from scratch, I'd do better to build something ugly and keep testing it until it seemed reliable.
I'm sorta leaning toward the "natural and elegant" approach for decision theories, since they'd have to face unknown new challenges without breaking, but patching CDT with cybernetics and such might work as well.
This reminds me of the debate between programmers who want to design an elegant system that accomplishes all the desired functions as consequences of a fundamentally simple design, and the programmers who just want to make it work and ship. Depending on the problem you're solving, and the constraints you're working under, I think either approach can be appropriate.
I think the resemblance is only superficial. There is nothing inelegant in treating two wired-in-parallel robotic arms controlled by the same controller, in same way regardless of whenever the...
I noticed that recently I wrote several comments of the form "UDT can be seen as a step towards solving X" and thought it might be a good idea to list in one place all of the problems that helped motivate UDT1 (not including problems that came up subsequent to that post).