Randaly comments on What's Wrong with Evidential Decision Theory? - Less Wrong

15 Post author: aaronde 23 August 2012 12:09AM

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Comment author: Randaly 23 August 2012 08:06:23AM *  0 points [-]

and A is the action of deciding to not smoke for the purpose of avoiding cancer.

People aren't that good and understanding why they do things. It might seem like you decided not to smoke because of EDT, but the more you want to smoke, the less likely you are to follow that line of reasoning.

This is being used as a proxy for the presence of the gene in question; an easy way around our lack of introspection is to use another proxy: testing for the presence of the gene.

Comment author: aaronde 23 August 2012 06:35:05PM 0 points [-]

If this were an option, it wouldn't change the problem. An EDT agent that would quit smoking for the good news value, without knowing whether it had the gene, would either avoid getting tested, or precommit to stop smoking regardless of the test results. It would do this for the same reason that, in Newcomb's problem, it wouldn't want to know whether the opaque box was empty before making its decision, even if it could.

Comment author: DanielLC 23 August 2012 06:05:42PM 0 points [-]

It's used as a proxy for a lot of things. This isn't about one specific situation. It's about a class of problems.

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