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cousin_it comments on Hardened Problems Make Brittle Models - Less Wrong
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What's the goal of that controlled experiment? If my decision apparatus fails on Newcomb's problem or the "true PD", does it tell you anything about my real world behavior?
It tells us that your real world behavior has the potential to be inconsistent.
Many people carry a decision apparatus that consists of a mess of unrelated heuristics and ad hoc special-cases. Examining extreme cases is a tool for uncovering places where the ad hoc system falls down, so that a more general system can be derived from basic principles, preferably before encountering a real world situation where the flaws in the ad hoc system become apparent.
To my mind, a better analogy than "controlled experiment" would be describing these as decision system unit tests.