Vaniver comments on Open Thread, November 16–30, 2012 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: VincentYu 18 November 2012 01:59PM

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Comment author: Vaniver 25 November 2012 06:57:13AM *  1 point [-]

And as long as P(U($10)>U($5)) is large enough a priori, it will swamp out the difference.

Well, then why even update? (Or, more specifically, why assume that this is harmless normally, but an ace up your sleeve for a particular class of problems? You need to be able to reliably distinguish when this helps you and when this hurts you from the inside, which seems difficult.)

Because I can't prove that I'll go through this line of reasoning. Simulating my decision process as part of my decision would result in infinite recursion.

I'm not sure that I understand this; I'm under the impression that many TDT applications require that they be able to simulate themselves (and other TDT reasoners) this way.

Comment author: aaronde 25 November 2012 11:44:51PM 0 points [-]

Good questions. I don't know the answers. But like you say, UDT especially is basically defined circularly - where the agent's decision is a function of itself. Making this coherent is still an unsolved problem. So I was wondering if we could get around some of the paradoxes by giving up on certainty.

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