Jayson_Virissimo comments on Meta Decision Theory and Newcomb's Problem - Less Wrong

5 Post author: wdmacaskill 05 March 2013 01:29AM

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Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 05 March 2013 03:33:39AM *  4 points [-]

In what ways does this differ from Nozick's recommendation in Nature of Rationality where he combines the results from EDT and CDT but gives them different weights depending on the priors (about the applicability to the situation and truth value of each decision theory)?

Comment author: crazy88 05 March 2013 08:38:06AM 2 points [-]

From memory, Nozick explicitly disclaims the idea that his view might be a response to normative uncertainty. Rather, he claims that EDT and CDT both have normative force and so should both be taken into account. While this may appear to be window dressing, this will have fairly substantial impacts. In particular, no regress threatens Nozick but the regress issue is going to need to be responded to in the normative uncertainty case.

Comment author: wdmacaskill 05 March 2013 03:37:51PM *  1 point [-]

Thanks for mentioning this - I discuss Nozick's view in my paper, so I'm going to edit my comment to mention this. A few differences:

As crazy88 says, Nozick doesn't think that the issue is a normative uncertainty issue - his proposal is another first-order decision theory, like CDT and EDT. I argue against that account in my paper. Second, and more importantly, Nozick just says "hey, our intuitions in Newcomb-cases are stakes-sensitive" and moves on. He doesn't argue, as I do, that we can explain the problematic cases in the literature by appeal to decision-theoretic uncertainty. Nor does he use decision-theoretic uncertainty to respond to arguments in favour of EDT. Nor does he respond to regress worries, and so on.