Andreas_Giger comments on Open Thread, September 30 - October 6, 2013 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Coscott 30 September 2013 05:18AM

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Comment author: Andreas_Giger 01 October 2013 11:07:48AM 0 points [-]

I saw this post from EY a while ago and felt kind of repulsed by it:

I no longer feel much of a need to engage with the hypothesis that rational agents mutually defect in the oneshot or iterated PD. Perhaps you meant to analyze causal-decision-theory agents?

Never mind the factual shortcomings, I'm mostly interested in the rejection of CDT as rational. I've been away from LW for a while and wasn't keeping up on the currently popular beliefs on this site, and I'm considering learning a bit more about TDT (or UDT or whatever the current iteration is called). I have a feeling this might be a huge waste of time though, so before I dive into the subject I would like to confirm that TDT has objectively been proven to be clearly superior to CDT, by which I (intuitively) mean:

  • There exist no problems shown to be possible in real life for which CDT yields superior results.
  • There exists at least one problem shown to be possible in real life for which TDT yields superior results.

"Shown to be possible in real life" excludes Omega, many-worlds, or anything of similar dubiousness. So has this been proven? Also, is there any kind of reaction from the scientific community in regards to TDT/UDT?

Comment author: Andreas_Giger 02 October 2013 01:42:02AM *  -1 points [-]

I think people have slightly misunderstood what I was referring to with this:

  • There exist no problems shown to be possible in real life for which CDT yields superior results.
  • There exists at least one problem shown to be possible in real life for which TDT yields superior results.

My question was whether there is a conclusive, formal proof for this, not whether this is widely accepted on this site (I already realized TDT is popular). If someone thinks such a proof is given somewhere in an article (this one?) then please direct me to the point in the article where I can find that proof. I'm very suspicious about this though, since the wiki makes blatantly false claims, e.g. that TDT performs better in one-shot PD than CDT, while in fact it can only perform better if access to source coude is given. So the wiki article feels more like promotion than anything.

Also, I would be very interested to hear about what kind of reaction from the scientific community TDT has received. Like, very very interested.

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