I'm struggling to understand anything technical on this website. I've enjoyed reading the sequences, and they have given me a lot to thing about. Still, I've read the introduction to Bayes theorem multiple times, and I simply can't grasp it. Even starting at the very beginning of the sequences I quickly get lost because there are references to programming and cognitive science which I simply do not understand.
Thinking about it, I realized that this might be a common concern. There are probably plenty of people who've looked at various more-or-less technical or jargony Less Wrong posts, tried understanding them, and then given up (without posting a comment explaining their confusion).
So I figured that it might be good to have a thread where you can ask for explanations for any Less Wrong post that you didn't understand and would like to, but don't want to directly comment on for any reason (e.g. because you're feeling embarassed, because the post is too old to attract much traffic, etc.). In the spirit of various Stupid Questions threads, you're explicitly encouraged to ask even for the kinds of explanations that you feel you "should" get even yourself, or where you feel like you could get it if you just put in the effort (but then never did).
You can ask to have some specific confusing term or analogy explained, or to get the main content of a post briefly summarized in plain English and without jargon, or anything else. (Of course, there are some posts that simply cannot be explained in non-technical terms, such as the ones in the Quantum Mechanics sequence.) And of course, you're encouraged to provide explanations to others!
The problem with this line of reasoning is that the desire to smoke is correlated with smoking, and therefore with the genetic lesion. Since and EDT agent is assumed to perform Bayesian updates, it should update its probability of having the lesion upon the observation that it has a desire to smoke.
How much it should update depends on its prior.
If, according to its prior, the desire to smoke largely screens off the correlation between the lesion and smoking, then the agent will choose to smoke.
Sorry, are you saying that EDT is wrong, or that my explanation of EDT is wrong? If it's the former, I agree. If it's the latter, can you give a different explanation? Note that most of the literature agrees that EDT doesn't smoke in the smoking lesion problem, so any alternative explanation should probably give the same result.