You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Alexei comments on Discussion for Eliezer Yudkowsky's paper: Timeless Decision Theory - Less Wrong Discussion

10 Post author: Alexei 06 January 2011 12:28AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (61)
Tags: timeless decision theory tdt eliezer yudkowsky

Comments (61)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Alexei 06 January 2011 12:32:16AM 0 points [-]

I am still reading the paper, but I have a question:

Conversely in the CGTA variant of Solomon's Problem, a causal decision agent, knowing in advance that he would have to choose between chewing gum and avoiding gum, has no reason to precommit himself to avoiding gum. (pg. 9)

Why not? Based on earlier numbers (pg. 5), chewing gum will give you strictly better results. The paper even mentions that:

This table shows that whether you have the gene CGTA or not, your chance of dying of a throat abscess goes down if you chew gum.

What am I missing?

Comment author: Larks 06 January 2011 12:53:00AM 0 points [-]

No reason to precommit to AVOID gum.

Gum is beneficial, so you don't want to precommit against it. Nonetheless, it is evidence of a bad thing.

Comment author: Alexei 06 January 2011 12:58:44AM *  0 points [-]

I don't follow. Chewing gum is strictly better, so I'll precommit to it. Precommitting to picking only box B is better than precomitting to picking box A and B, so if I had to precommit I would choose to do so for box B.

Nonetheless, it is evidence of a bad thing.

That has been debunked.

I guess I am just following the parallels between the two problems.

Comment author: Larks 06 January 2011 01:01:47AM 1 point [-]

Yes, you might want to precommit to it. But you don't want to precommit against it, which is Eliezer's point. In the parallel example (Newcombe's box), you do want to precommit against the thing which seems to strictly dominate, and the difference between the two cases is the justification for treating time-invariance as important.

Comment author: Alexei 06 January 2011 01:14:10AM 0 points [-]

Ok, hah, I don't think we disagree on anything here. I think I made a mistake in reading "has no reason to precommit himself to avoiding gum" as "has no reason to precommit himself [to anything]". My bad. Thanks for helping out!

Comment author: Larks 06 January 2011 01:20:22AM 0 points [-]

That would be quite important! =)

Does he need to precommit to chew gum? I haven't read the doc. in months, but I don't recall their being any danger of temporal inconsistancy in that case.

Comment author: Alexei 06 January 2011 02:14:19AM 0 points [-]

No he doesn't. Eliezer compares this version of Solomon's problem to the Newcomb's problem, where precommitment actually makes a difference.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit