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Perplexed comments on Discussion for Eliezer Yudkowsky's paper: Timeless Decision Theory - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (61)
I suspect that this claim is at the heart of the dispute. I think that it is far from close enough to the truth.
The reason people don't shoplift is that they fear the consequences. There is no mystery to be explained. Except perhaps why people are sufficiently motivated by fear of being temporarily physically constrained by a store-owner or security guard and publicly shamed (typical punishment for a first offense).
It serves to emphasize the type-error that I see in your request. You seem to be criticizing one normative theory (CDT) while promoting another (UDT/TDT). But you are doing so by asking whether the normative theory is satisfactory when used as a descriptive theory. And you are asking that it function descriptively in a fictitious universe in which shoplifters are rarely caught and mildly punished.
I agreed there is no need to invoke TDT/UDT to explain lack of shoplifting.
In addition to what Perplexed said, it seems to me that people tend to care more about their reputation compared to what is evolutionarily adaptive today, probably because in our EEA, you couldn't move to a new city and start over (or if you could move to another tribe, it was only at an extremely high cost), nor did you interact mostly with strangers. That would explain why people are sometimes deterred or motivated by reputation/shame when it doesn't seem to make sense to be, without having to invoke TDT/UDT.