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JonathanLivengood comments on Can anyone explain to me why CDT two-boxes? - Less Wrong Discussion

-12 Post author: Andreas_Giger 02 July 2012 06:06AM

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Comment author: JonathanLivengood 03 July 2012 06:39:49PM 0 points [-]

From my perspective, it's a shame that you have little regard for philosophical tradition. But as someone who is intimately familiar with the philosophical literature on causation, it seems to me that the sense of "causal" in causal decision theory, while imprecise, is perfectly compatible with most traditional approaches. I don't see any reason to think the "causal" in "causal decision theory" is incompatible with regularity theories, probabilistic theories, counterfactual theories, conserved quantity theories, agency/manipulation/intervention theories, primitivism, power theories, or mechanism theories. It might be a tense relation between CDT and projectivist theories, but I suspect that even there, you will not find outright incompatibility.

For a nice paper in the overlap between decision theory and the philosophy of causation and causal inference, you might take a look at the paper Conditioning and Intervening (pdf) by Meek and Glymour if you haven't seen it already. Of course, Glymour's account of causation is not very different from Pearl's, so maybe you don't think of this as philosophy.

Comment author: wedrifid 03 July 2012 07:19:13PM 0 points [-]

But as someone who is intimately familiar with the philosophical literature on causation, it seems to me that the sense of "causal" in causal decision theory, while imprecise, is perfectly compatible with most traditional approaches.

That was my impression (without sufficient confidence that I wished to outright contradict on facts.)