Open Thread, August 1-15, 2012

OpenThreadGuy

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.

Do people think superrationality, TDT, and UDT are supposed to be useable by humans?

I had always assumed that these things were created as sort of abstract ideals, things you could program an AI to use (I find it no coincidence that all three of these concepts come from AI researchers/theorists to some degree) or something you could compare humans to, but not something that humans can actually use in real life.

But having read the original superrationality essays, I realize that Hofstadter makes no mention of using this in an AI framework and instead thinks about humans using it. And in HPMoR, Eliezer has two eleven-year old humans using a bare-bones version of TDT to cooperate (I forget the chapter this occurs in), and in the TDT paper, Eliezer still makes no mention of AIs but instead talks about "causal decision theorists" and "evidential decision theorists" as though they were just people walking around with opinions about decision theory, not the platonic formalized abstraction of decision theories. (I don't think he uses the phrase "timeless decision theorists".)

I think part of the rejection people have to these decision theories might be from how impossible they are to actually implement in humans. To get superrationality to work in humans, you'd probably have to broadcast it directly into the minds of everyone on the planet, and even then it's uncertain how many defectors would remain. You almost certainly could not possibly get TDT or UDT to work in humans because the majority of them cannot even understand them. I certainly had trouble, and I am not exactly one of the dumbest members of the species, and frankly I'm not even sure I understand them now.

The original question remains. It is not rhetorical. Do people think TDT/UDT/superrationality are supposed to be useable by humans?

(I am aware of this; it is no surprise that a very smart and motivated person can use TDT to cooperate with himself, but I doubt they can really be used in practice to get people to cooperate with other people, especially those not of the same tribe.)

Some ways humans act resemble TDT much more than they resemble CDT: some behaviours such as voting in an election with a negligible probability of being decided by one vote, or refusing small offers in the Ultimatum game, make no sense unless you take in account the fact that similar people thinking about similar issues in similar ways will reach similar conclusions. Also, the one-sentence summary of TDT strongly reminds me of both the Golden Rule and the categorical imperative. (I've heard that Good and Real by Gary Drescher discusses this kind of stuff i... (read more)

3Randaly14y

Some people think so; they are wrong. (Examples: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Most of these take overly broad vague definitions of a person's "platonic algorithm"; #5 is forgetting that natural selection acts on the level of genes, not people.) Eliezer: "This is primarily a theory for AIs dealing with other AIs." Unfortunately, it's difficult to write papers or fiction publicizing TDT that solely address AI's- especially when the description of TDT needs to be in a piece of Harry Potter fanfiction. On a slightly more interesting side note, if TDT were applicable in real life, people would likely be computation hazards, since a simulation of another person accurate enough to count as implementing the same, simulated platonic algorithm as the one they actually use would also be quite possibly be complex enough to be a person.

0Larks14y

Why do you think we would need to get everyone to use UDT for it to be useful to you? It's not like UDT can't deal with non-UDT agents.