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AlexMennen comments on Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4 - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: lukeprog 27 August 2012 12:04AM

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Comment author: lukeprog 27 August 2012 02:49:23AM 0 points [-]

Follow-up: Is it in how they compute conditional probabilities in the decision algorithm? As I understand it, that's how CDT and EDT and TDT differ.

Comment author: AlexMennen 27 August 2012 03:38:02AM 0 points [-]

I don't think that is how CDT and EDT differ, actually. Instead, it's that EDT cares about conditional probabilities and CDT doesn't. For instance, in Newcomb's problem, a CDT agent could agree that his expected utility is higher conditional on him one-boxing than it is conditional on him two-boxing. But he two-boxes anyway because the correlation isn't causal. A guess TDT/UDT does compute conditional probabilities differently in the sense that they don't pretend that their decisions are independent of the outputs of similar algorithms.