Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

lukeprog

This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

Ask away!

Previously: round 1, round 2, round 3

From the original thread:

This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

Ask away!

I can see what updating on sensory updating does to TDT (causing it to fail counterfactual mugging). But what does it mean to say that TDT makes use of causality and UDT doesn't? Are there any situations where this causes them to give different answers?

(I added a link at the end of the grandparent comment where Eliezer does give some of his thoughts on this issue.)

Are there any situations where this causes them to give different answers?

Eliezer seems to think that causality can help deal with Gary Drescher's "5-and-10" problem:

But you would still have to factor out your logical uncertainty in a way which prevented you from concluding "if I choose A6, it must have had higher utility than A7" when considering A6 as an option (as Drescher observes).

But it seems possible to build ... (read more)

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

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