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Wei_Dai 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: AlexMennen 27 August 2012 08:28:28PM 2 points [-]

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?

Comment author: Wei_Dai 27 August 2012 08:49:33PM *  4 points [-]

(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 versions of UDT that are free from such problems (such as the proof-based ones that cousin_it and Nesov have explored), although there are still some remaining issues with "spurious proofs" which may be related. In any case, it's unclear how to get help from the notion of causality, and as far as I know, nobody has explored in that direction and reported back any results.

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