owencb comments on Decision theories as heuristics - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (9)
I agree with this -- I think the absentminded driver is a particularly clean-cut case.
I was partly trying to offer an explanation of what was going on in e.g. discussions of Newcomb's problem where people contrast CDT with EDT. Given that you say EDT isn't even fully specified, it seems pretty clear that they're interpreting it as a heuristic, but I'm not sure they're always aware of that.
Yes -- nice example.
I'm not entirely convinced by this. We can evaluate heuristics by saying "how well does implementing them perform?" (which just needs us to have models of the world and of value). I certainly think we can make meaningful judgements that some heuristics are better than others without knowing what the idealised form is.
That said, I'm sympathetic to the idea that studying the idealised form might be more valuable (although I'm not certain about that). The thrust of my post arguing that understanding the heuristics is valuable was to make it clear that I was trying to clarify the fact that some people end up discussing heuristics without realising it, rather than to attack such people.