Publication of "Anthropic Decision Theory"

Stuart_Armstrong

My paper "Anthropic decision theory for self-locating beliefs", based on posts here on Less Wrong, has been published as a Future of Humanity Institute tech report. Abstract:

This paper sets out to resolve how agents ought to act in the Sleeping Beauty problem and various related anthropic (self-locating belief) problems, not through the calculation of anthropic probabilities, but through finding the correct decision to make. It creates an anthropic decision theory (ADT) that decides these problems from a small set of principles. By doing so, it demonstrates that the attitude of agents with regards to each other (selfish or altruistic) changes the decisions they reach, and that it is very important to take this into account. To illustrate ADT, it is then applied to two major anthropic problems and paradoxes, the Presumptuous Philosopher and Doomsday problems, thus resolving some issues about the probability of human extinction.

Most of these ideas are also explained in this video.

To situate Anthropic Decision Theory within the UDT/TDT family: it's basically a piece of UDT applied to anthropic problems, where the UDT approach can be justified by using generally fewer, and more natural, assumptions than UDT does.

My paper "Anthropic decision theory for self-locating beliefs", based on posts here on Less Wrong, has been published as a Future of Humanity Institute tech report. Abstract:

This paper sets out to resolve how agents ought to act in the Sleeping Beauty problem and various related anthropic (self-locating belief) problems, not through the calculation of anthropic probabilities, but through finding the correct decision to make. It creates an anthropic decision theory (ADT) that decides these problems from a small set of principles. By doing so, it demonstrates that the attitude of agents with regards to each other (selfish or altruistic) changes the decisions they reach, and that it is very important to take this into account. To illustrate ADT, it is then applied to two major anthropic problems and paradoxes, the Presumptuous Philosopher and Doomsday problems, thus resolving some issues about the probability of human extinction.

Most of these ideas are also explained in this video.

What would be required for UDT to be written up fully? And what is missing between FDT (in the Death in Damascus problem) and UDT?

I'm puzzled by the FDT paper, it claims to be a generalization of UDT but it seems strictly less general, the difference being this.

As to your first question, we already have several writeups that fit in the context of decision theory literature (TDT, FDT, ADT) but they omit many ideas that would fit better in a different context, the intersection of game theory and computation (like the paper on program equilibrium by Tennenholtz). Thinking back, I played a large part in developing these ideas, and writing them up was probably my responsibility which I fl... (read more)

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Publication of "Anthropic Decision Theory"

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Publication of "Anthropic Decision Theory"

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