It's an interesting question how to draw the line between chosen action and mere behaviour. If the "glitch" occurs at an earlier enough stage, and the subsequent causal process includes enough of my usual reasons-responsive mechanisms (and so isn't wildly contrary to my core values, etc.), then I don't see why the upshot couldn't, in principle, qualify as "my" choice -- even if it's rather surprising, at least to a casual observer, that I ended up acting contrary to my usual disposition.
If your normal decision making apparatus continues to work afterwards, has the chance to compensate for the glitch, doesn't, and the glitch changes the result it would have to be almost exactly balanced in a counterfactual case without the glitch. How likely is that? And even so it doesn't strike me as conceptionally all that different from unconsciously incorporating a small random element in the decision making process right from the start. In either case the more important the random element the less accurately is the outcome described as your choice, as far as I'm concerned (maybe some would define the the random element as the real you, and not the parts that include your values, experiences, your reasoning ability and so on; or possibly argue that for mysterious reasons they are so conveniently entangled that they are somehow the same thing)
But there are cases where it is applicable. In particular, there are cases where everyone involved is less than omniscient (even about such local matters as the precise arrangement of matter in my head). They might have some fantastic knowledge -- e.g. they might know everything there is to know about my brain that can be captured using the language of ordinary folk psychology. This can include various important dispositional facts about me. But if folk psychology is too coarse-grained to capture my total disposition, then we need to distinguish (and separately evaluate) my coarse-grained dispositions from my actual actions.
But that's just a map-territory difference. If you use disposition as your word for "map of the decision making process" of course that map will sometimes have inaccuracies. But calling the difference between map and territory "choice" strikes me as ... well.. it matches the absolutely crazy way some people think about free will, but is worse than useless. Unless you want to outlaw psychology because it's akin to slavery, trying to take away peoples choice by understanding them, oh the horror!
calling the difference between map and territory "choice"
Eh? That's not what I'm doing. I'm pointing out that there's a respectable (coarse-grained) sense of 'disposition' (i.e. tendency) according to which one can have a disposition to X without this necessarily entailing that one will actually do X. (There's another sense of 'total disposition' where the entailment does hold. N.B. We make choices either way, but it only makes sense to separately evaluate choices from coarse-grained dispositions.)
I take these general dispositions to accura...
A common background assumption on LW seems to be that it's rational to act in accordance with the dispositions one would wish to have. (Rationalists must WIN, and all that.)
E.g., Eliezer:
And more recently, from AdamBell:
Within academic philosophy, this is the position advocated by David Gauthier. Derek Parfit has constructed some compelling counterarguments against Gauthier, so I thought I'd share them here to see what the rest of you think.
First, let's note that there definitely are possible cases where it would be "beneficial to be irrational". For example, suppose an evil demon ('Omega') will scan your brain, assess your rational capacities, and torture you iff you surpass some minimal baseline of rationality. In that case, it would very much be in your interests to fall below the baseline! Or suppose you're rewarded every time you honestly believe the conclusion of some fallacious reasoning. We can easily multiply cases here. What's important for now is just to acknowledge this phenomenon of 'beneficial irrationality' as a genuine possibility.
This possibility poses a problem for the Eliezer-Gauthier methodology. (Quoting Eliezer again:)
The problem, obviously, is that it's possible for irrational agents to receive externally-generated rewards for their dispositions, without this necessarily making their downstream actions any more 'reasonable'. (At this point, you should notice the conflation of 'disposition' and 'choice' in the first quote from Eliezer. Rachel does not envy Irene her choice at all. What she wishes is to have the one-boxer's dispositions, so that the predictor puts a million in the first box, and then to confound all expectations by unpredictably choosing both boxes and reaping the most riches possible.)
To illustrate, consider (a variation on) Parfit's story of the threat-fulfiller and threat-ignorer. Tom has a transparent disposition to fulfill his threats, no matter the cost to himself. So he straps on a bomb, walks up to his neighbour Joe, and threatens to blow them both up unless Joe shines his shoes. Seeing that Tom means business, Joe sensibly gets to work. Not wanting to repeat the experience, Joe later goes and pops a pill to acquire a transparent disposition to ignore threats, no matter the cost to himself. The next day, Tom sees that Joe is now a threat-ignorer, and so leaves him alone.
So far, so good. It seems this threat-ignoring disposition was a great one for Joe to acquire. Until one day... Tom slips up. Due to an unexpected mental glitch, he threatens Joe again. Joe follows his disposition and ignores the threat. BOOM.
Here Joe's final decision seems as disastrously foolish as Tom's slip up. It was good to have the disposition to ignore threats, but that doesn't necessarily make it good idea to act on it. We need to distinguish the desirability of a disposition to X from the rationality of choosing to do X.