nshepperd comments on Timelessness as a Conservative Extension of Causal Decision Theory - LessWrong

15 [deleted] 28 May 2014 02:57PM

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Comment author: nshepperd 30 May 2014 02:32:28AM -2 points [-]

I haven't thought about this carefully, but much of UDT stuff bothers me because it tries to extend EDT, and thus fails whenever confounding shows up.

This is not true, and I wish you'd stop repeating it. Especially since your definition of EDT seems to involve blindly importing related historical data as if it was a literally true description of any agent's situation, which is something that UDT doubly does not do.

Alternatively, I invite you to write a world-program for UDT that demonstrates the algorithm arriving at the wrong result due to some sort of "confounding".

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 30 May 2014 10:40:19AM *  2 points [-]

You should read that paper I linked. Chance moves by Nature in:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensive-form_game

can be confounded with each other, and in fact often are (in the survivor effect example by the underlying health status). It is very easy to add confounding to anything, it is a fundamental issue you have to deal with. That was one of the points of my talk.


You need causal language to describe "the agent's situation" (where confounders are, etc.) properly.