wedrifid, RIGHT. Sorry, got a little sloppy.

By "TDT reasoning" -- I know, I know -- I have been meaning Desrtopa's use of "TDT reasoning," which seems to be like TDT + [assumption that everyone else is using TDT].

I shouldn't say that TDT is irrelevant, but really that it is a needless generalization in this context. I meant that Desrtopa's invocation of TDT was irrelevant, in that it did nothing to fix the commons problem that we were initially discussing without mention of TDT.

It seems like this is an example of, at best, a domain on which decisionmaking could use TDT. No one is denying that people could use TDT, though. I was hoping for you to demonstrate an example where people actually seem to be behaving in accordance with TDT. (It is not enough to just argue that people reason fairly similarly in certain domains).

"Isomorphic" is a strong word. Let me know if you have a better example.

Anyway let me go back to this from your previous comment:

Tragedies of commons are not universally unresolvable....Simply saying "It's a tragedy of the commons problem" doesn't mean there's no chance of resolving it and therefore no use in knowing about it.

No one is claiming tragedies of the commons are always unresolvable. We are claiming that unresolved tragedies of the commons are tragedies of the commons! You seem to be suggesting that knowledge is a special thing which enables us to possibly resolve tragedies of the commons and therefore we should seek it out. But in the context of global warming and the current discussion, knowledge-collection is the tragedy of the commons. To the extent that people are underincentivized to seek out knowledge, that is the commons problem we're talking about.

If you turn around and say, "well they should be seeking out more knowledge because it could potentially resolve the tragedy"...well of course more knowledge could resolve the tragedy of not having enough knowledge, but you have conjured up your "should" from nowhere! The tragedy we're discussing is what exists after rational individuals decide to gather exactly as much information as a rational agent "should," where should is defined with respect to that agent's preferences and the incentives he faces.

Final question: If TDT reasoning did magically get us to the level of informedness on global warming that you think we rationally should be attaining, and if we are not attaining that level of informedness, does that not imply that we aren't using TDT reasoning? And if other people aren't using TDT reasoning, does that not imply that it is NOT a good idea for me to start using it? You seem to think that TDT has something to do with how rational agents "should" behave here, but I just don't see how TDT is relevant.

Later, when I cease identifying with my past self too much, I would admit (at least to myself) that I have changed my opinion.

I think the default is that people change specific opinions more in response to the tactful debate style you're identifying, but are less likely to ever notice that they have in fact changed their opinion. I think explicitly noticing one's wrongness on specific issues can be really beneficial in making a person less convinced of their rightness more globally, and therefore more willing to change their mind in general. My question is how we ought to balance these twin goals.

It would be much easier to get at the first effect by experiment than the second, since the latter is a much more long-term investment in noticing one's biases more generally. And if we could get at both, we would still have to decide how much we care about one versus the other, on LW.

Personally I am becoming inclined to give up the second goal.

I'd like to say yes, but I don't really know. Am I way off-base here?

Probably the most realistic answer is that I would sometimes believe it, and sometimes not. If not often enough, it's not worth it. It's too bad there aren't more people weighing in on these comments because I'd like to know how the community thinks my priorities should be set. In any case you've been around for longer so you probably know better than I.

human decisionmaking is isomorphic to TDT in some domains

Maybe it would help if you gave me an example of what you have in mind here.

prase, I really sympathize with that comment. I will be the first to admit that forcing people to concede their incorrectness is typically not the best way of getting them to agree on the truth. See for example this comment.

BUT! On this site we sort of have TWO goals when we argue, truth-seeking and meta-truth-seeking. Yes, we are trying to get closer to the truth on particular topics. But we're also trying to make ourselves better at arguing and reasoning in general. We are trying to step back and notice what we're doing, and correct flaws when they are exposed to our scrutiny.

If you look back over this debate, you will see me at several points deliberately stepping back and trying to be extremely clear about what I think is transpiring in the debate itself. I think that's worth doing, on lesswrong.

To defend the particular sentence you quote: I know that when I was younger, it was entirely possible for me to "escape" from a debate in a face-saving way without realizing I had actually been wrong. I'm sure this still happens from time to time...and I want to know if it's happening! I hope that LWers will point it out. On LW I think we ought to prioritize killing biases over saving faces.

Unfortunately that response did not convince me that I'm misunderstanding your position.

If people are not using a TDT decision rule, then your original explicit use of TDT reasoning was irrelevant and I don't know why you would have invoked it at all unless you thought it was actually relevant. And you continue to imply at least a weaker form of that reasoning.

No one is disputing that there is correlation between people's decisions. The problem is that correlation does not imply that TDT reasoning works! A little bit of correlation does not imply that TDT works a little bit. Unless people are similar to you AND using TDT, you don't get to magically drag them along with you by choosing to cooperate.

This is a standard textbook tragedy of the commons problem, plain and simple. From where I'm standing I don't see the relevance of anything else. If you want to continue disagreeing, can you directly tell me whether you think TDT is still relevant and why?

Desrtopa, can we be careful with it means to be "different" from other agents? Without being careful, we might reach for any old intuitive metric. But it's not enough to be mentally similar to other agents across just any metric. For your reasoning to work, they have to be executing the same decision rule. That's the metric that matters here.

Suppose we start out identical but NOT reasoning as per TDT -- we defect in the prisoner's dilemma, say -- but then you read some LW and modify your decision rule so that when deciding what to do, you imagine that you're deciding for both of us, since we're so similar after all. Well, that's not going to work too well, is it? My behavior isn't going to change any, since, after all, you can't actually influence it by your own reading about TDT.

So don't be so quick to cast your faith in TDT reasoning. Everyone can look very similar in every respect EXCEPT the one that matters, namely whether they are using TDT reasoning.

With this in mind, if you reread the bayesians versus barbarians post you linked to, you should be able to see that it has the feel more of an existence proof of a cooperate-cooperate equilibrium. It does not say that we will necessarily find ourselves in such an equilibrium just by virtue of being sufficiently similar.

To me, this comment basically concedes that you're wrong but attempts to disguise it in a face-saving way. If you could have said that people should be informing themselves at the socially optimal level, as you've been implying with your TDT arguments above, you would have. Instead, you backed off and said that people ought to be informing themselves at least a little.

Just to be sure, let me rewrite your claim precisely, in the sense you must mean it given your supposed continued disagreement:

In general I think that a personal policy of not informing oneself at even a basic level about tragedies of commons where the information is readily available is not beneficial to the individual, because humans have a sufficiently developed propensity for resolving tragedies of commons to give at least the most basic information marginal benefit to the individual.

Assuming that's what you're saying, it's easy to see that even this is an overreach. The question on the table is whether people should be informing themselves about global warming. Whether the first epsilon of information one gets from "informing oneself" (as opposed to hearing the background noise) is beneficial to the individual relative to the cost of attaining it, is a question of derivatives of cost and benefit functions at zero, and it could go either way. You simply can't make a general statement about how these derivatives relate for the class of Commons Problems. But more importantly, even if you could, SO WHAT? The question is not whether people should be informing themselves a bit, the question is whether they should be informing themselves at anywhere close to the socially optimal level. And by admitting it's a tragedy of the commons, we are already ANSWERING that question.

Does that make sense? Am I misunderstanding your position? Has your position changed?

I agree. Desrtopa is taking Eliezer's barbarians post too far for a number of reasons.

1) Eliezer's decision theory is at the least controversial which means many people here may not agree with it.

2) Even if they agree with it, it doesn't mean they have attained rationality in Eliezer's sense.

3) Even if they have attained this sort of rationality, we are but a small community, and the rest of the world is still not going to cooperate with us. Our attempts to cooperate with them will be impotent.

Desrtopa: Just because it upholds an ideal of rationality that supports cooperation, does not mean we have attained that ideal. Again, the question is not what you'd like to be true, but about what's actually true. If you're still shocked by people's low confidence in global warming, it's time to consider the possibility that your model of the world -- one in which people are running around executing TDT -- is wrong.