Given that you receive the letter, paying is indeed evidence for not having termites and winning $999,000. EDT is elegant, but still can't be correct in my view. I wish it were, and have attempted to "fix" it.
My take is this. Either you have the termite infestation, or you don't.
Say you do. Then
Say you...
XOR Blackmail is (in my view) perhaps the clearest counterexample to EDT:
...An agent has been alerted to a rumor that her house has a terrible termite infestation that would cost her $1,000,000 in damages. She doesn’t know whether this rumor is true. A greedy predictor with a strong reputation for honesty learns whether or not it’s true, and drafts a letter:
I know whether or not you have termites, and I have sent you this letter iff exactly one of the following is true: (i) the rumor is false, and you are going to pay me $1,000 upon receiving this lette
I think this is potentially an overly strong criteria for decision theories - we should probably restrict to something like the problems to a fair problem class, else we end up with no decision theory receiving any credence.
Good point, I should have mentioned that in my article. (Note that XOR Blackmail is definitely a fair problem (not that you are claiming otherwise)).
I also think "wrong answer" is doing a lot of work here.
I at least in part agree here. This is why I picked XOR Blackmail, because it has such an obvious right answer. That's an...
Thanks for the comment!
There is a false dichotomy in the argument basing the conclusion only on the options CDT or EDT, when in fact both are wrong.
I wouldn't say there's a false dichotomy: the argument works fine if you also have credence in e.g. FDT. It just says that altruistic, morally motivated agents should favor EDT over CDT. (However, as I have attempted to demonstrate, 2 premises of the argument don't hold up.)
...Suppose you know instead that Omega was miserly and almost all of the people who one-box don't get offered the opportunity to play - let's
Heighn’s response to this argument is that this is a perfectly fine prescription.
Note that omnizoid hasn't checked with me whether this is my response, and if he had, I would have asked him to specify the problem more. In my response article, I attempt to specify the problem more, and with that particular specification, I do indeed endorse FDT's decision.
I'm surprised Wei Dai thinks this is a fair point. I disagree entirely with it: FDT is a decision theory and doesn't in and of itself value anything. The values need to be given by a utility function.
Consider the Psychological Twin Prisoner's Dilemma. Given the utility function used there, the agent doesn't value the twin at all: the agent just wants to go home free as soon as possible. FDT doesn't change this: it just recognizes that the twin makes the same decision the agent does, which has bearing on the prison time the agent gets.
...which makes the Procreation case an unfair problem. It punishes FDT'ers specifically for following FDT. If we're going to punish decision theories for their identity, no decision theory is safe. It's pretty wild to me that @WolfgangSchwarz either didn't notice this or doesn't think it's a problem.
A more fair version of Procreation would be what I have called Procreation*, where your father follows the same decision theory as you (be it FDT, CDT or whatever).
You should take a look this list of UDT open problems that Vladimir Slepnev wrote 13 years ago, where 2 and 3 are problems in which UDT/FDT seemingly make incorrect decisions, and 1 and 5 are definitely also serious open problems.
"Insofar as your distribution has a faraway median, that means you have close to certainty that it isn't happening soon. And that, I submit, is ridiculously overconfident and epistemically unhumble."
Why? You can say a similar thing about any median anyone ever has. Why is this median in particular overconfident?
(No edit was made to the original question.)
Thanks for your answer!
I (strongly) disagree that sentience is uniquely human. It seems to me a priori very unlikely that this would be the case, and evidence does exist to the contrary. I do agree sentience is an important factor (though I'm unsure it's the only one).
"but certainly none of the things that we (legally) do with animals are bad for any of the important reasons why torture of people is bad."
That seems very overconfident to me. What are your reasons for believing this, if I may ask? What quality or qualities do humans have that animals lack that makes you certain of this?
"But by the time the situation described in the OP happens, it no longer matters whether you optimize expected utility over the whole sample space; that goal is now moot."
This is what we agree on. If you're in the situation with a bomb, all that matters is the bomb.
My stance is that Left-boxers virtually never get into the situation to begin with, because of the prediction Omega makes. So with probability close to 1, they never see a bomb.
Your stance (if I understand correctly) is that the problem statement says there is a bomb, so, that's what's true with...
Note that it's my argumentation that's being called crazy, which is a large factor in the "antagonism" you seem to observe - a word choice I don't agree with, btw.
About the "needlessly upping the heat", I've tried this discussion from multiple different angles, seeing if we can come to a resolution. So far, no, alas, but not for lack of trying. I will admit some of my reactions were short and a bit provocative, but I don't appreciate nor agree with your accusations. I have been honest in my reactions.
If you ask ChatGPT to multiply two 4-digit numbers it writes out the reasoning process in natural knowledge and comes to the right answer.
People keep saying such things. Am I missing something? I asked it to calculate 1024 * 2047, and the answer isn't even close. (Though to my surprise, the first 2 steps are at least correct steps, and not nonsense. And it is actually adding the right numbers together in step 3, again, to my surprise. I've seen it perform much, much worse.)
Agreed, but I think it's important to stress that it's not like you see a bomb, Left-box, and then see it disappear or something. It's just that Left-boxing means the predictor already predicted that, and the bomb was never there to begin with.
Put differently, you can only Left-box in a world where the predictor predicted you would.
I think we agree. My stance: if you Left-box, that just means the predictor predicted that with probability close to 1. From there on, there are a trillion trillion - 1 possible worlds where you live for free, and 1 where you die.
I'm not saying "You die, but that's fine, because there are possible worlds where you live". I'm saying that "you die" is a possible world, and there are way more possible worlds where you live.
I'm not going to make you cite anything. I know what you mean. I said Right-boxing is a consequence, given a certain resolution of the problem; I always maintained Left-boxing is the correct decision. Apparently I didn't explain myself well, that's on me. But I'm kinda done, I can't seem to get my point across (not saying it's your fault btw).
By construction it is not, because the scenario is precisely that we find ourselves in one such exceptional case; the posterior probability (having observed that we do so find ourselves) is thus ~1.
Except that we don't find ourselves there if we Left-box. But we seem to be going around in a circle.
… but you have said, in a previous post, that if you find yourself in this scenario, you Right-box. How to reconcile your apparently contradictory statements…?
Right-boxing is the necessary consequence if we assume the predictor's Right-box prediction is fixed now...
"In your problem description you said you receive the letter"
True, but the problem description also specifies subjunctive dependence between the agent and the predictor. When the predictor made her prediction the letter isn't yet sent. So the agent's decision influences whether or not she gets the letter.
"This intuition is actually false for perfect predictors."
I agree (and have written extensively on the subject). But it's the prediction the agent influences, not the presence of the termite infestation.