If there was one criticism I’d like to repeat, it’s that framing the smoking lesion problem in terms of clean decisions between counterfactuals is already missing something from the pre-mathematical description of the problem. The problem is interesting because we as humans sometimes have to worry that we’re running on “corrupted hardware”—it seems to me that mathematization of this idea requires us to somehow mutilate the decision theories we’re allowed to consider.
To look at this from another angle: I’m agreeing that the counterfactuals are “socio-linguistic conventions”—and I want to go even further and place the entire problem within a context that allows it to have lots of unique quirks depending on the ideas it’s expressing, rather than having only the straightforward standardized interpretation. I see this as a feature, not a bug, and think that we can afford to be “greedy” in trying to hang on to the semantics of the problem statement rather than “lazy” in trying to come up with an efficient model.
Yeah, I agree that I haven’t completely engaged with the issue of “corrupted hardware”, but it seems like any attempt to do this would require so much interpretation that I wouldn’t expect to obtain agreement over whether I had interpreted it correctly. In any case, my aim is purely to solve counterfactuals for non-corrupted agents, at least for now. But glad to see that someone agrees with me about socio-linguistic conventions :-)
Sure. I have this sort of instinctive mental pushback because I think of counterfactuals primarily as useful tools for a planning agent, but I’m assuming that you don’t mean to deny this, and are just applying different emphasis.
Yeah, there’s definitely a tension between being a social-linguistic construct and being pragmatically useful (such as what you might need for a planning agent). I don’t completely know how to resolve this yet, but this post makes a start by noting that in additional to the social linguistic elements, the strength of the physical linkage between elements is important as well. My intuition is that there are a bunch of properties that make something more or less counterfactual and the social-linguistic conventions are about a) which of these properties are present when the problem is ambiguous b) which of these properties need to be satisfied before we accept a counterfactual as valid.
Do you have a specific objection to what I wrote?
Oh, I more or less agree :P
If there was one criticism I’d like to repeat, it’s that framing the smoking lesion problem in terms of clean decisions between counterfactuals is already missing something from the pre-mathematical description of the problem. The problem is interesting because we as humans sometimes have to worry that we’re running on “corrupted hardware”—it seems to me that mathematization of this idea requires us to somehow mutilate the decision theories we’re allowed to consider.
To look at this from another angle: I’m agreeing that the counterfactuals are “socio-linguistic conventions”—and I want to go even further and place the entire problem within a context that allows it to have lots of unique quirks depending on the ideas it’s expressing, rather than having only the straightforward standardized interpretation. I see this as a feature, not a bug, and think that we can afford to be “greedy” in trying to hang on to the semantics of the problem statement rather than “lazy” in trying to come up with an efficient model.
Yeah, I agree that I haven’t completely engaged with the issue of “corrupted hardware”, but it seems like any attempt to do this would require so much interpretation that I wouldn’t expect to obtain agreement over whether I had interpreted it correctly. In any case, my aim is purely to solve counterfactuals for non-corrupted agents, at least for now. But glad to see that someone agrees with me about socio-linguistic conventions :-)
Sure. I have this sort of instinctive mental pushback because I think of counterfactuals primarily as useful tools for a planning agent, but I’m assuming that you don’t mean to deny this, and are just applying different emphasis.
Yeah, there’s definitely a tension between being a social-linguistic construct and being pragmatically useful (such as what you might need for a planning agent). I don’t completely know how to resolve this yet, but this post makes a start by noting that in additional to the social linguistic elements, the strength of the physical linkage between elements is important as well. My intuition is that there are a bunch of properties that make something more or less counterfactual and the social-linguistic conventions are about a) which of these properties are present when the problem is ambiguous b) which of these properties need to be satisfied before we accept a counterfactual as valid.