I’ve been reading stuff by philospher Wolfgang Spohn. His recent decision theory stuff (like Dependency equilibria and the causal structure of decision and game situations or Reversing 30 years of discussion: why causal decision theorists should one-box) is kind of cool. Like TDT, he talks about rational agents deciding on the basis of “reflexive entangled decision situations” and like UDT he proposes that agents should decide to follow the decisions they would have made in “earlier situations”. It’s not quite LW style reductionism, but it’s close-ish, and it increases my estimation that LW decision theory would be well recieved in academia (after a little self promotion).
I stumbled on Spohn’s “Reversing 30 years...” today via Choice & Inference, and it looks to me like the single most LW-relevant decision theory paper I’ve ever seen in a mainstream journal. Have you stumbled on any other good finds recently?
I just dig through google scholar till I find something good. The first paper cites “Conditioning and Intervening”
by Meek and Glymour, which I looked at recently, so maybe that’s how. I can also get to it by searching for “decision theory” within papers citing Pearl’s “Causality” (though it’s a few pages in). Also, I think Ledwig mentioned Spohn’s older stuff in her dissertation on Newcomb’s problem. Kind of hard to reconstruct search paths.
I’ve been reading stuff by philospher Wolfgang Spohn. His recent decision theory stuff (like Dependency equilibria and the causal structure of decision and game situations or Reversing 30 years of discussion: why causal decision theorists should one-box) is kind of cool. Like TDT, he talks about rational agents deciding on the basis of “reflexive entangled decision situations” and like UDT he proposes that agents should decide to follow the decisions they would have made in “earlier situations”. It’s not quite LW style reductionism, but it’s close-ish, and it increases my estimation that LW decision theory would be well recieved in academia (after a little self promotion).
I stumbled on Spohn’s “Reversing 30 years...” today via Choice & Inference, and it looks to me like the single most LW-relevant decision theory paper I’ve ever seen in a mainstream journal. Have you stumbled on any other good finds recently?
Thank you for posting this! What led you to it, or how did you find it?
I just dig through google scholar till I find something good. The first paper cites “Conditioning and Intervening” by Meek and Glymour, which I looked at recently, so maybe that’s how. I can also get to it by searching for “decision theory” within papers citing Pearl’s “Causality” (though it’s a few pages in). Also, I think Ledwig mentioned Spohn’s older stuff in her dissertation on Newcomb’s problem. Kind of hard to reconstruct search paths.
Makes sense. Thanks.