A real causal decision theorist would, of course, one box.
Only in the “No True Scottsman” sense. What Will calls CDT is an interesting decision theory and from what little I’ve seen of Will talking about it it may also be a superior decision theory, but it doesn’t correspond to the decision theory called CDT. The version of Causal Decision Theory that is in academics’ heads is CDT, the one that is in Will’s head needs a new name.
(Fair enough. My only real problem with causal decision theory being called causal decision theory is that at best it’s a strange use of the word “causal”, breaking with thousands of years of reasonable philosophical tradition. That’s my impression anyway—but there’s like a billion papers on Newcomb’s problem, and maybe one of them gives a perfectly valid explanation of the terminology.)
I’m not familiar with the philosophical tradition that would be incompatible with the way CDT uses ‘causality’. It quite possibly exists and my lack of respect for philosophical tradition leaves me ignorant of such.
From my perspective, it’s a shame that you have little regard for philosophical tradition. But as someone who is intimately familiar with the philosophical literature on causation, it seems to me that the sense of “causal” in causal decision theory, while imprecise, is perfectly compatible with most traditional approaches. I don’t see any reason to think the “causal” in “causal decision theory” is incompatible with regularity theories, probabilistic theories, counterfactual theories, conserved quantity theories, agency/manipulation/intervention theories, primitivism, power theories, or mechanism theories. It might be a tense relation between CDT and projectivist theories, but I suspect that even there, you will not find outright incompatibility.
For a nice paper in the overlap between decision theory and the philosophy of causation and causal inference, you might take a look at the paper Conditioning and Intervening (pdf) by Meek and Glymour if you haven’t seen it already. Of course, Glymour’s account of causation is not very different from Pearl’s, so maybe you don’t think of this as philosophy.
But as someone who is intimately familiar with the philosophical literature on causation, it seems to me that the sense of “causal” in causal decision theory, while imprecise, is perfectly compatible with most traditional approaches.
That was my impression (without sufficient confidence that I wished to outright contradict on facts.)
Only in the “No True Scottsman” sense. What Will calls CDT is an interesting decision theory and from what little I’ve seen of Will talking about it it may also be a superior decision theory, but it doesn’t correspond to the decision theory called CDT. The version of Causal Decision Theory that is in academics’ heads is CDT, the one that is in Will’s head needs a new name.
(Fair enough. My only real problem with causal decision theory being called causal decision theory is that at best it’s a strange use of the word “causal”, breaking with thousands of years of reasonable philosophical tradition. That’s my impression anyway—but there’s like a billion papers on Newcomb’s problem, and maybe one of them gives a perfectly valid explanation of the terminology.)
I’m not familiar with the philosophical tradition that would be incompatible with the way CDT uses ‘causality’. It quite possibly exists and my lack of respect for philosophical tradition leaves me ignorant of such.
From my perspective, it’s a shame that you have little regard for philosophical tradition. But as someone who is intimately familiar with the philosophical literature on causation, it seems to me that the sense of “causal” in causal decision theory, while imprecise, is perfectly compatible with most traditional approaches. I don’t see any reason to think the “causal” in “causal decision theory” is incompatible with regularity theories, probabilistic theories, counterfactual theories, conserved quantity theories, agency/manipulation/intervention theories, primitivism, power theories, or mechanism theories. It might be a tense relation between CDT and projectivist theories, but I suspect that even there, you will not find outright incompatibility.
For a nice paper in the overlap between decision theory and the philosophy of causation and causal inference, you might take a look at the paper Conditioning and Intervening (pdf) by Meek and Glymour if you haven’t seen it already. Of course, Glymour’s account of causation is not very different from Pearl’s, so maybe you don’t think of this as philosophy.
That was my impression (without sufficient confidence that I wished to outright contradict on facts.)