Emotions are not preferences, but I believe they can’t be completely disentangled. There is something wrong with a person who feels unhappy after learning that the world has changed towards his/her prefered state.
I don’t see how you can effectively apply social standards like “something wrong” to a mind that implements UDT. There are no human minds or non-human minds that I am aware of that perfectly implement UDT. There are no known societies of beings that do. It stands to reason that such a society would seem very other if judged by the social standards of a society composed of standard human minds.
When discussing UDT outcomes you have to work around that part of you that wants to immediately “correct” the outcome by applying non-UDT reasoning.
That “something wrong” was not as much of a social standard, as rather an expression of an intuitive feeling of a contradiction, which I wasn’t able to specify more explicitly. I could anticipate general objections such as yours, however, it would help if you can be more concrete here. The question is whether one can say he prefers the state of world where he dies soon with 99% probability, even if he would be in fact disappointed after realising that it was really going to happen. I think we are now at risk of redefining few words (like preference) to mean something quite different from what they used to mean, which I don’t find good at all.
And by the way, why is this a question of decision theory? There is no decision in the discussed scenario, only a question whether some news can be considered good or bad.
Emotions are not preferences, but I believe they can’t be completely disentangled. There is something wrong with a person who feels unhappy after learning that the world has changed towards his/her prefered state.
I don’t see how you can effectively apply social standards like “something wrong” to a mind that implements UDT. There are no human minds or non-human minds that I am aware of that perfectly implement UDT. There are no known societies of beings that do. It stands to reason that such a society would seem very other if judged by the social standards of a society composed of standard human minds.
When discussing UDT outcomes you have to work around that part of you that wants to immediately “correct” the outcome by applying non-UDT reasoning.
That “something wrong” was not as much of a social standard, as rather an expression of an intuitive feeling of a contradiction, which I wasn’t able to specify more explicitly. I could anticipate general objections such as yours, however, it would help if you can be more concrete here. The question is whether one can say he prefers the state of world where he dies soon with 99% probability, even if he would be in fact disappointed after realising that it was really going to happen. I think we are now at risk of redefining few words (like preference) to mean something quite different from what they used to mean, which I don’t find good at all.
And by the way, why is this a question of decision theory? There is no decision in the discussed scenario, only a question whether some news can be considered good or bad.