I still feel like I don’t know what having a strict preference or permissibility means — is there some way to translate these things to actions?
As an aspiring rational agent, I’m faced with lots of options. What do I do? Ideally I’d like to just be able to say which option is “best” and do that. If I have a complete ordering over the expected utilities of the options, then clearly the best option is the expected utility-maximizing one. If I don’t have such a complete ordering, things are messier. I start by ruling out dominated options (as Maximality does). The options in the remaining set are all “permissible” in the sense that I haven’t yet found a reason to rule them out.
I do of course need to choose an action eventually. But I have some decision-theoretic uncertainty. So, given the time to do so, I want to deliberate about which ways of narrowing down this set of options further seem most reasonable (i.e., satisfy principles of rational choice I find compelling).
(Basically I think EU maximization is a special case of “narrow down the permissible set as much as you can via principles of rational choice,[1] then just pick something from whatever remains.” It’s so straightforward in this case that we don’t even recognize we’re identifying a (singleton) “permissible set.”)
Now, maybe you’d just want to model this situation like: “For embedded agents, ‘deliberation’ is just an option like any other. Your revealed strict preference is to deliberate about rational choice.” I might be fine with this model.[2] But:
For the purposes of discussing how {the VOI of deliberation about rational choice} compares to {the value of going with our current “best guess” in some sense}, I find it conceptually helpful to think of “choosing to deliberate about rational choice” as qualitatively different from other choices.
The procedure I use to decide to deliberate about rational choice principles is not “I maximize EV w.r.t. some beliefs,” it’s “I see that my permissible set is not a singleton, I want more action-guidance, so I look for more action-guidance.”
Though I think once you open the door to this embedded agency stuff, reasoning about rational choice in general becomes confusing even for people who like precise EV max.
As an aspiring rational agent, I’m faced with lots of options. What do I do? Ideally I’d like to just be able to say which option is “best” and do that. If I have a complete ordering over the expected utilities of the options, then clearly the best option is the expected utility-maximizing one. If I don’t have such a complete ordering, things are messier. I start by ruling out dominated options (as Maximality does). The options in the remaining set are all “permissible” in the sense that I haven’t yet found a reason to rule them out.
I do of course need to choose an action eventually. But I have some decision-theoretic uncertainty. So, given the time to do so, I want to deliberate about which ways of narrowing down this set of options further seem most reasonable (i.e., satisfy principles of rational choice I find compelling).
(Basically I think EU maximization is a special case of “narrow down the permissible set as much as you can via principles of rational choice,[1] then just pick something from whatever remains.” It’s so straightforward in this case that we don’t even recognize we’re identifying a (singleton) “permissible set.”)
Now, maybe you’d just want to model this situation like: “For embedded agents, ‘deliberation’ is just an option like any other. Your revealed strict preference is to deliberate about rational choice.” I might be fine with this model.[2] But:
For the purposes of discussing how {the VOI of deliberation about rational choice} compares to {the value of going with our current “best guess” in some sense}, I find it conceptually helpful to think of “choosing to deliberate about rational choice” as qualitatively different from other choices.
The procedure I use to decide to deliberate about rational choice principles is not “I maximize EV w.r.t. some beliefs,” it’s “I see that my permissible set is not a singleton, I want more action-guidance, so I look for more action-guidance.”
“Achieve Pareto-efficiency” (as per the CCT) is one example of such a principle.
Though I think once you open the door to this embedded agency stuff, reasoning about rational choice in general becomes confusing even for people who like precise EV max.