I think this post hits a narrow target of taking a fairly high-level and complicated intuition, and successfully formalizing parts of it by putting it into the context of existing work in an established technical field. I think this kind of work is one of the most promising avenues for making progress in rationality, and has been one of the key drivers of progress historically (see as an example of this Eliezer’s Technical Explanation of a Technical Explanation).
Two things that seem like potentially great additions to this post are maybe one or two exercises that could test your understanding of the analogy and idea (one of the major benefits of technical posts is that you can often add exercises that have a clear-cut answer), and some more exploration of how this frame on decision theory and game theory interacts with existing writing on LW (i.e. more exploration of the form “this is what this implies about this thought experiment that was discussed previously”).
Promoted to curated. Here are my thoughts:
I think this post hits a narrow target of taking a fairly high-level and complicated intuition, and successfully formalizing parts of it by putting it into the context of existing work in an established technical field. I think this kind of work is one of the most promising avenues for making progress in rationality, and has been one of the key drivers of progress historically (see as an example of this Eliezer’s Technical Explanation of a Technical Explanation).
Two things that seem like potentially great additions to this post are maybe one or two exercises that could test your understanding of the analogy and idea (one of the major benefits of technical posts is that you can often add exercises that have a clear-cut answer), and some more exploration of how this frame on decision theory and game theory interacts with existing writing on LW (i.e. more exploration of the form “this is what this implies about this thought experiment that was discussed previously”).