I think an optimizer is a thing that makes decisions that are aimed at optimizing a certain quantity. I think, when you talk about what a decisionmaker does and its effects, you’re essentially saying “What if their decisions were this, vs what if their decisions were that?”. If you say “Well, actually their personality and known objectives dictate that their decisions would (almost certainly) be this”, then you’re not considering them as a decisionmaker, but as one of the fixed features of the world.
It is arguably the case that, along the lines of your analogies, the general question of “What if their decisions were different?” is sometimes divorced from reality—e.g. “Yes, the dictator’s bodyguards do have the power to kill him, but they’ve also been selected for being loyal and unlikely to do that, so it doesn’t make much sense to talk as though that’s a real possibility.” Though, at least to my knowledge, humans are sufficiently unpredictable, and things like unexpected mental illness can happen, such that you can never really say the chance is zero that a human will decide to do something. With a computer program, you can get a lot closer to certainty—but there are gamma ray bitflips and such. So I would say, it’s pretty much always physically possible for the decisionmaker to pick anything; whether it’s likely is a different question.
I think an optimizer is a thing that makes decisions that are aimed at optimizing a certain quantity. I think, when you talk about what a decisionmaker does and its effects, you’re essentially saying “What if their decisions were this, vs what if their decisions were that?”. If you say “Well, actually their personality and known objectives dictate that their decisions would (almost certainly) be this”, then you’re not considering them as a decisionmaker, but as one of the fixed features of the world.
It is arguably the case that, along the lines of your analogies, the general question of “What if their decisions were different?” is sometimes divorced from reality—e.g. “Yes, the dictator’s bodyguards do have the power to kill him, but they’ve also been selected for being loyal and unlikely to do that, so it doesn’t make much sense to talk as though that’s a real possibility.” Though, at least to my knowledge, humans are sufficiently unpredictable, and things like unexpected mental illness can happen, such that you can never really say the chance is zero that a human will decide to do something. With a computer program, you can get a lot closer to certainty—but there are gamma ray bitflips and such. So I would say, it’s pretty much always physically possible for the decisionmaker to pick anything; whether it’s likely is a different question.