Do you “manage the news” by refusing to read the morning’s newspaper, or by scribbling over the front page “Favored Candidate Wins Decisively!”? No: if you’re rational, your credence in the loss is still 70%.
I feel like the “No; if you’re rational” bit is missing some of the intuition against EDT. Physical humans do refuse to read the morning’s newspaper, or delay opening letters, or similar things, I think because of something EDT-ish ‘close to the wire’. (I think this is what’s up with ugh fields.)
I think there’s something here—conservation of expected evidence and related—that means that a sophisticated EDT won’t fall prey to those traps. But this feels sort of like the defense whereby a sophisticated EDT doesn’t fall prey to typical counterexamples because if you’re doing the expectation correctly, you’re taking into account causation, at which point we’re not really talking about EDT anymore. I do think it’s sensible to include proper probabilistic reasoning in EDT, but sometimes feels off about hiding this detail behind the word “rational.”
I feel like the “No; if you’re rational” bit is missing some of the intuition against EDT. Physical humans do refuse to read the morning’s newspaper, or delay opening letters, or similar things, I think because of something EDT-ish ‘close to the wire’. (I think this is what’s up with ugh fields.)
I think there’s something here—conservation of expected evidence and related—that means that a sophisticated EDT won’t fall prey to those traps. But this feels sort of like the defense whereby a sophisticated EDT doesn’t fall prey to typical counterexamples because if you’re doing the expectation correctly, you’re taking into account causation, at which point we’re not really talking about EDT anymore. I do think it’s sensible to include proper probabilistic reasoning in EDT, but sometimes feels off about hiding this detail behind the word “rational.”