Thanks — do you have a specific section of the paper in mind? Is the idea that this ontology is motivated by “finding a decision theory that recommends verdicts in such and such decision problems that we find pre-theoretically intuitive”?
shrug — I guess it’s not worth rehashing pretty old-on-LW decision theory disagreements, but: (1) I just don’t find the pre-theoretic verdicts in that paper nearly as obvious as the authors do, since these problems are so out-of-distribution. Decision theory is hard. Also, some interpretations of logical decision theories give the pre-theoretically “wrong” verdict on “betting on the past.” (2) I pre-theoretically find the kind of logical updatelessness that some folks claim follows from the algorithmic ontology pretty bizarre. (3) On its face it seems more plausible to me that algorithms just aren’t ontologically basic, they’re abstractions we use to represent (physical) input-output processes.
Thanks — do you have a specific section of the paper in mind? Is the idea that this ontology is motivated by “finding a decision theory that recommends verdicts in such and such decision problems that we find pre-theoretically intuitive”?
That sounds like a good description of my understanding, but I’d also say the pre-theoretic intuitions are real damn convincing!
There’s a table of contents which you can use to read relevant sections of the paper. You know your cruxes better than I do.
shrug — I guess it’s not worth rehashing pretty old-on-LW decision theory disagreements, but: (1) I just don’t find the pre-theoretic verdicts in that paper nearly as obvious as the authors do, since these problems are so out-of-distribution. Decision theory is hard. Also, some interpretations of logical decision theories give the pre-theoretically “wrong” verdict on “betting on the past.” (2) I pre-theoretically find the kind of logical updatelessness that some folks claim follows from the algorithmic ontology pretty bizarre. (3) On its face it seems more plausible to me that algorithms just aren’t ontologically basic, they’re abstractions we use to represent (physical) input-output processes.