Do you mean something like, “operating within the worldview”?
Basically yes. Longer version: “Suppose we were in scenario X. Normally, in such a scenario, I would discard this worldview, or put low weight on it, because reason Y. But suppose by fiat that I continue to use the worldview, with no other changes made to scenario X. Then …”
It’s meant to be analogous to imputing a value in a causal Bayes net, where you simply “suppose” that some event happened, and don’t update on anything causally upstream, but only reason forward about things that are causally downstream. (I seem to recall Scott Garrabrant writing a good post on this, but I can’t find it now. ETA: Found it, it’s here, but it doesn’t use the term “impute” at all. I’m now worried that I literally made up the term, and it doesn’t actually have any existing technical meaning.)
Basically yes. Longer version: “Suppose we were in scenario X. Normally, in such a scenario, I would discard this worldview, or put low weight on it, because reason Y. But suppose by fiat that I continue to use the worldview, with no other changes made to scenario X. Then …”
It’s meant to be analogous to imputing a value in a causal Bayes net, where you simply “suppose” that some event happened, and don’t update on anything causally upstream, but only reason forward about things that are causally downstream. (I seem to recall Scott Garrabrant writing a good post on this, but I can’t find it now. ETA: Found it, it’s here, but it doesn’t use the term “impute” at all. I’m now worried that I literally made up the term, and it doesn’t actually have any existing technical meaning.)
Aha! I thought it might be borrowing language from some technical term I wasn’t familiar with. Thanks!