The OB/LW/SL4/TOElist/polymathlist group is one intellectual community drawing on similar prior work that hasn’t been broadly disseminated.
What prior work are you referring to, that hasn’t been broadly disseminated?
The same arguments apply with much greater force to the the causal decision theory vs evidential decision theory debate.
I think much less brainpower has been spent on CDT vs EDT, since that’s thought of as more of a technical issue that only professional decision theorists are interested in. Likewise, Newcomb’s problem is usually seen as an intellectual curiosity of little practical use. (At least that’s what I thought until I saw Eliezer’s posts about the potential link between it and AI cooperation.)
Anthropic reasoning, on the other hand, is widely known and discussed (I remember the Doomsday Argument brought up during a casual lunch-time conversation at Microsoft), and thought to be both interesting in itself and having important applications in physics.
The interns wound up more focused on their group projects.
I miss the articles they would have written. :) Maybe post the topic ideas here and let others have a shot at them?
“What prior work are you referring to, that hasn’t been broadly disseminated?”
I’m thinking of the corpus of past posts on those lists, which bring certain tools and concepts (Solomonoff Induction, anthropic reasoning, Pearl, etc) jointly to readers’ attention. When those tools are combined and focused on the same problem, different forum participants will tend to use them in similar ways.
You might think that more top-notch economists and game theorists would have addressed Newcomb/TDT/Hofstadter superrationality given their interest in the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Looking at the actual literature on the Doomsday argument, there are some physicists involved (just as some economists and others have tried their hands at Newcomb), but it seems like more philosophers. And anthropics doesn’t seem core to professional success, e.g. Tegmark can indulge in it a bit thanks to showing his stuff in ‘hard’ areas of cosmology.
I just realized/remembered that one reason that others haven’t found the TDT/UDT solutions to Newcomb/anthropic reasoning may be that they were assuming a fixed human nature, whereas we’re assuming an AI capable of self-modification. For example, economists are certainly more interested in answering “What would human beings do in PD?” than “What should AIs do in PD assuming they know each others’ source code?” And perhaps some of the anthropic thinkers (in the list I linked to earlier) did invent something like UDT, but then thought “Human beings can never practice this, I need to keep looking.”
What prior work are you referring to, that hasn’t been broadly disseminated?
I think much less brainpower has been spent on CDT vs EDT, since that’s thought of as more of a technical issue that only professional decision theorists are interested in. Likewise, Newcomb’s problem is usually seen as an intellectual curiosity of little practical use. (At least that’s what I thought until I saw Eliezer’s posts about the potential link between it and AI cooperation.)
Anthropic reasoning, on the other hand, is widely known and discussed (I remember the Doomsday Argument brought up during a casual lunch-time conversation at Microsoft), and thought to be both interesting in itself and having important applications in physics.
I miss the articles they would have written. :) Maybe post the topic ideas here and let others have a shot at them?
“What prior work are you referring to, that hasn’t been broadly disseminated?”
I’m thinking of the corpus of past posts on those lists, which bring certain tools and concepts (Solomonoff Induction, anthropic reasoning, Pearl, etc) jointly to readers’ attention. When those tools are combined and focused on the same problem, different forum participants will tend to use them in similar ways.
You might think that more top-notch economists and game theorists would have addressed Newcomb/TDT/Hofstadter superrationality given their interest in the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Looking at the actual literature on the Doomsday argument, there are some physicists involved (just as some economists and others have tried their hands at Newcomb), but it seems like more philosophers. And anthropics doesn’t seem core to professional success, e.g. Tegmark can indulge in it a bit thanks to showing his stuff in ‘hard’ areas of cosmology.
I just realized/remembered that one reason that others haven’t found the TDT/UDT solutions to Newcomb/anthropic reasoning may be that they were assuming a fixed human nature, whereas we’re assuming an AI capable of self-modification. For example, economists are certainly more interested in answering “What would human beings do in PD?” than “What should AIs do in PD assuming they know each others’ source code?” And perhaps some of the anthropic thinkers (in the list I linked to earlier) did invent something like UDT, but then thought “Human beings can never practice this, I need to keep looking.”