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.”
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.”