You know, you’re right. The independence assumption doesn’t follow from time-causality; it’s the main assumption itself. (X’s programmer writing a CDT agent is a past cause of both the prediction and the action.) I’ll fix the post.
Thanks. I was interested in where the “independent decisions” idea comes from. This page on Causal Decision Theory suggests that it probably came from Robert Stalnaker in the 1970s—and was rolled into CDT in:
Gibbard, Allan and William Harper. [1978] 1981. “Counterfactuals and Two Kinds of Expected Utility.”
You know, you’re right. The independence assumption doesn’t follow from time-causality; it’s the main assumption itself. (X’s programmer writing a CDT agent is a past cause of both the prediction and the action.) I’ll fix the post.
Thanks. I was interested in where the “independent decisions” idea comes from. This page on Causal Decision Theory suggests that it probably came from Robert Stalnaker in the 1970s—and was rolled into CDT in:
Gibbard, Allan and William Harper. [1978] 1981. “Counterfactuals and Two Kinds of Expected Utility.”