I don’t see how knowledge how the lesion works would affect the probabilities when you don’t know if you have lesion and the probability of having lesion.
Even if you do, how is knowing that the lesion causes cancer going to change anything about P(smokes|gets cancer) ? The issue is that you need to do two equations, one for case when you do have lesion, and other for when you don’t have lesion. The EDT just confuses those together.
it makes you more likely to use a decision theory that leads you to decide to smoke
it only makes irrational people more likely to smoke.
it changes people’s utility of smoking.
In case 1, you should follow EDT, and use a decision theory that will make you not decide to smoke.
In case 2, you know that the lesion doesn’t apply to you, so go ahead and smoke.
In case 3, conditioned on your utility function (which you know), the probability of the lesion no longer depends on your decision. So, you can smoke.
I don’t see how knowledge how the lesion works would affect the probabilities when you don’t know if you have lesion and the probability of having lesion.
Also:
You would still have priors for all of these things.
Even if you do, how is knowing that the lesion causes cancer going to change anything about P(smokes|gets cancer) ? The issue is that you need to do two equations, one for case when you do have lesion, and other for when you don’t have lesion. The EDT just confuses those together.
The lesion could work in (at least) two ways:
it makes you more likely to use a decision theory that leads you to decide to smoke
it only makes irrational people more likely to smoke.
it changes people’s utility of smoking.
In case 1, you should follow EDT, and use a decision theory that will make you not decide to smoke. In case 2, you know that the lesion doesn’t apply to you, so go ahead and smoke. In case 3, conditioned on your utility function (which you know), the probability of the lesion no longer depends on your decision. So, you can smoke.