When I started learning decision theory, introductions like yours wasted a huge amount of my time and frustrated me to no end
You sound like someone who is in a position to write a great intro to DT. Would you consider doing that, or perhaps collaborating with this post’s author?
That would feel a bit like hijacking. The obvious candidates for writing such a post are Eliezer, Gary Drescher, or Wei Dai. I don’t know why they aren’t doing that, probably they feel that surveying the existing literature is quite enough to make yourself confused. I’ll think about your suggestion, though. If I find an honest and accessible angle, I’ll write a post.
I’m not writing a tutorial on decision theory because I think a simple informal understanding of expected utility maximization is sufficient for almost all practical decision making, and people who are interested in the technical details, or want to work on things like anthropic reasoning or Newcomb’s problem can easily find existing material on EDT and CDT. (I personally used the book that I linked to earlier. And I think it is useful to survey the existing literature, if only to confirm that a problem exists and hasn’t already been solved.)
But anyway, Adam Bell seems to be doing a reasonable job of explaining EDT and CDT to a non-technical audience. If he is successful, it might give people a better idea of what it is that we’re actually trying to accomplish with TDT and UDT.
You sound like someone who is in a position to write a great intro to DT. Would you consider doing that, or perhaps collaborating with this post’s author?
That would feel a bit like hijacking. The obvious candidates for writing such a post are Eliezer, Gary Drescher, or Wei Dai. I don’t know why they aren’t doing that, probably they feel that surveying the existing literature is quite enough to make yourself confused. I’ll think about your suggestion, though. If I find an honest and accessible angle, I’ll write a post.
I’m not writing a tutorial on decision theory because I think a simple informal understanding of expected utility maximization is sufficient for almost all practical decision making, and people who are interested in the technical details, or want to work on things like anthropic reasoning or Newcomb’s problem can easily find existing material on EDT and CDT. (I personally used the book that I linked to earlier. And I think it is useful to survey the existing literature, if only to confirm that a problem exists and hasn’t already been solved.)
But anyway, Adam Bell seems to be doing a reasonable job of explaining EDT and CDT to a non-technical audience. If he is successful, it might give people a better idea of what it is that we’re actually trying to accomplish with TDT and UDT.
Looks like this is being addressed:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2lg/desirable_dispositions_and_rational_actions/2gec?c=1