A person might deliberately avoid passing through the sweets aisle in a supermarket in order to avoid temptation.
I like this example, and the related discussion around reflective endorsement and contextual activation/weighting of various ‘decision-making influences’ is great.
This relates closely in my reading to the concepts of Actualism and Possibilism from moral philosophy[1].
In short, actualism emphasises what the ongoing agent would actually (be expected to) do as the decision-relevant factors—in the sweets example, perhaps that’s succumbing to a sweet tooth given the context of proximity to the sweets, and buying lots of packets.
Possibilism instead emphasises the ongoing counterfactual of what options are considered available as the decision-relevant factors—even if you can predict that you’ll succumb, the right thing to do is to take the shorter route via the sweets and then just have the willpower dammit to overcome the sweet tooth!
Some authors contrast naive possibilist with ‘resolute’ or ‘sophisticated’ decisions for this kind of sequential problem[2].
In my mind these relate closely to the concepts of policy-relative action-advantage functions from reinforcement learning, except applied to more compound ‘options’ than whatever plain atomic action space is assumed to exist. But I’ve not seen this comparison made anywhere.
(Presumably you use the term ‘option’ as I do, to refer to something similar to the contextually-activated semi-policies of Sutton and Precup and others?)
By the way, I find it helpful to think about decision-makers only existing in their present form for the duration of a ‘single decision’ and I think this substantially gets at the heart of embeddedness.
I like this example, and the related discussion around reflective endorsement and contextual activation/weighting of various ‘decision-making influences’ is great.
This relates closely in my reading to the concepts of Actualism and Possibilism from moral philosophy[1].
In short, actualism emphasises what the ongoing agent would actually (be expected to) do as the decision-relevant factors—in the sweets example, perhaps that’s succumbing to a sweet tooth given the context of proximity to the sweets, and buying lots of packets.
Possibilism instead emphasises the ongoing counterfactual of what options are considered available as the decision-relevant factors—even if you can predict that you’ll succumb, the right thing to do is to take the shorter route via the sweets and then just have the willpower dammit to overcome the sweet tooth!
Some authors contrast naive possibilist with ‘resolute’ or ‘sophisticated’ decisions for this kind of sequential problem[2].
In my mind these relate closely to the concepts of policy-relative action-advantage functions from reinforcement learning, except applied to more compound ‘options’ than whatever plain atomic action space is assumed to exist. But I’ve not seen this comparison made anywhere.
(Presumably you use the term ‘option’ as I do, to refer to something similar to the contextually-activated semi-policies of Sutton and Precup and others?)
By the way, I find it helpful to think about decision-makers only existing in their present form for the duration of a ‘single decision’ and I think this substantially gets at the heart of embeddedness.
See the short Wikipedia take here or the longer Stanford take here.
See Stanford here with their discussion of Ulysses under Sequential decisions