TDT was explained in enough detail for Dai and some others to get it.
It’s explained in enough detail for me to get an intuitive understanding of it, and to obtain some inspirations and research ideas to follow up. But it’s not enough for me to try to find flaws in it. I think that should be the standard of detail in scientific publication: the description must be detailed enough that if the described idea or research were to have a flaw, then a reader would be able to find it from the description.
It might not make sense to a lay audience but any philosophically competent fellow who’s read the referenced books could reconstruct TDT out of Ingredients of Timeless Decision Theory.
Ok, but what if TDT is flawed? In that case, whoever is trying to reconstruct TDT would just get stuck somewhere before they got to a coherent theory, unless they recreated the same flaw by coincidence. If they do get stuck, how can they know or convince you that it’s your fault, and not theirs? Unless they have super high motivation and trust in you, they’ll just give up and do something else, or never attempt the reconstruction in the first place.
I already know it’s got a couple of flaws (the “Problems I Can’t Solve” post, you solved one of them). The “Ingredients” page should let someone get as far as I got, no further, if they had all the standard published background knowledge that I had.
The theory has two main formal parts that I know how to formalize. One is the “decision diagonal”, and I wrote that out as an equation. It contains a black box, but I haven’t finished formalizing that black box either! The other main part that needs formalizing is the causal network. Judea Pearl wrote all this up in great detail; why should I write it again? There’s an amendment of the causal network to include logical uncertainty. I can describe this in the same intuitive way that CDT theorists took for granted when they were having their counterfactual distributions fall out of the sky as manna from heaven, but I don’t know how to give it a Pearl-grade formalization.
Hear me well! If I wanted to look impressive, I could certainly attach Greek symbols to key concepts—just like the classical causal decision theory theorists did in order to make CDT look much more formalized than it actually was. This is status-seeking and self-deception and it got in the way of their noticing what work they had left to do. It was a mistake for them to pretend to formality that way. It is part of the explanation for how they bogged down. I don’t intend to make the same mistake.
It’s explained in enough detail for me to get an intuitive understanding of it, and to obtain some inspirations and research ideas to follow up. But it’s not enough for me to try to find flaws in it. I think that should be the standard of detail in scientific publication: the description must be detailed enough that if the described idea or research were to have a flaw, then a reader would be able to find it from the description.
This is where I get stuck. I can get an intuitive understanding of it easily enough. In fact, I got a reasonable intuitive understanding of it just from observing application to problem cases. But I know I don’t have enough to go on to find flaws. I would have to do quite a lot of further background research to construct the difficult parts of the theory and I know that even then I would not be able to fully trust my own reasoning without dedicating several years to related fields.
Basically, it would be easier for me to verify a completed theory if I just created it myself from the premise “a decision theory shouldn’t be bloody stupid”. That way I wouldn’t have to second guess someone else’s reasoning.
Since I know I do not have the alliances necessary to get a commensurate status pay-off for any work I put into such research that probably isn’t the best way to satisfy my curiosity. Ricardo would suggest that the most practical approach would be for me to spend my time leveraging my existing position to earn cash and making a donation earmarked for ‘getting someone to finish the TDT theory’.
It’s explained in enough detail for me to get an intuitive understanding of it, and to obtain some inspirations and research ideas to follow up. But it’s not enough for me to try to find flaws in it. I think that should be the standard of detail in scientific publication: the description must be detailed enough that if the described idea or research were to have a flaw, then a reader would be able to find it from the description.
Ok, but what if TDT is flawed? In that case, whoever is trying to reconstruct TDT would just get stuck somewhere before they got to a coherent theory, unless they recreated the same flaw by coincidence. If they do get stuck, how can they know or convince you that it’s your fault, and not theirs? Unless they have super high motivation and trust in you, they’ll just give up and do something else, or never attempt the reconstruction in the first place.
I already know it’s got a couple of flaws (the “Problems I Can’t Solve” post, you solved one of them). The “Ingredients” page should let someone get as far as I got, no further, if they had all the standard published background knowledge that I had.
The theory has two main formal parts that I know how to formalize. One is the “decision diagonal”, and I wrote that out as an equation. It contains a black box, but I haven’t finished formalizing that black box either! The other main part that needs formalizing is the causal network. Judea Pearl wrote all this up in great detail; why should I write it again? There’s an amendment of the causal network to include logical uncertainty. I can describe this in the same intuitive way that CDT theorists took for granted when they were having their counterfactual distributions fall out of the sky as manna from heaven, but I don’t know how to give it a Pearl-grade formalization.
Hear me well! If I wanted to look impressive, I could certainly attach Greek symbols to key concepts—just like the classical causal decision theory theorists did in order to make CDT look much more formalized than it actually was. This is status-seeking and self-deception and it got in the way of their noticing what work they had left to do. It was a mistake for them to pretend to formality that way. It is part of the explanation for how they bogged down. I don’t intend to make the same mistake.
This is where I get stuck. I can get an intuitive understanding of it easily enough. In fact, I got a reasonable intuitive understanding of it just from observing application to problem cases. But I know I don’t have enough to go on to find flaws. I would have to do quite a lot of further background research to construct the difficult parts of the theory and I know that even then I would not be able to fully trust my own reasoning without dedicating several years to related fields.
Basically, it would be easier for me to verify a completed theory if I just created it myself from the premise “a decision theory shouldn’t be bloody stupid”. That way I wouldn’t have to second guess someone else’s reasoning.
Since I know I do not have the alliances necessary to get a commensurate status pay-off for any work I put into such research that probably isn’t the best way to satisfy my curiosity. Ricardo would suggest that the most practical approach would be for me to spend my time leveraging my existing position to earn cash and making a donation earmarked for ‘getting someone to finish the TDT theory’.