I think the ability to legibly adopt such precommitment and willingness to do so kinda turns EDT-agent into FDT-agent.
Yes. I think we are mostly in agreement then. FDT seems to be defined by adopting a form of universal precomitment, which you can only do once and can’t really undo. Seems that EDT can clearly do that (to the extent any agent can adopt FDT), so EDT can always EDT->FDT, but FDT->EDT is not allowed (or it breaks the universal pre-commitment or cooperation across instances) . That does not resolve the question of whether or not adopting FDT is optimal.
My main point from earlier is this:
In principle it seems wrong to measure utility at the moment in time right before A on the basis of our knowledge; seems we should only measure it based on the agent’s knowledge. This means we need to sum our expectation over all possibly universes consistent with those facts. The set of universes that proceed to B/C is infinitesimal and probably counter balanced by opposites—so the very claim itself that FDT is optimal for 5 is perhaps a form of pascal’s mugging.
The agent in scenario 5 before observing the box and the rules is a superposition of all agents in similar scenarios, and it is only correct for us to judge their performance across that entire set—ie according to the agent’s knowledge, not our knowledge. So it’s optimal to take the FDT precomittment in this specific scenario only if it’s optimal to do so over all similar environments, which in this case is nearly all environments as the agent hasn’t observed anything at all at the start of your scenario 5!
So I think this reduces down to the conclusion that FDT and its universal precomittment can’t provide any specific advantage on a specific problem over regular problem-specific precomittments EDT can make, unless it provides a net advantage everywhere across the multiverse, in which case EDT uses that and becomes FDT.
Yes. I think we are mostly in agreement then. FDT seems to be defined by adopting a form of universal precomitment, which you can only do once and can’t really undo. Seems that EDT can clearly do that (to the extent any agent can adopt FDT), so EDT can always EDT->FDT, but FDT->EDT is not allowed (or it breaks the universal pre-commitment or cooperation across instances) . That does not resolve the question of whether or not adopting FDT is optimal.
My main point from earlier is this:
The agent in scenario 5 before observing the box and the rules is a superposition of all agents in similar scenarios, and it is only correct for us to judge their performance across that entire set—ie according to the agent’s knowledge, not our knowledge. So it’s optimal to take the FDT precomittment in this specific scenario only if it’s optimal to do so over all similar environments, which in this case is nearly all environments as the agent hasn’t observed anything at all at the start of your scenario 5!
So I think this reduces down to the conclusion that FDT and its universal precomittment can’t provide any specific advantage on a specific problem over regular problem-specific precomittments EDT can make, unless it provides a net advantage everywhere across the multiverse, in which case EDT uses that and becomes FDT.