Ah yes—I was confusing myself at some point between forming and using a model (hence “incentives”).
I think you’re correct that “perfectly useful” isn’t going to happen. I’m happy to be wrong.
“the quickest way to simulate one counterfactual does not include simulating a mutually exclusive counterfactual”
I don’t think you’d be able to formalize this in general, since I imagine it’s not true. E.g. one could imagine a fractal world where every detail of a counterfactual appeared later in a subbranch of a mutually exclusive counterfactual. In such a case, simulating one counterfactual could be perfectly useful to the other. (I suppose you’d still expect it to be an operation or so slower, due to extra indirection, but perhaps that could be optimised away??)
To rule this kind of thing out, I think you’d need more specific assumptions (e.g. physics-based).
Ah yes—I was confusing myself at some point between forming and using a model (hence “incentives”).
I think you’re correct that “perfectly useful” isn’t going to happen. I’m happy to be wrong.
I don’t think you’d be able to formalize this in general, since I imagine it’s not true. E.g. one could imagine a fractal world where every detail of a counterfactual appeared later in a subbranch of a mutually exclusive counterfactual. In such a case, simulating one counterfactual could be perfectly useful to the other. (I suppose you’d still expect it to be an operation or so slower, due to extra indirection, but perhaps that could be optimised away??)
To rule this kind of thing out, I think you’d need more specific assumptions (e.g. physics-based).