But who does the capturing? (To push the analogy one step up, I know of no solvable question that doesn’t admit an answer written on a sheet of paper.)
See the section on “utility functions” in this post. UDT/ADT seeks exactly to infer functional dependencies that can then be used in the usual manner (at least, this is one way to look at what’s going on). It is intended to solve the very problem which you argue must always be solvable.
My examples of explicit dependence bias show that there are wrong and right ways of parsing the outcome as depending on agent’s decision. If we are guaranteed to be given a right parsing, then that part is indeed covered, and there is no need to worry about the wrong ones. Believing that a right parsing merely exists doesn’t particularly help in finding one.
So I guess the problem you are having with UDT is that you assume that the problem of finding a correct explicit dependence of outcome on action is already solved, and we have a function World ready specified in a way that doesn’t in any way implicitly depend on agent’s actions. But UDT is intended to solve the problem while not making this assumption, and instead tries to find an unbiased dependence on its own. Since you assume the goal of UDT as a prerequisite in your thinking about decision theory, you don’t see the motivation for UDT, which indeed there would be none had we assumed this problem solved.
We’re talking past each other, and this back-and-forth conversation isn’t going anywhere because we’re starting from very different definitions. Let’s restart this conversation after I’ve finished the post that builds up the definitions from scratch.
At least address this concern, which suggests that our difficulty is probably an easy one of technical confusion, and not of communicating intuitive understanding of relevance of studying a certain question.
But who does the capturing? (To push the analogy one step up, I know of no solvable question that doesn’t admit an answer written on a sheet of paper.)
See the section on “utility functions” in this post. UDT/ADT seeks exactly to infer functional dependencies that can then be used in the usual manner (at least, this is one way to look at what’s going on). It is intended to solve the very problem which you argue must always be solvable.
My examples of explicit dependence bias show that there are wrong and right ways of parsing the outcome as depending on agent’s decision. If we are guaranteed to be given a right parsing, then that part is indeed covered, and there is no need to worry about the wrong ones. Believing that a right parsing merely exists doesn’t particularly help in finding one.
So I guess the problem you are having with UDT is that you assume that the problem of finding a correct explicit dependence of outcome on action is already solved, and we have a function World ready specified in a way that doesn’t in any way implicitly depend on agent’s actions. But UDT is intended to solve the problem while not making this assumption, and instead tries to find an unbiased dependence on its own. Since you assume the goal of UDT as a prerequisite in your thinking about decision theory, you don’t see the motivation for UDT, which indeed there would be none had we assumed this problem solved.
We’re talking past each other, and this back-and-forth conversation isn’t going anywhere because we’re starting from very different definitions. Let’s restart this conversation after I’ve finished the post that builds up the definitions from scratch.
At least address this concern, which suggests that our difficulty is probably an easy one of technical confusion, and not of communicating intuitive understanding of relevance of studying a certain question.