Roughly, you don’t actually get to commit your future-self to things. Instead, you just do what you (in expectation) would have committed yourself to given some reconstructed prior.
Agreed.
Just as a literature pointer: If I recall correctly, Chris Meacham’s approach in “Binding and Its Consequences” is ultimately to estimate your initial credence function and perform the action from the plan with the highest EU according to that function.
Yes, that’s a great paper! (I think we might have had a footnote on cohesive decision theory in a draft of this post.) Specifically, I think the third version of cohesive decision theory which Meacham formulates (in footnote 34), and variants thereof, are especially relevant to dynamic choice with changing awareness. The general idea (as I see it) would be that you optimize relative to your ur-priors, and we may understand the ur-prior function as the prior you would or should have had if you had been more aware. So when you experience awareness growth, the ur-priors change (and thus the evaluation of a given plan will often change as well).
He doesn’t talk about awareness growth, but open-mindedness seems to fit in nicely within his framework (or at least the framework I recall him having).
(Meacham actually applies the ur-prior concept and ur-prior conditionalization to awareness growth in this paper.)
Thanks.
Agreed.
Yes, that’s a great paper! (I think we might have had a footnote on cohesive decision theory in a draft of this post.) Specifically, I think the third version of cohesive decision theory which Meacham formulates (in footnote 34), and variants thereof, are especially relevant to dynamic choice with changing awareness. The general idea (as I see it) would be that you optimize relative to your ur-priors, and we may understand the ur-prior function as the prior you would or should have had if you had been more aware. So when you experience awareness growth, the ur-priors change (and thus the evaluation of a given plan will often change as well).
(Meacham actually applies the ur-prior concept and ur-prior conditionalization to awareness growth in this paper.)