It seems to me that FDT has the property that you associate with the “ultimate decision theory”.
My understanding is that FDT says that you should follow the policy which is attained by taking the argmax over all policies of the utility from following that policy (only including downstream effects of your policy).
In these easy examples your policy space is your space of committed actions. In which case the above seems to reduce to the “ultimate decision theory” criterion.
(only including downstream effects of your policy)
I’m not sure I know what you mean by this, but if you mean causal effects, no, it considers all pasts, and all timelines.
(A reader might balk, “but that’s computationally infeasible”, but we’re talking about mathematic idealizations, the mathematical idealization of CDT is also computationally infeasible. Once we’re talking about serious engineering projects to make implementable approximations of these things, you don’t know what’s going to be feasible.)
It seems so to me too, but I expect that there may be some nuance that makes this particular precommitment and therefore FDT not so ultimate after all.
But the point is that we can reduce FDT to CDT with precommitment, so if FDT is indeed ultimate decision theory, than so is CDT+P.
It seems to me that FDT has the property that you associate with the “ultimate decision theory”.
My understanding is that FDT says that you should follow the policy which is attained by taking the argmax over all policies of the utility from following that policy (only including downstream effects of your policy).
In these easy examples your policy space is your space of committed actions. In which case the above seems to reduce to the “ultimate decision theory” criterion.
I’m not sure I know what you mean by this, but if you mean causal effects, no, it considers all pasts, and all timelines.
(A reader might balk, “but that’s computationally infeasible”, but we’re talking about mathematic idealizations, the mathematical idealization of CDT is also computationally infeasible. Once we’re talking about serious engineering projects to make implementable approximations of these things, you don’t know what’s going to be feasible.)
It seems so to me too, but I expect that there may be some nuance that makes this particular precommitment and therefore FDT not so ultimate after all.
But the point is that we can reduce FDT to CDT with precommitment, so if FDT is indeed ultimate decision theory, than so is CDT+P.