My claim is that there is not yet people who know what they are talking about, or more precisely, everyone knows roughly as much about what they are talking about as everyone else.
Again, I’d like to know who these decision theorists you talked to were, or at least what their arguments were.
The most important thing here is how you are evaluating the field of decision theory as a whole, how you are evaluating who counts as an expert or not, and what arguments they make, in enough detail that one can conclude that FDT doesn’t work without having to rely on your word.
If you look at philosophers with Ph.Ds who study decision theory for a living, and have a huge incentive to produce original work, none of them endorse FDT.
I don’t think the specific part of decision theory where people argue over Newcomb’s problem is large enough as a field to be subject to the EMH. I don’t think the incentives are awfully huge either. I’d compare it to ordinal analysis, a field which does have PhDs but very few experts in general and not many strong incentives. One significant recent result (if the proof works then the ordinal notation in question would be most powerful proven well-founded) was done entirely by an amateur building off of work by other amateurs (see the section on Bashicu Matrix System): https://cp4space.hatsya.com/2023/07/23/miscellaneous-discoveries/
I mean like, I can give you some names. My friend Ethan who’s getting a Ph.D was one person. Schwarz knows a lot about decision theory and finds the view crazy—MacAskill doesn’t like it either.
Is there anything about those cases that suggest it should generalize to every decision theorist, or that this is as good a proxy for how much FDT works as the beliefs of earth scientists are for whether the Earth is flat or not?
For instance, your samples consist of a philosopher not specialized in decision theory, one unaccountable PhD, and one single person who is both accountable and specializes in decision theory. Somehow, I feel as if there is a difference between generalizing from that and generalizing from every credentialed expert that one could possibly contact. In any case, its dubious to generalize from that to “every decision theorist would reject FDT in the same way every earth scientist would reject flat earth”, even if we condition on you being totally honest here and having fairly represented FDT to your friend.
I think everyone here would bet $1,000 that if every earth scientist knew about flat earth, they would nearly universally dismiss it (in contrast to debating over it or universally accepting it) without hesitation. However, I would be surprised if you would bet $1,000 that if every decision theorist knew about FDT, they would nearly universally dismiss it.
What’s your explanations of why virtually no published papers defend it and no published decision theorists defend it? You really think none of them have thought of it or anything in the vicinity?
Yes. Well, almost. Schwarz brings up disposition-based decision theory, which appears similar though might not be identical to FDT, and every paper I’ve seen on it appears to defend it as an alternative to CDT. There are some looser predecessors to FDT as well, such as Hofstadter’s superrationality, but that’s too different imo.
Given Schwarz’ lack of reference to any paper describing any decision theory even resembling FDT, I’d wager that FDT’s obviousness is merely only in retrospect.
My claim is that there is not yet people who know what they are talking about, or more precisely, everyone knows roughly as much about what they are talking about as everyone else.
Again, I’d like to know who these decision theorists you talked to were, or at least what their arguments were.
The most important thing here is how you are evaluating the field of decision theory as a whole, how you are evaluating who counts as an expert or not, and what arguments they make, in enough detail that one can conclude that FDT doesn’t work without having to rely on your word.
If you look at philosophers with Ph.Ds who study decision theory for a living, and have a huge incentive to produce original work, none of them endorse FDT.
I don’t think the specific part of decision theory where people argue over Newcomb’s problem is large enough as a field to be subject to the EMH. I don’t think the incentives are awfully huge either. I’d compare it to ordinal analysis, a field which does have PhDs but very few experts in general and not many strong incentives. One significant recent result (if the proof works then the ordinal notation in question would be most powerful proven well-founded) was done entirely by an amateur building off of work by other amateurs (see the section on Bashicu Matrix System): https://cp4space.hatsya.com/2023/07/23/miscellaneous-discoveries/
I mean like, I can give you some names. My friend Ethan who’s getting a Ph.D was one person. Schwarz knows a lot about decision theory and finds the view crazy—MacAskill doesn’t like it either.
Is there anything about those cases that suggest it should generalize to every decision theorist, or that this is as good a proxy for how much FDT works as the beliefs of earth scientists are for whether the Earth is flat or not?
For instance, your samples consist of a philosopher not specialized in decision theory, one unaccountable PhD, and one single person who is both accountable and specializes in decision theory. Somehow, I feel as if there is a difference between generalizing from that and generalizing from every credentialed expert that one could possibly contact. In any case, its dubious to generalize from that to “every decision theorist would reject FDT in the same way every earth scientist would reject flat earth”, even if we condition on you being totally honest here and having fairly represented FDT to your friend.
I think everyone here would bet $1,000 that if every earth scientist knew about flat earth, they would nearly universally dismiss it (in contrast to debating over it or universally accepting it) without hesitation. However, I would be surprised if you would bet $1,000 that if every decision theorist knew about FDT, they would nearly universally dismiss it.
What’s your explanations of why virtually no published papers defend it and no published decision theorists defend it? You really think none of them have thought of it or anything in the vicinity?
Yes. Well, almost. Schwarz brings up disposition-based decision theory, which appears similar though might not be identical to FDT, and every paper I’ve seen on it appears to defend it as an alternative to CDT. There are some looser predecessors to FDT as well, such as Hofstadter’s superrationality, but that’s too different imo.
Given Schwarz’ lack of reference to any paper describing any decision theory even resembling FDT, I’d wager that FDT’s obviousness is merely only in retrospect.