The thing I disagree with here most is the claim that FDT is crazy. I do not think it is, in fact, crazy to think it is a good idea to adopt a decision theory whose users generically end up winning in decision problems compared to other decision theories.
I also find it suspicious that that part predicates on the opinions of experts we know nothing about, who presumably learned about FDT primarily from you who thinks FDT is bad, and also sort of assumes that MacAskill is any more of an expert on decision theory than Soares. Do not take this as a personal attack, given this is speculation about your intent/mental state, these are just my honest thoughts. At the very least, it would be helpful to read their arguments against FDT.
Even if these were actual experts you talked to, somehow it seems strange to compare a few experts you talked to saying it is false, to flat earth, a hypothesis which many many experts from several fields all related to the earth, all accountable, think is false, and which can be disproven by mere idle thinking about what society and the institution of science would have to look like for it to be true.
For that matter, who even counts as a decision theory expert? What set of criteria are you applying to determine whether someone is an expert on it or not?
Well here’s one indication—I don’t know if there’s a single published academic philosophy paper defending FDT. Maybe there’s one—certainly not many. Virtually no decision theorists defend it. I don’t know much about Soares, but I know he’s not an academic philosopher, and I think there are pretty unique skills involved in being an academic philosopher.
So it’s crazy to believe things that aren’t supported by published academic papers? I think if your standard for “crazy” is believing something that a couple people in a field too underdeveloped to be subject to the EMH disagree with and that there are merely no papers defending it, not any actively rejecting it, then probably you and roughly every person on this website ever count as “crazy”.
Actually, I think an important thing here is that decision theory is too underdeveloped and small to be subject to the EMH, so you can’t just go “if this crazy hypothesis is correct then why hasn’t the entire field accepted it, or at least having a debate over it?” It is simply too small to have fringe, in contrast to non-fringe positions.
Obviously, I don’t think the above is necessarily true, but I still think you’re making us rely too much on your word and personal judgement.
On that note, I think it’s pretty silly to call people crazy based on either evidence they have not seen and you have not showed them (for instance, whatever counterarguments the decision theorists you contacted had), or evidence as weak/debatable as the evidence you have put forth in this post, and which has come to their attention only now. Were we somehow supposed to know that your decision theorist acquaintances disagreed beforehand?
If you have any papers from academic decision theorists about FDT, I’d like to see them, whether favoring or disfavoring it.
IIRC Soares has a Bachelor’s in both computer science and economics and MacAskill has a Bachelor’s in philosophy.
I wouldn’t call a view crazy for just being disbelieved by many people. But if a view is both rejected by all relevant experts and extremely implausible, then I think it’s worth being called crazy!
I didn’t call people crazy, instead I called the view crazy. I think it’s crazy for the reasons I’ve explained, at length, both in my original article and over the course of the debate. It’s not about my particular decision theory friends—it’s that the fact that virtually no relevant experts agree with an idea is relevant to an assessment of it.
I’m sure Soares is a smart guy! As are a lot of defenders of FDT. Lesswrong selects disproportionately for smart, curious, interesting people. But smart people can believe crazy things—I’m sure I have some crazy beliefs; crazy in the sense of being unreasonable such that pretty much all rational people would give them up upon sufficient ideal reflection and discussion with people who know what they’re talking about.
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.
The thing I disagree with here most is the claim that FDT is crazy. I do not think it is, in fact, crazy to think it is a good idea to adopt a decision theory whose users generically end up winning in decision problems compared to other decision theories.
I also find it suspicious that that part predicates on the opinions of experts we know nothing about, who presumably learned about FDT primarily from you who thinks FDT is bad, and also sort of assumes that MacAskill is any more of an expert on decision theory than Soares. Do not take this as a personal attack, given this is speculation about your intent/mental state, these are just my honest thoughts. At the very least, it would be helpful to read their arguments against FDT.
Even if these were actual experts you talked to, somehow it seems strange to compare a few experts you talked to saying it is false, to flat earth, a hypothesis which many many experts from several fields all related to the earth, all accountable, think is false, and which can be disproven by mere idle thinking about what society and the institution of science would have to look like for it to be true.
For that matter, who even counts as a decision theory expert? What set of criteria are you applying to determine whether someone is an expert on it or not?
Well here’s one indication—I don’t know if there’s a single published academic philosophy paper defending FDT. Maybe there’s one—certainly not many. Virtually no decision theorists defend it. I don’t know much about Soares, but I know he’s not an academic philosopher, and I think there are pretty unique skills involved in being an academic philosopher.
So it’s crazy to believe things that aren’t supported by published academic papers? I think if your standard for “crazy” is believing something that a couple people in a field too underdeveloped to be subject to the EMH disagree with and that there are merely no papers defending it, not any actively rejecting it, then probably you and roughly every person on this website ever count as “crazy”.
Actually, I think an important thing here is that decision theory is too underdeveloped and small to be subject to the EMH, so you can’t just go “if this crazy hypothesis is correct then why hasn’t the entire field accepted it, or at least having a debate over it?” It is simply too small to have fringe, in contrast to non-fringe positions.
Obviously, I don’t think the above is necessarily true, but I still think you’re making us rely too much on your word and personal judgement.
On that note, I think it’s pretty silly to call people crazy based on either evidence they have not seen and you have not showed them (for instance, whatever counterarguments the decision theorists you contacted had), or evidence as weak/debatable as the evidence you have put forth in this post, and which has come to their attention only now. Were we somehow supposed to know that your decision theorist acquaintances disagreed beforehand?
If you have any papers from academic decision theorists about FDT, I’d like to see them, whether favoring or disfavoring it.
IIRC Soares has a Bachelor’s in both computer science and economics and MacAskill has a Bachelor’s in philosophy.
I wouldn’t call a view crazy for just being disbelieved by many people. But if a view is both rejected by all relevant experts and extremely implausible, then I think it’s worth being called crazy!
I didn’t call people crazy, instead I called the view crazy. I think it’s crazy for the reasons I’ve explained, at length, both in my original article and over the course of the debate. It’s not about my particular decision theory friends—it’s that the fact that virtually no relevant experts agree with an idea is relevant to an assessment of it.
I’m sure Soares is a smart guy! As are a lot of defenders of FDT. Lesswrong selects disproportionately for smart, curious, interesting people. But smart people can believe crazy things—I’m sure I have some crazy beliefs; crazy in the sense of being unreasonable such that pretty much all rational people would give them up upon sufficient ideal reflection and discussion with people who know what they’re talking about.
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.