I feel like MIRI perhaps mispositioned FDT (their variant of UDT) as a clear advancement in decision theory
On second thought this is probably not fair to MIRI since I don’t think I objected to such positioning when they sent paper drafts for me to review. I guess in the early days UDT did look more like a clear advancement, because it seems to elegantly solve several problems at once, namely anthropic reasoning (my original reason to start thinking in the “updateless” direction), counterfactual mugging, cooperation with psychological twin / same decision theory, Newcomb’s problem, and it wasn’t yet known that the open problems would remain open for so long.
On second thought this is probably not fair to MIRI since I don’t think I objected to such positioning when they sent paper drafts for me to review. I guess in the early days UDT did look more like a clear advancement, because it seems to elegantly solve several problems at once, namely anthropic reasoning (my original reason to start thinking in the “updateless” direction), counterfactual mugging, cooperation with psychological twin / same decision theory, Newcomb’s problem, and it wasn’t yet known that the open problems would remain open for so long.