An alternative approaches that captures the spirit of FDT’s aims
I’m somewhat confused about how you can buy FDT as far as you seem to buy it in this section, while also claiming not to understand FDT to the point of saying there is no sensible perspective at all in which it can be said to achieve higher utility. From the perspective in this section, it seems you can straightforwardly interpret FDT’s notion of expected utility maximization via an evaluative focal point such as “the output of the algorithm given these inputs”.
This evaluative focal point addresses the concern you raise about how bounded ability to implement decision procedures interacts with a “best decision procedure” evaluative focal point (making it depart from FDT’s recommendations in so far as the agent can’t manage to act like FDT), since those concerns don’t arise (at least not so clearly) when we consider what FDT would recommend for the response to one situation in particular. On the other hand, we also can make sense of the notion that taking the bomb is best, since (according to both global-CDT and global-EDT) it is best for an algorithm to output “left” when given the inputs of the bomb problem (in that it gives us the best news about how that agent would do in bomb problems, and causes the agent to do well when put in bomb problems, in so far as a causal intervention on the output of the algorithm also affects a predictor running the same algorithm).
Response to Section VIII:
I’m somewhat confused about how you can buy FDT as far as you seem to buy it in this section, while also claiming not to understand FDT to the point of saying there is no sensible perspective at all in which it can be said to achieve higher utility. From the perspective in this section, it seems you can straightforwardly interpret FDT’s notion of expected utility maximization via an evaluative focal point such as “the output of the algorithm given these inputs”.
This evaluative focal point addresses the concern you raise about how bounded ability to implement decision procedures interacts with a “best decision procedure” evaluative focal point (making it depart from FDT’s recommendations in so far as the agent can’t manage to act like FDT), since those concerns don’t arise (at least not so clearly) when we consider what FDT would recommend for the response to one situation in particular. On the other hand, we also can make sense of the notion that taking the bomb is best, since (according to both global-CDT and global-EDT) it is best for an algorithm to output “left” when given the inputs of the bomb problem (in that it gives us the best news about how that agent would do in bomb problems, and causes the agent to do well when put in bomb problems, in so far as a causal intervention on the output of the algorithm also affects a predictor running the same algorithm).