by Abram Demski 119 days ago | link | parent Excellent example. It seems to me, intuitively, that we should be able to get both the CDT feature of not thinking we can control our utility function through our actions and the EDT feature of taking the information into account. Here’s a somewhat contrived decision theory which I think captures both effects. It only makes sense for binary decisions. First, for each action you compute the posterior probability of the causal parents for each decision. So, depending on details of the setup, smoking tells you that you’re likely to be a smoke-lover, and refusing to smoke tells you that you’re more likely to be a non-smoke-lover. Then, for each action, you take the action with best “gain”: the amount better you do in comparison to the other action keeping the parent probabilities the same: $\texttt{Gain}(a) = \mathbb{E}(U|a) - \mathbb{E}(U|a, \texttt{do}(\bar a))$ ($$\mathbb{E}(U|a, \texttt{do}(\bar a))$$ stands for the expectation on utility which you get by first Bayes-conditioning on $$a$$, then causal-conditioning on its opposite.) The idea is that you only want to compare each action to the relevant alternative. If you were to smoke, it means that you’re probably a smoker; you will likely be killed, but the relevant alternative is one where you’re also killed. In my scenario, the gain of smoking is +10. On the other hand, if you decide not to smoke, you’re probably not a smoker. That means the relevant alternative is smoking without being killed. In my scenario, the smoke-lover computes the gain of this action as -10. Therefore, the smoke-lover smokes. (This only really shows the consistency of an equilibrium where the smoke-lover smokes – my argument contains unjustified assumption that smoking is good evidence for being a smoke lover and refusing to smoke is good evidence for not being one, which is only justified in a circular way by the conclusion.) In your scenario, the smoke-lover computes the gain of smoking at +10, and the gain of not smoking at 0. So, again, the smoke-lover smokes. The solution seems too ad-hoc to really be right, but, it does appear to capture something about the kind of reasoning required to do well on both problems.

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