Late last year I wrote up a small note replying to Andy Egan’s paper Some Counterexamples to Causal Decision Theory (PDF). I was hoping to revise it a little and then post it, but I haven’t had the chance to do the revisions (and fill in the references), but it looks interesting enough that it …
Suzy has a favourite bottle. She values it at $100. Billy has thrown a rock at Suzy’s favourite bottle. It will soon hit and shatter the bottle. Suzy cannot intercept Billy’s rock or save the bottle, but she can throw her own rock at the bottle so that it hits at the same time as …
I taught a series of classes on game theory over the last few weeks at Arché. And one of the things that has always puzzled me about game theory is that it seems so hard to reduce orthodox views in game theory to orthodox views in decision theory. The puzzle is easy enough to state. …
Consider the following decision problem. You have two choices, which we’ll call 1 and 2. If you choose option 1, you’ll get $1,000,000. If you choose option 2, you’ll get $1,000. There are no other consequences of your actions, and you prefer more money to less. What should you do? It sounds easy enough right? …
I’ve been continuing to write my decision theory notes for the decision theory course I’ve been doing this term. The course hasn’t ended up quite the way I expected. Because I wanted to go into more details on some of the fundamentals, and because I wanted to avoid heavy lifting in the mathematics, I’ve skipped …
The following feels like a purely technical problem for standard versions of causal decision theory, and it should yield to a purely technical solution, but the said solution wasn’t immediately obvious to me, so I’m posting the puzzle here.
One of the courses I’ll be teaching this semester is 483 – Philosophy of Choice & Decision. Despite the course number starting with ‘4’, which might be interpreted as a sign the course is pitched at 4th year (i.e. senior) students this is basically a grad class that is meant to be accessible to good …
I’m (slowly) writing the entry on David Lewis for the Stanford Encyclopaedia. Here’s the tentative table of contents. Convention and Linguistic Meaning Counterfactuals Philosophy of Mind
(UPDATE: I think there’s a mistake in the argument here – see Bob Stalnaker’s comment 11 below.) Row and Column are going to play 100 rounds of Prisoners Dilemma. At each round they can either play Co-op or Defect, with standard rules. (So the payoffs are symmetric, and on each round Defect dominats Co-op for …
Continue reading “Is there a rational strategy in Finite Iterated Prisoners Dilemma?”
Here is the ‘Death in Damascus’ case from Allan Gibbard and William Harper’s classic paper on causal decision theory. Consider the story of the man who met Death in Damascus. Death looked surprised, but then recovered his ghastly composure and said, ‘I am coming for you tomorrow’. The terrified man that night bought a camel …