Survival and Decision Making

First, an apology. I messed up the system that notifies me of when there are comments awaiting moderation, so there were several comments sitting in the queue for several days. That shouldn’t have happened, and I’m sorry it did.

I’ve written up a short note on Robbie Williams’s great paper “Decision Making Under Indeterminacy”:http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~phljrgw/wip/dmuinew3.pdf. This was a bit long, and a bit symbol heavy, for a blog post.

The paper concerns cases where the agent is going to split into two, in some sense, and there’s no fact of the matter about which of the two will really be them. I think in those cases it can be rational to act as if it is 50/50 which of them will be you. Robbie, in effect, disagrees. (Or at least, if I’ve read him aright, he disagrees.) I present a couple of cases designed to strengthen the intuition that I’m right. Here’s the paper.