“Betting on the Past” – a decision problem by Arif Ahmed

Thanks for the link! What I don't understand is how this works in the context of empirical and logical uncertainty. Also, it's unclear to me how this approach relates to Bayesian conditioning. E.g. if the sentence "if a holds, than o holds" is true, doesn't this also mean that P(o|a)=1? In that sense, proof-based UDT would just be an elaborate specification of how to assign these conditional probabilities "from the viewpoint of the original position", so with updatelessness, and in the context of full logical inference and knowledge of the world, including knowledge about one's own decision algorithm. I see how this is useful, but don't understand how it would at any point contradict normal Bayesian conditioning.

As to your first question: if we ignore problems that involve updatelessness (or if we just stipulate that EDT always had the opportunity to precommit), I haven't been able to find any formally specified problems where EDT and UDT diverge.

I think Caspar Oesterheld's and my flavor of EDT would be ordinary EDT with some version of updatelessness. I'm not sure if this works, but if it turns out to be identical to UDT, then I'm not sure which of the two is the better specified or easier to formalize one. According to the language in Arbital's LDT article, my EDT would differ from UDT only insofar as instead of some logical conditioning, we use ordinary Bayesian conditioning. So (staying in the Arbital framework), it could look something like this (P stands for whatever prior probability distribution you care about):

Thanks a lot for your elaborate reply!

(So I'm not even sure what CDT is supposed to do here, since it's not clear that the bet is really on the past state of the world and not on truth of a proposition about the future state of the world.)

Hmm, good point. The truth of the proposition is evaluated on basis of Alice's action, which she can causally influence. But we could think of a Newcomblike scenario in which someone made a perfect prediction a 100 years ago and put down a note about what state the world was in at that time. Now instead of checking Alice's action, we just check this note to evaluate whether the proposition is true. I think then it's clear that CDT would "two-box".

Given that, I don't see what role "LDT’s algorithm already existed yesterday" plays here, and I think it's misleading to state that "it can change yesterday’s world and make the proposition true". Instead it can make the proposition true without changing yesterday’s world, by ensuring that yesterday’s world was always such that the proposition is true. There is no change, yesterday’s world was never different and the proposition was never false.

Sorry for the fuzzy wording! I agree that "change" is not a good terminology. I was thinking about TDT and a causal graph. In that context, it might have made sense to say that TDT can "determine the output" of the decision nodes, but not that of the nature nodes that have a causal influence on the decision nodes?

Following from the preceding point, it doesn't matter when the past state of the world is, since we are not trying to influence it, we are instead trying to influence its consequences, which are in the future.

OK, if I interpret that correctly, you would say that our proposition is also a program that references Alice's decision algorithm, and hence we can just determine that program's output the same way we can determine our own decision. I am totally fine with that. If we can expand this principle to all the programs that somehow reference our decision algorithms, I would be curious whether there are still differences left between this and evidential counterfactuals.

Take the thought experiment in this post, for instance: Imagine you're an agent that always chooses the action "take the red box". Now there is a program that checks whether there will be cosmic rays, and if so, then it changes your decision algorithm to one that outputs "take the green box". Of course, you can still "influence" your output like all regular humans, and you can thus in some sense also influence the output of the program that changed you. By extension, you can even influence whether or not the output of the program "outer space" is "gamma rays" or "no gamma rays". If I understand your answers to my Coin Flip Creation post correctly, this formulation would make the problem into a kind of anthropic problem again, where the algorithm would at one point "choose to output red" in order to be instantiated into the world without gamma rays. Would you agree with this, or did I get something wrong?