Introduction
This blog post serves as an introduction to Evidential Decision Theory (EDT), designed for readers with no prior background. While much has been written about EDT’s application to well-known problems like the Smoking Lesion problem, and Newcomb-like problems, we are unable to find a clear and formal introduction. As such, this post aims to fill that gap.
Our motivation for writing this post stems from the work of Nate Soares and Benja Fallenstein in their papers, Towards Idealized Decision Theory (2015) [8] and Agent Foundations for Aligning Machine Intelligence with Human Interests: A Technical Research Agenda (2015) [9]. These works suggest the need for the study of decision theory in aligning smarter-than-human agents with... (read 2898 more words →)