Guide to Logical Decision Theory

Written by Eliezer Yudkowsky last updated

Summaries

"Logical decision theory" is a new family of decision theories, of varying levels of formalization, which are argued to have key implications for theories of economic rationality, the design of sufficiently advanced machine intelligence algorithms, and of course the philosophy of rational decision. Logical decision theories impinge on whether it's rational to vote in elections, or rational to give in to blackmail, or how computational agents should play in dilemmas if the agents have common knowledge of each others' source code.

The new idea in logical decision theories can glossed as "choose as though you were choosing the logical output of your decision algorithm".

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