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Anthropic and Decision-Theoretical Dutch Books

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Here's a fun fact—some combinations of anthropic assumptions and decision theories expose you to Dutch books.[1] If you are a causal decision theorist who makes the self sampling assumption or an evidential decision theorist who makes the self indicating assumption, you can be enticed into accepting a portfolio of bets that lead to a sure loss. I find this fact surprising for two reasons. The first is that it wasn't intuitively obvious to me that your anthropic assumptions should interact at all with your decision theory. I first learned about these two topics in totally separate contexts, and it was never pointed out to me that there could be a connection between them. Anthropics feels like it's asking an epistemological question—What should I believe in light of the fact that I exist?—whereas decision theory is asking a pragmatic question—How should I act in light of the fact that my decision-making algorithm is correlated with features of the environment? Of course beliefs are for a

Anthropic and Decision-Theoretical Dutch Books Home About Anthropic and Decision-Theoretical Dutch Books Introduction Here's a fun fact—some combinations of anthropic assumptions and decision theories expose you to Dutch books. [1] If you are a causal decision theorist who makes the self sampling assumption or an evidential decision theorist who makes the self indicating assumption, you can be enticed into accepting a portfolio of bets that lead to a sure loss. I find this fact surprising for two reasons. The first is that it wasn't intuitively obvious to me that your anthropic assumptions sho

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