Functional Decision Theory: Not Even Wrong, Also Wrong

According to LessWrong, philosopher Bentham's Bulldog argues that Functional Decision Theory—a decision-making framework popular among rationalists—is fundamentally flawed on two counts: it's so underspecified that it offers no real guidance, and whatever guidance it does offer is implausible. FDT, which asks how the world would change if your decision algorithm changed, differs from established approaches like causal and evidential decision theory. Yet despite its prominence in the Bay Area rationalist community, virtually no academic decision theorists endorse it. The critique centers on a basic problem: there's no coherent way to determine how other agents' behavior would shift if your own algorithm were different.

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