The Disutility of FDT: on Utility Functions and Voting, Insights from Behavioral Economics and Decision Theory

I apologize for the (mild) clickbait, I will do my best to justify it later. As an introductory note, this discussion is principally motivated by a previous discussion of decision theory given by Yudkowsky and Soares in their various writings, including their paper, and here on the wiki. I am going to discuss in the context of the three decision theories outlined in the wiki (causal decision theory (CDT) evidentiary decision theory (FDT), and logical decision theory (LDT)). I will try to cover context where relevant. I am also, in large part, responding to the case example of voting which Yudkowsky has discussed here. Beyond this disclaimer, I am going to focus on other, general topics, before circling back to a more particular critique.Introduction to Utility: The Classic Economic View of Decisions SummarizedModern theories of decision (or theories of choice - I will use the terms interchangeably) say little about what goals people will or should pursue. Goals may be good or evil, mean-spirited or magnanimous, altruistic or egoistic, short-sighted or far-sighted; they may be Mother Teresa's or the Marquis de Sade's. Theories of decision simply take a set of goals as given. Provided a set of goals, however, the theories have much to say about how people will or should pursue those goals.- Angner, Erik. A course in behavioral economics. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.Note, the first part here is mostly summarizing, if you are already passingly familiar with behavioral economics, you should be able to skim ahead. First, an obvious question: what are we trying to model? As Anger noted, economists typically are concerned with taking some set of goals as granted and modeling either how people do behave pursuant to those goals and/or how they should behave if they want to achieve those goals, that is we are concerned both with a descriptive theory of human behavior as well as a normative theory (i.e. a theory of what is rational behavior). One might hope these come together.