Disagree, or at least it doesn’t have to be like that: I think deciding to smoke can give further evidence for the strength of the desire which at least could be further evidence that you are genetically predisposed to cancer if a common genetic cause between desire to smoke and getting cancer exists.
Seems like you are thinking of a case without full introspection. Both Eells and Ahmed provide convincing tickle defences in this case as well. See Oesterheld (2022) for a review of the arguments (especially sections 6.3 and 6.4).
At this point I have to admit that we’ve gotten beyond my knowledge of this stuff, and I can’t really follow your comment! Though when I glanced at the Oesterheld I think I get what’s going on, sort of, though it’s not clear to me why decision theory should start with the assumption of perfect introspection, and I also suspect you can come up with a case where your X-ing provides evidence that Y bad thing will happen but does not causally influence Y, that gets around this while still looking bad for evidential decision theory. But that’s only a guess, as again, I have no background on this stuff beyond generic philosophy education.
Disagree, or at least it doesn’t have to be like that: I think deciding to smoke can give further evidence for the strength of the desire which at least could be further evidence that you are genetically predisposed to cancer if a common genetic cause between desire to smoke and getting cancer exists.
Seems like you are thinking of a case without full introspection. Both Eells and Ahmed provide convincing tickle defences in this case as well. See Oesterheld (2022) for a review of the arguments (especially sections 6.3 and 6.4).
At this point I have to admit that we’ve gotten beyond my knowledge of this stuff, and I can’t really follow your comment! Though when I glanced at the Oesterheld I think I get what’s going on, sort of, though it’s not clear to me why decision theory should start with the assumption of perfect introspection, and I also suspect you can come up with a case where your X-ing provides evidence that Y bad thing will happen but does not causally influence Y, that gets around this while still looking bad for evidential decision theory. But that’s only a guess, as again, I have no background on this stuff beyond generic philosophy education.