“the emphasis here seems to be much more about whether you can actually have a causal impact on the past”—I definitely didn’t mean to imply that you could have a causal impact on the past. The key point is that the type of control in question is acausal.
I agree that many of these cases involve unrealistic assumptions, and that CDT may well be an effective heuristic most of the time (indeed, I expect that it is).
I don’t feel especially hung up on calling it “control”—ultimately it’s the decision theory (e.g., rejecting CDT) that I’m interested in. I like the word “control,” though, because I think there is a very real sense in which you get to choose what your copy writes on his whiteboard, and that this is pretty weird; and because, more broadly, one of the main objections to non-CDT decision theories is that it feels like they are trying to “control” the past in some sense (and I’m saying: this is OK).
Simulation stuff does seem like it could be one in principle application here, e.g.: “if we create civilizations simulations, then this makes it more likely that others whose actions are correlated with ours create simulations, in which case we’re more likely to be in a simulation, so because we don’t want to be in a simulation, this is a reason to not create simulations.” But it seems there are various empirical assumptions about the correlations at stake here, and I haven’t thought about cases like this much (and simulation stuff gets gnarly fast, even without bringing weird decision-theory in).
“the emphasis here seems to be much more about whether you can actually have a causal impact on the past”—I definitely didn’t mean to imply that you could have a causal impact on the past. The key point is that the type of control in question is acausal.
I agree that many of these cases involve unrealistic assumptions, and that CDT may well be an effective heuristic most of the time (indeed, I expect that it is).
I don’t feel especially hung up on calling it “control”—ultimately it’s the decision theory (e.g., rejecting CDT) that I’m interested in. I like the word “control,” though, because I think there is a very real sense in which you get to choose what your copy writes on his whiteboard, and that this is pretty weird; and because, more broadly, one of the main objections to non-CDT decision theories is that it feels like they are trying to “control” the past in some sense (and I’m saying: this is OK).
Simulation stuff does seem like it could be one in principle application here, e.g.: “if we create civilizations simulations, then this makes it more likely that others whose actions are correlated with ours create simulations, in which case we’re more likely to be in a simulation, so because we don’t want to be in a simulation, this is a reason to not create simulations.” But it seems there are various empirical assumptions about the correlations at stake here, and I haven’t thought about cases like this much (and simulation stuff gets gnarly fast, even without bringing weird decision-theory in).