Evidential Decision Theory

Evidential decision theory holds that a rational agent should choose the action that provides the best evidence for a desirable outcome, maximizing expected utility conditional on the act itself. It diverges from Causal Decision Theory in cases like Newcomb's Problem, where taking both boxes provides evidence that you are a defector and the predictor has left the opaque box empty. The theory's defenders argue that causal structure is often unknown and that rationality must operate on available evidence, not on metaphysical counterfactuals. Critics respond that this conflates the value of information with the value of action, producing prescriptions that violate the intuition that agents should control what they can control rather than signal what they already are.\n\n\n