Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Functional Decision Theory

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete‎. ✗plicit 23:54, 28 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Functional Decision Theory (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)

(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)

No evidence of notability. Article is based around preprints and blog posts - the RSes are not actually about FDT. A call for RSes on the talk page produced nothing. The article needs RS coverage specifically about the topic - David Gerard (talk) 13:30, 21 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Logic, Philosophy, and Mathematics. David Gerard (talk) 13:30, 21 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete Yet another example of the fact that little blue clicky linky numbers do not an article make. We can't base an article entirely on preprints and blog posts. (LessWrong is a group blog without editorial review, Medium is a blogging platform, etc.) A paper from 2007 can't contribute to the wiki-notability of an idea introduced 10 years later. A paper from 1979 is likewise background at best. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article that is currently reference #3 makes no mention of FDT, Yudkowsky, or Soares. The 2017 preprint is, well, a preprint on the arXiv, i.e., a self-published source that is primary and the opposite of independent. There are very, very few cases when we can use unrefereed arXiv preprints as sources for anything. For example, we could probably get away with citing John Baez's This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics [1] as a convenience link for a well-known, standard calculation regarding an established topic, so that readers would have an option that is easier and cheaper to get than a doorstopper textbook. But we couldn't take a topic that Baez invented on his blog and write a whole article about it; the fact that he has written other things that establish his subject-matter expert status would be insufficient justification. Searching for sources that are non-primary, reliably published, and providing significant coverage turns up nothing. The best that the literature offers is passing mentions:In response, various other one-boxing theories have been developed (see, e.g. Gauthier 1989; Spohn 2012; Poellinger 2013; Levinstein and Soares 2020) [2]. The closest approach to a usable source is the 2021 monograph by Ahmed on evidential decision theory which notes that FDT has been proposed as a competitor but concludes that it is not a fully baked theory yet:How best to spell this out is not yet clear;there is currently lack of clarity surrounding the counterfactuals at the heart of FDT. (The fact that the Functional Decision Theory article right now doesn't make clear that the best available source says that FDT has yet to be developed in a mathematically rigorous way makes this article a violation of NPOV.) Perhaps those brief remarks could be scraped together to justify a few lines in another article, to which this could be made a redirect. That would probably involve improving the decision theory article, which currently doesn't explain either causal or evidential approaches (leaving them to languish in the "See also"). Perhaps an "Other" subsection could be crafted that summarizes the various proposals and counter-proposals in this area. XOR'easter (talk) 18:36, 21 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: Previous WP:PROD candidate, ineligible for soft deletion.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, ✗plicit 14:22, 28 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete: I've taken the comment above and deleted the deprecated sources. Much of the article is seen to be without reliable sources. This shows that the article is (and was) poorly cited. The question before us is, however, whether FDT is notable, through the existence of sources in the world (not in the article). A search indicates that the term certainly exists within academia. However, many of the sources are arxiv.org preprints or ResearchGate or own-university self-publications, which do not confer notability. There are some reputable sources which at least mention FDT. What I'm not sure of is the existence of multiple, reliable sources that substantially discuss FDT. If you know of such sources, feel free to list them below and I'll change my !vote. Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:28, 28 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.