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kithpendragon comments on Confusion about Newcomb is confusion about counterfactuals - Less Wrong
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I think the fundamental conceptual problem with Newcomb's paradox is that it basically says, "Assume that Joe's choice causes the box to have money in it, but it doesn't 'cause' the box to have money in it." Causation is necessary; the hypothetical just black-boxes it and says we can't call it "causation." This doublethink predictably leads to a great deal of confusion, which makes us dissect causality and generate analyses like these even though the problem seems to be essentially linguistic.
Edit for clarity: This is an objection to the framing of Newcomb's itself, not to the specific treatment of causation in the article. I explain in response to a response below, but it seems to me that Newcomb's requires doublethink with respect to the concept of causation, and that this doublethink makes the problem useless.
I suggest that what is happening here is that Omega establishes a causal link with the agent's decision to 1- or 2-box. Consider an analogy: You happen upon a group of crystals, each of which is anchored to the ground and grows upward with a complicated internal structure. Each is generally cylindrical to a minimum length, whereafter it continues in a helical fashion. Some crystals have a right-handed helix and others are left-handed. You, for reasons of your own, determine which are left-handed and at a point just below the start of the helix mark them, perhaps with a drop of ink. Omega has done nothing more than this. His mark is the contents of the opaque box. What the agent "should" do is to 1-box... that is, to turn left at the start of its helix... because that is the "moment" at which causality kicks in. No doublethink required.