Wei_Dai comments on The Absent-Minded Driver - Less Wrong

27 Post author: Wei_Dai 16 September 2009 12:51AM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 16 September 2009 06:47:11PM *  3 points [-]

I'm not sure about that. A lot of people intuitively endorse one-boxing on Newcomb, and probably a comparable fraction would endorse the 2/3 strategy for Absent-Minded Driver.

Aumann et al.'s solution is also p=2/3. They just propose to use a roundabout (but perhaps more intuitive?) algorithm to compute it.

They do mention and dismiss mystical /psychic causation, the idea that in choosing what we will do we also choose for all identical minds/algorithms

That was in the context of arguing against P&R's reasoning, which leads to p=4/9.

There could be substantial path-dependence here.

Yes, and that argues for not proposing solutions until we can see the whole problem (or set of problems) and solve it all at once. Well maybe that's kind of unrealistic, so perhaps just keeping in mind the possible path-dependence and try to mitigate it.

BTW, did you know that you can quote people by using ">"? Click on the "help" link under the comment edit box for more info.