= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
JGWeissman comments on Newcomb's problem happened to me - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (97)
I predict, with probability ~95%, that if Joe becomes unhappy in the marriage, he and Kate will get divorced, even though Joe and Kate, who is not as powerful a predictor as Omega, currently believe otherwise. Joe is, after all, running this "timeless decision theory" on hostile hardware.
(But I hope that they remain happy, and this prediction remains hypothetical.)
Your prediction is overconfident. Less than 95% of unhappy marriages end in divorce.
Perhaps, I didn't look up any statistics. The "~" in "~95%" was supposed to indicate my meta uncertainty that this is the precise strength of belief an ideal rationalist should have given evidence observed by me. I am confident that I am closer to the ideal probability than 0% as believed by Kate.
Apparently 45% to 50% of first marriages in America end in divorce, but this does not account for whether the marriages were unhappy. Do you have a source for your assertion? I have not found anything with a quick Google search.
http://www.ultimate-self.com/unhappy-marriage-statistics/
100% of marriages end in divorce or death.
100% of marriages that have ended ended in divorce or death.
Good point; if we conquer death then there may be some marriages that do not end. It'd be interesting to see if people move towards near-universal divorce, sci-fi-novel-style limited-term marriages, or find ways to develop infinite-term compatibility. Or stop pairing up (inconceivable to present-day humans, but such is the nature of a Singularity).
That definitely would be interesting. It would perhaps be an indicator of preferences, as opposed to the current indicator of capability. If you have tools that can alter your mind you can cheat.
Historically.
Which of those does it count as when one of the parties just leaves and becomes unfindable?
My understanding is that you're still married until one of you goes and gets a divorce, but I can't admit to having researched such a thing.
I suspect that getting a divorce requires some minimal amount of input from both parties - if I remember correctly I had to sign something saying that I'd received some paperwork, when mine happened, in order for it to go through.
I suspect that in the case I posited, the non-disappearing person would be able to get the disappearing person declared dead after a certain period of time, which doesn't strictly require that the disappearing person be dead, and then remarry. If that's accurate, that'd be a third option.
100% of marriages that have ended have ended in divorce or legal death?
Where does 'annulment' fit into things? Is that when it is decided to just pretend the marriage never existed in the first place.
Yes. In the Catholic Church, a "declaration of nullity" was nearly a loophole to not being able to get divorced. Basically, there were certain preconditions that were assumed to hold when getting married, and if it turns out any of those preconditions did not actually obtain, then the marriage never actually happened. For example, it is assumed that the couple wants to have children; if it turns out that one party never intended to have children, that can be grounds for a declaration of nullity.
Several legal jurisdictions have adopted this idea, but it makes little sense when one can just get divorced and there are not strict preconditions for marriage.
Wikipedia: Annulment
As long as we're picking nits, in some places marriages can also be annulled (though of course they will insist that this is retroactive, and for some purposes it is).
That's what I understand; an annulment means the marriage never happened. (E.g. if it's been "consummated" then annulment is not an option. I wonder how that interacts with modern pre-consummated marriages?)
Yeah, it's a big open problem if some humans can precommit or not, making the issue of its value all the more relevant.
No, it's not. I don't see any reason to believe that humans can reliably precommit, without setting up outside constraints, especially over time spans of decades.
What you have described is not Newcomb's problem. Take what taw said, and realize that actual humans are in fact in this category:
added:
Try playing with the parameters. Maybe Kate only wants 90% certainty from Joe, and Joe is only 80% sure he'll be happy. Then he doesn't need a 100% precomitment, but only some kind of partial deterrent, and if Kate requires that he not resort to external self-restrictions, he can certainly self-modify partial pre-commitments into himself in the form of emotions.
Self-modification is robust, pre-commitment is robust, its detection is robust... these phenomena really aren't going anywhere.
Replacing the certainties with 95% still does not reflect reality. I don't think Kate can assign probability to whether she and Joe will get divorced any better than by taking the percentage of marriages, possibly in some narrow reference class they are part of, that end in divorce. Even if Joe can signal that he belongs to some favorable reference class, it still won't work.
If they are rational enough to talk about divorce in order to avoid it, then he can make an economic commitment by writing a prenup that guarantees that any divorce becomes unfavorable. Of course, only making it relatively unfavorable will give her an incentive to leave him, so it is better if a big portion of their property is given away or burned in case of a divorce.
Yes, that is a strategy they can take, However, that sort of strategy is unnecessary in Newcomb's problem, where you can just one-box and find the money there without having made any sort of precommitment.
I think that the translation to Newcombe's was that committing == one boxing and hedging == two boxing.
This mapping does not work. Causal Decision Theory would commit (if available) in the marriage proposal problem, but two box in Newcomb's problem. So the mapping does not preserve the relationship between the mapped elements.
This should be a sanity check for any scenario proposed to be equivalent to Newcomb's problem. EDT/TDT/UDT should all do the equivalent of one-boxing, and CDT should do the equivalent of two-boxing.
CDT on Newcomb's problem would, if possible, precommit to one-boxing as long as Omega's prediction is based on observing the CDT agent after its commitment.
CDT in the marriage case would choose to leave once unhappy, absent specific precommitment.
So that exact mapping doesn't work, but the problem does seem Newcomblike to me (like the transparent-boxes version, actually; which, I now realize, is like Kavka's toxin puzzle without the vagueness of "intent".) (ETA: assuming that Kate can reliably predict Joe, which I now see was the point under dispute to begin with.)
Why is the parent comment being voted down, and its parent being voted up, when it correctly refutes the parent?
Why is the article itself being voted up, when it has been refuted? Are people so impressed by the idea of a real life Newcomb like problem that they don't notice, even when it is pointed out, that the described story is not in fact a Newcomb like problem?
I predict with probability ~95% that if statisticians had arbitrarily decided many years ago to use 97% instead of 95% as their standard of proof, then all appearances of 95 and 97 in this comment would be reversed.
How does it change your prediction to learn that I was not considering statisticians' arbitrary standard of proof, but I was thinking about numbers in base ten, and I had considered saying ~90% instead?
Not much for me. I think it about six times more likely that you used base ten numbers to "get to" 95% than it is you came to 95% by coincidence.
That's the reason why I never get why people are against marriage contracts. Even ignoring the inherent uncertainty of love & marriage, if I walk under a bus tomorrow and lose for example all empathy due to brain damage, my current self would wish you to divorce future psychopath-me as quickly as possible.
As for the OP, good article. If anyone ever asks why I spend my time theorizing away over 'impossible' things like AI or decision theory I can use this as an example.
Did you mean to say you don't understand why people are in favor of marriage contracts? I don't see how the marriage contract helps in the bus example.
Sorry, I used the wrong terminology. I meant an prenuptial agreement. The bus example was to show that even if you precommit there is always the possibility that you will change your mind (i.e. in this case by losing empathy). I used the extreme method of brain damage because it's completely out of your control. You cannot precommit on not being run over by a bus.