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Academian comments on Newcomb's problem happened to me - Less Wrong
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Comments (97)
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.)
Would you care to share your reasoning? What is your mapping of strategies, and does it pass my sanity check? (EVT two-boxes on the transparent boxes variation.)
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 voted it up because it is a good article. The claim "this situation is a problem of the class Newcomblike" has been refuted. If Academian had belligerently defended the 'It's Newcomblike' claim in response to correction I would have reversed my upvote. As it stands the discussion both in the original post and the comments are useful. I expect it has helped clarify how the situation as it is formalized here differs from Newcomb's problem and what changes the scenario would need to actually be a Newcomblike problem. In fact, that is a follow up post that I would like to see.
Ease up. The "it's not actually Newcomblike" comments are being upvoted. People get it. It's just that sometimes correction is sufficient and a spiral of downvotes isn't desirable.
That depends entirely on what characteristics you consider to be most "Newcomb like". From an emotional point of view, the situation is very "Newcomb like", even if the mathematics is different.