Spurlock comments on Newcomb's Problem: A problem for Causal Decision Theories - Less Wrong

8 [deleted] 16 August 2010 11:25AM

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Comment author: Spurlock 16 August 2010 05:26:24PM 2 points [-]

I think that this just gets rolled into your overall decision theory.

For instance, suppose we have two programs. We give all odd numbers to program 1 and it performs some action. We give all even numbers to program 2 and it performs some other action. On the surface, it looks like we've got 2 different programs and a meta level procedure for deciding which to use. But of course, it's trivial to code this whole system up into a single program that takes an integer and does the correct thing with it.

My point being that I think it's misleading to try and suggest two decision theories would be at work in your example. You've just got one big decision theory that does different stuff at different levels (which some decision theories already do anyway).