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bentarm comments on Newcomb's Problem: A problem for Causal Decision Theories - Less Wrong
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I have two real boxes, labelled with Newcomb's problem and using 1 and 4 quarters in place of the $10k and $1M. I have shown them to people at Less Wrong meetups, and also to various friends of mine, a total of about 20 people.
Almost everyone I've tried it on has one-boxed. Even though I left out the part in the description about being a really accurate predictor, and pre-seeded the boxes before I even knew who would be the one choosing. Maybe it would be different with $10k instead of $0.25. Maybe my friends are unusual and a different demographic would two-box. Maybe it's due to a quirk of how I present them. But unless someone presents contrary evidence, I have to conclude that most people are one-boxers.
What?!? You offer people two boxes with essentially random amounts of money in them, and they choose to take one of the boxes instead of both? And these people are otherwise completely sane?
Could you maybe give us details of how exactly you present the problem? I can't imagine any presentation that would make anyone even slightly tempted to one-box this variant. (Maybe if I knew I'd get to play again one day...)
That seems bizarre to me too. But if Jimrandomh is filling his boxes on the basis of what most people would do, and most people do one-box, then perhaps they are just behaving as rational, highly correlated, timeless decisionmakers.
A signalling explanation might explain this behavior: people would rather be seen as having gotten the problem correct, or signal non-greediness, than get an extra $0.25. As evidence for this conclusion, some people turn down the $1.00 in box one.
No one's given the real correct solution, which is "inspect the boxes more thoroughly". One of them has an extra label on the bottom, offering an extra $1.00 for finding it if you haven't opened any boxes yet, which I've never had to pay out on. The moral is supposed to be that theory is hard to transfer into the real world and to question assumptions.
You let people inspect the boxes? Wouldn't they be distinguishable by weight?