TobyBartels 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: [deleted] 16 August 2010 02:26:36PM 3 points [-]

We could do a modified Newcomb's Problem where the perfectly honest, all knowing Omega tells you that you're not the simulation but the actual person and the simulation has already been done which seems to resolve that possibility discussed above. I don't think you need to though because there's no statement in Newcomb's Problem that says that the predictions do occur via a simulation.

It reminds me of the trolley cart example in ethics where you're told a train is rolling out of control down a hill and will run over 3 people. By hitting a switch you can change the track it goes down and it will instead hit 1 different person. Should you hit the switch?

The specific question isn't relevant to what I'm trying to say but people's responses are.

People will say things like, "Well, I'd just yell at the three people to get off the tracks."

And then you have to specify that they're too far away.

And the person will say, "Well, I'll run toward them yelling so I get close enough in time."

And you have to specify that they're too far away for that as well.

The point is that the people that ask this question are missing the whole idea of the abstraction behind the trolley problem and they're thinking of it as a lateral thinking test rather than a scenario used to make an intellectual point.

I feel that finding a way for CDT to answer Newcomb's Problem via the specifics of the way Omega predicts your reactions is a similar response - trying to respecify the argument in such a way that an answer can be found rather than looking at the abstracted conception of the argument.

As always, I'm open to being shown that I'm wrong and missing something though.

Comment author: TobyBartels 18 August 2010 04:40:48AM *  1 point [-]

the perfectly honest, all knowing Omega tells you that you're not the simulation but the actual person and the simulation has already been done

Then the prediction has been based on a simulation that took place under different circumstances, since Omega (being perfectly honest) did not say this to the simulation.

But as others have said, this is beside the point. After reading all of these irrelevant objections and the irrelevant responses to them, I'm convinced that (at least when addressing people who understand decision theory up to the point of doing calculations with statistics) it's better to phrase the question so that Omega is simply a clever human being who has achieved very high accuracy with very high correlation on a very large number of previous trials, instead of bringing perfection into it.

I'm thinking something like this:

  • 30 cases where Omega predicts one-boxing but two-boxing takes place,
  • 70 cases where Omega predicts two-boxing but one-boxing takes place,
  • 270 cases where Omega predicts two-boxing and two-boxing takes place,
  • 630 cases where Omega predicts one-boxing and one-boxing takes place.

Also, make the amounts $1 and $1000 so that utility will be very close to linear in amount of money (at least to middle-class First-Worlders like me).