Perplexed comments on Desirable Dispositions and Rational Actions - Less Wrong
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Comments (180)
Ah! So I need to assign priors to three hypotheses. (1) Omega is a magician (i.e. illusion artist) (2) Omega had bribed people to lie about his past success. (3) He is what he claims.
So I assign a prior of zero probability to hypothesis #3, and cheerfully one-box using everyday decision theory.
First: http://lesswrong.com/lw/mp/0_and_1_are_not_probabilities/
You don't seem to be entering into the spirit of the problem. You are "supposed" to reach the conclusion that there's a good chance that Omega can predict your actions in this domain pretty well - from what he knows about you - after reading the premise of the problem.
If you think that's not a practical possibility, then I recommend that you imagine yourself as a deterministic robot - where such a scenario becomes more believable - and then try the problem again.
If I imagine myself as a deterministic robot, who knows that he is a deterministic robot, I am no longer able to maintain the illusion that I care about this problem.
Do you think you aren't a deterministic robot? Or that you are, but you don't know it?
It is a quantum universe. So I would say that I am a stochastic robot. And Omega cannot predict my future actions.
...then you need to imagine you made the robot, it is meeting Omega on your behalf - and that it then gives you all its winnings.
I like this version! Now the answer seems quite obvious.
In this case, I would design the robot to be a one-boxer. And I would harbour the secret hope that a stray cosmic ray will cause the robot to pick both boxes anyway.
Yes - but you would still give its skull a lead-lining - and make use of redundancy to produce reliability...
Agreed.