ETA: the relevance of the comment below is doubtful. I didn't read upthread far enough before making it. Original comment was:
...the scenario doesn't allow rational choice. It doesn't actually allow choice at all...
What do you mean by "choice"?
Per Possibility and couldness (spoiler warning), if I run a deterministic chess-playing program, I'm willing to call its evaluation of the board and subsequent move a "choice". How about you?
By choice, I mean my mind deciding what to do on the basis of it's own thought processes, out of set of possibilities that could be realised if my mind were different than it is.
That is what I mean by choice.
A chess-program can do that.
I, in this scenario, cannot. No matter how my mind was setup prior to the scenario, there is only one possible outcome.
This is part of a sequence titled "An introduction to decision theory". The previous post was Newcomb's Problem: A problem for Causal Decision Theories
For various reasons I've decided to finish this sequence on a seperate blog. This is principally because there were a large number of people who seemed to feel that this sequence either wasn't up to the Less Wrong standard or felt that it was simply covering ground that had already been covered on Less Wrong.
The decision to post it on another blog rather than simply discontinuing it came down to the fact that other people seemed to feel that the sequence had value. Those people can continue reading it at "The Smoking Lesion: A problem for evidential decision theory".
Alternatively, there is a sequence index available: Less Wrong and decision theory: sequence index