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SilasBarta comments on Open Thread September, Part 3 - Less Wrong
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I'm glad to have this to read. I was surprised to find many examples and arguments that EY hadn't given before (or at least formalized this way). I liked the Newcomb's soda problem in particular. I had been worried that EY had presented enough of his TDT justification that someone could "scoop" him, but there's a lot more depth to it. (Anyone up-to-date on the chance that he could get a PhD just for this?)
And I also appreciated that the modified the smoking lesion problem to be one where people aren't distracted by their existing knowledge of smoking, and that this was the reason for transforming the example.
I read up to ~p. 35, and I think I have a better understanding now of the relevance of time consistency and how it varies across examples.
That said, I agree with the others who say it could use some mroe polish.
Maybe the CGTA gene gives you an itchy throat or makes you like to chew things. At any rate, chewing the gum is always the right choice (assuming the others costs of gum-chewing are negligible).
One intuition pump: if someone else forced you to chew gum, this wouldn't have any bearing on whether you have CGTA, and it would lower your chances of abcess in either case, and so you'd be glad they'd done so. However, if someone else forced you to two-box, you'd be quite angry at having missed out on the million dollars.
In Newcomb's problem, the result depends directly on your decision making process (by the definition of Omega/the Predictor), whereas with the gum example it doesn't.
A Ph.D. in what? The subject matter fits into some odd interdisciplinary combination of Philosophy, Economics, Operations Research, AI/CompSci, and Statistics. In general, the research requirements for a PhD in CompSci are roughly equivalent to something like 4 published research papers plus a ~200 page dissertation containing material that can be worked into either a monograph or another half-dozen publishable papers. But there are other requirements besides research, and many institutions don't like to allow people to "test out" of those requirements because it looks bad to the accrediting agencies.