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JGWeissman comments on Solve Psy-Kosh's non-anthropic problem - Less Wrong
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Under the same rules, does it make sense to ask what is the error in refusing to pay in a Counterfactual Mugging? It seems like you are asking for an error in applying a decision theory, when really the decision theory fails on the problem.
Ah - I was waiting for the first commenter to draw the analogy with Counterfactual Mugging. The problem is, Psy-Kosh's scenario does not contain any predictors, amnesia, copying, simulations or other weird stuff that we usually use to break decision theories. So it's unclear why standard decision theory fails here.
This problem contains correlated decision making, which is what makes copies anthropically confusing.
Would it be the same problem if we said that there were nine people told they were potential deciders in the first branch, one person told ey was a potential decider in the second branch, and then we chose the decision of one potential decider at random (so that your decision had a 1/9 chance of being chosen in the first branch, but a 100% chance of being chosen in the second)? That goes some of the way to eliminating correlated decision making weirdness.
If you change it so that in the tails case, rather than taking the consensus decision, and giving nothing if there is not consensus, the experimenter randomly selects one of the nine decision makers as the true decision maker (restating to make sure I understand), then this analysis is obviously correct. It is not clear to me which decision theories other than UDT recognize that this modified problem should have the same answer as the original.
Meanwhile, that forumulation is equivalent to just picking one decider at random and then flipping heads or tails to determine what a "yea" is worth! So in that case of course you choose "nay".
Why does it fail on this problem, and less so on others? What feature of this problem makes it fail?