conchis comments on Counterfactual Mugging - Less Wrong

52 Post author: Vladimir_Nesov 19 March 2009 06:08AM

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Comment author: MBlume 19 March 2009 11:19:44AM *  14 points [-]

I'm actually not quite satisfied with it. Probability is in the mind, which makes it difficult to know what I mean by "perfect knowledge". Perfect knowledge would mean I also knew in advance that the coin would come up tails.

I know giving up the $100 is right, I'm just having a hard time figuring out what worlds the agent is summing over, and by what rules.

ETA: I think "if there was a true fact which my past self could have learned, which would have caused him to precommit etc." should do the trick. Gonna have to sleep on that.

ETA2: "What would you do in situation X?" and "What would you like to pre-commit to doing, should you ever encounter situation X?" should, to a rational agent, be one and the same question.

Comment author: conchis 19 March 2009 10:24:56PM *  7 points [-]

"Perfect knowledge would mean I also knew in advance that the coin would come up tails."

This seems crucial to me.

Given what I know when asked to hand over the $100, I would want to have pre-committed to not pre-committing to hand over the $100 if offered the original bet.

Given what I would know if I were offered the bet before discovering the outcome of the flip I would wish to pre-commit to handing it over.

From which information set I should evaluate this? The information set I am actually at seems the most natural choice, and it also seems to be the one that WINS (at least in this world).

What am I missing?

Comment author: fractalman 21 July 2013 04:10:56AM -2 points [-]

I'll give you the quick and dirty patch for dealing with omega: There is no way to know that, at that moment, you are not inside of his simulation. by giving him the 100$, there is a chance you are tranfering that money from within a simulation-which is about to be terminated-to outside of the simulation, with a nice big multiplier.