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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Counterfactual Mugging - Less Wrong
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The counterfactual anti-mugging: One day No-mega appears. No-mega is completely trustworthy etc. No-mega describes the counterfactual mugging to you, and predicts what you would have done in that situation not having met No-mega, if Omega had asked you for $100.
If you would have given Omega the $100, No-mega gives you nothing. If you would not have given Omega $100, No-mega gives you $10000. No-mega doesn't ask you any questions or offer you any choices. Do you get the money? Would an ideal rationalist get the money?
Okay, next scenario: you have a magic box with a number p inscribed on it. When you open it, either No-mega comes out (probability p) and performs a counterfactual anti-mugging, or Omega comes out (probability 1-p), flips a fair coin and proceeds to either ask for $100, give you $10000, or give you nothing, as in the counterfactual mugging.
Before you open the box, you have a chance to precommit. What do you do?
Do you have a point?
Yes, that there can just as easily be a superintelligence that rewards people predicted to act one way as one that rewards people predicted to act the other. Which precommitment is most rational depends depends on the which type you expect to encounter.
I don't expect to encounter either, and on the other hand I can't rule out fallible human analogues of either. So for now I'm not precommitting either way.
You don't precommit to "give away the $100, to anyone who asks". You precommit to give away the $100 in exactly the situation I described. Or, generalizing such precommitments, you just compute your decisions on the spot, in a reflectively consistent fashion. If that's what you want do to with your future self, that is.
Yeah, now. But after Omega really, really, appears in front of you, chance of Omega existing is about 1. Chance of No-Mega is still almost non-existent. In this problem, existence of Omega is given. It's not something you are expecting to encounter now, just as we're not expecting to encounter eccentric Kavkan billionaires that will give you money for toxicating yourself. The Kavka's Toxin and the counterfactual mugging present a scenario that is given, and ask you how would you act then.