I am still reading the paper, but I have a question:
Conversely in the CGTA variant of Solomon's Problem, a causal decision agent, knowing in advance that he would have to choose between chewing gum and avoiding gum, has no reason to precommit himself to avoiding gum. (pg. 9)
Why not? Based on earlier numbers (pg. 5), chewing gum will give you strictly better results. The paper even mentions that:
This table shows that whether you have the gene CGTA or not, your chance of dying of a throat abscess goes down if you chew gum.
What am I missing?
No reason to precommit to AVOID gum.
Gum is beneficial, so you don't want to precommit against it. Nonetheless, it is evidence of a bad thing.
I have not seen any place to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky's new paper, titled Timeless Decision Theory, so I decided to create a discussion post. (Have I missed an already existing post or discussion?)