This misses the point of Newcomb's problem entirely. The stuff about boxes and Omega is just an intuition pump; Newcomb's problem itself is more properly written as a computer program, which contains none of that other stuff. It is common to complain that no real-world scenario will ever correspond to that program, but that is true only in the same sense that the world can never contain the frictionless pulleys, perfect vacuums and rigid objects that come up in physics problems. It's not that complications like friction and the possibility of being deceived about the rules don't matter, but rather that you have to solve the simplified problem first before you add those complications back in. In decision theory, "Omega" is short for "without any complications not explicitly mentioned in the problem statement", so if you start adding in possibilities like illusionists then it isn't Newcomb's problem anymore.
My intuition has been pumped hard by this problem. My intuition is that it violates what we know about physics to be able to predict what each of 6 billion human beings will do confronted with the two boxes after one hour's time elapsed.
The particular physics I think is violated is quantum mechanical uncertainty. What we believe we know from quantum mechanical uncertainty is that there are a myriad of microscopic processes of which the outcome in our world cannot be predicted. We encase this result from quantum mechanics in at least two possible inter...
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?)