Omega can be replaced by amnesia

Bongo

Let's play a game. Two times, I will give you an amnesia drug and let you enter a room with two boxes inside. Because of the drug, you won't know whether this is the first time you've entered the room. On the first time, both boxes will be empty. On the second time, box A contains $1000, and Box B contains $1,000,000 iff this is the second time and you took only box B the first time. You're in the room, do take both boxes or only box B?

This is equivalent to Newcomb's Problem in the sense that any strategy does equally well on both, where by "strategy" I mean a mapping from info to (probability distributions over) actions.

I suspect that any problem with Omega can be transformed into an equivalent problem with amnesia instead of Omega.

Does CDT return the winning answer in such transformed problems?

Discuss.

Let's play a game. Two times, I will give you an amnesia drug and let you enter a room with two boxes inside. Because of the drug, you won't know whether this is the first time you've entered the room. On the first time, both boxes will be empty. On the second time, box A contains $1000, and Box B contains $1,000,000 iff this is the second time and you took only box B the first time. You're in the room, do take both boxes or only box B?

This is equivalent to Newcomb's Problem in the sense that any strategy does equally well on both, where by "strategy" I mean a mapping from info to (probability distributions over) actions.

I suspect that any problem with Omega can be transformed into an equivalent problem with amnesia instead of Omega.

Does CDT return the winning answer in such transformed problems?

Discuss.

Your transformation seems to require weird Omegas that respond to randomizing players by randomizing too. It's not clear to me why an Omega would want to behave like that (probabilistically reward cheaters). Can you handle other kinds of Omegas, e.g. the original kind specified by Eliezer?

I don't think they're weird. I think Omegas that go out of their way to discriminate against mixed strategies are weird. A strategy that one-boxes with probability 0.999 never gets a million, while one that one-boxes with probability 1 always gets a million. You could call that a discontinuity.

And I thought 1 was not a probability anyway! Any real rational one-boxing agent will expect to one-box with probability ~1, not with "probability" 1. Does that mean that the agent is using a mixed strategy? On the other hand, any agent that isn't using qu... (read more)

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Omega can be replaced by amnesia

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Omega can be replaced by amnesia

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