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AlephNeil comments on You're in Newcomb's Box - Less Wrong
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You should still one-box in Newcomb's problem with transparent boxes. There's no unknown state there. And if you think you shouldn't: when Omega presents you with two transparent boxes, one of them containing 1000$ and the other empty -- won't you regret being the kind of person who two-boxes in that problem?
Can you link to a description of the Newcomb's problem with both boxes transparent?
If the problem is how you imply it to be, I don't know what Omega would do if I one-boxed in the case of an empty transparent box, and I two-boxed in the case of a full one. That seems an exceptionally easy way to contradict Omega's prediction, which in turn goes against the principle of Omega being Omega.
Also, what you're doing seems to be substituting an uncertainty of the content for the box with an uncertainty of whether Omega will appear to me and offer me a empty or full box. But there's an infinite number of hypothetical quasi-deities that might appear to me, and I can't commit to all their hypothetical arbitrary demands in advance.
I'm slightly lost by all the different variations of "Newcomb's problem with transparent boxes", but for what it's worth, one can easily write down a version of "Newcomb's problem with transparent boxes" that is equivalent to Parfit's Hitchhiker:
First, Omega judges whether, if both boxes are full, you will take both or just one. Then it fills the first box accordingly. (To make it strictly 'isomorphic' we can stipulate so that Omega will leave both boxes empty if you decide to two-box, but this doesn't affect the decision theory.)
No doubt you will say that the difference between this and the "Prometheus problem" is that in the latter, you exist no matter what, and both boxes are full no matter what.
I agree that this seems intuitively to make all the difference in the world but consider this possibility: Perhaps the only way that Prometheus can predict your behaviour is by running a conscious simulation of you. If so, then choosing to two-box could cause your immediate "death" due to the fact that the simulation will be stopped, and Prometheus will not create a 'real world' copy of you.
(On the other hand, if Prometheus' prediction is based entirely on 'hard-wired' factors beyond your conscious control, like your genetic makeup or whatever, then the same logic that says you must smoke in the 'smoking lesion' problem can be used to say that you must two-box after all.)