I've been trying to work on this problem based on my admittely poor understanding of Updateless Decision Theory and I think I've come to the conclusion that, while you should one-box in Newcomb's problem and in Transparent Newcomb's problem, you should two-box when dealing with Prometheus, ignore Azathoth, and ignore the desires of evil parents.
Why? My reasoning is based on these lines from cousin_it's explanation of UDT:
When you're faced with a decision, you find all copies of you in the entire "multiverse" that are faced with the same decision ("information set"), and choose the decision that logically implies the maximum sum of resulting utilities weghted by universe-weight......
.......For example, Counterfactual Mugging: by assumption, your decision logically affects both heads-universe and tails-universe, which (also by assumption) have equal weight, so by agreeing to pay you win more cookies overall.
I start by taking into account that there are some universes where I was created by Prometheus/Azathoth/evil parents and some where I was not. I then try to make the decision that will increase the utility of all my copies in all possible universes where a version of me is faced with this decision. If I two-box then all the existing copies of me faced with the same decision will also two-box, and get $200. The nonexistant mes in the universes where I was not created will keep right on not existing. If I one-box all the copies of me will get $100. Again, the nonexistant mes in the universes where I was not created will keep right on not existing, their nonexistant utility unchanged. So all my copies will get more utility if I two-box, ignore Azathoth, and tell my evil parents to do something anatomically improbable. The nonexistant mes cannot be affected.
The key is that you're supposed to consider the utility of "all copies of you in the entire "multiverse" that are faced with the same decision," and copies that were never created are obviously not faced with the same decision. This differs from the counterfactual mugging because there you exist in the heads and tails universe, so you have to take the utility of both copies into account. I believe that it differs from Newcomb's problem and Transparent Newcomb's problem for the same reason.
So it looks like, if I understand UDT correctly, in newcomblike-problems where you never having existed is part of the problem, one-boxing is not neccessarily rational. (An aside: I should also mention that I am assuming whatever method of prediction Prometheus used did not result in the creation of a morally signtificant copy of you in his head. That would be a whole other ballgame, and I think the spirit of the original post was that Prometheus' prediction method did not do this)
Did I get this right, or is my understanding of UDT wrong? I'm not very certain of this at all, and would like it if someone with a stronger understanding of UDT could confirm or disconfirm it.
UPDATE: I think that a possible flaw in my reasoning is that I have misunderstood UDT to mean "make all your copies make whatever decision maximizes their utility in all possible situations," when what it really means is more like "make your decision as if the Omega/Prometheus in those other universes is watching your universe and basing your decision on your behavior there, rather than the behavior of the you in their native universe; and act to maximize utility across all possible universes." I think my previous formulation implies two-boxing in Newcomb's, which seems wrong. With my second formulation it might indeed be better to one-box in the Prometheus problem because in some other universe Prometheus is "watching (i.e. simulating) the you of your universe and is going to decide to create you based on what you do.
I'm not sure my second formulation is quite right either. It still seems to me that these nonexistance problems are qualitatively different from other Newcomblike problems, it seems that the fact that in some universes I don't exist changes the nature of the problem in some way so that one-boxing is no longer rational, maybe because in those universes I'm not part of the same "information set."
That being said, even if UDT recommends one-boxing, there are still several strong objections to the original post's conclusions, and AnasKateris' disturbing "evil parent" variant:
Part 1: Transparent Newcomb with your existence at stake
Related: Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality
Omega, a wise and trustworthy being, presents you with a one-time-only game and a surprising revelation.
"I have here two boxes, each containing $100," he says. "You may choose to take both Box A and Box B, or just Box B. You get all the money in the box or boxes you take, and there will be no other consequences of any kind. But before you choose, there is something I must tell you."
Omega pauses portentously.
"You were created by a god: a being called Prometheus. Prometheus was neither omniscient nor particularly benevolent. He was given a large set of blueprints for possible human embryos, and for each blueprint that pleased him he created that embryo and implanted it in a human woman. Here was how he judged the blueprints: any that he guessed would grow into a person who would choose only Box B in this situation, he created. If he judged that the embryo would grow into a person who chose both boxes, he filed that blueprint away unused. Prometheus's predictive ability was not perfect, but it was very strong; he was the god, after all, of Foresight."
Do you take both boxes, or only Box B?
For some of you, this question is presumably easy, because you take both boxes in standard Newcomb where a million dollars is at stake. For others, it's easy because you take both boxes in the variant of Newcomb where the boxes are transparent and you can see the million dollars; just as you would know that you had the million dollars no matter what, in this case you know that you exist no matter what.
Others might say that, while they would prefer not to cease existing, they wouldn't mind ceasing to have ever existed. This is probably a useful distinction, but I personally (like, I suspect, most of us) score the universe higher for having me in it.
Others will cheerfully take the one box, logic-ing themselves into existence using whatever reasoning they used to qualify for the million in Newcomb's Problem.
But other readers have already spotted the trap.
Part 2: Acausal trade with Azathoth
Related: An Alien God, An identification with your mind and memes, Acausal Sex
(ArisKatsaris proposes an alternate trap.)
Q: Why does this knife have a handle?
A: This allows you to grasp it without cutting yourself.
Q: Why do I have eyebrows?
A: Eyebrows help keep rain and sweat from running down your forehead and getting into your eyes.
These kinds of answers are highly compelling, but strictly speaking they are allowing events in the future to influence events in the past. We can think of them as a useful cognitive and verbal shortcut--the long way to say it would be something like "the knife instantiates a design that was subject to an optimization process that tended to produce designs that when instantiated were useful for cutting things that humans want to cut..." We don't need to spell that out every time, but it's important to keep in mind exactly what goes into those optimization processes--you might just gain an insight like the notion of planned obsolescence. Or, in the case of eyebrows, the notion that we are Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers.
But if you one-box in Newcomb's Problem, you should take these answers more literally. The kinds of backwards causal arrows you draw are the same.
Q: Why does Box B contain a million dollars?
A: Because you're not going to take Box A.
In the same sense that your action determines the contents of Box B, or Prometheus's decision, the usefulness of the handle or the usefulness of eyebrows determines their existence. If the handle was going to prevent you from using the knife, it wouldn't be on there in the first place.
Q: Why do I exist?
A: Because you're going to have lots of children.
You weren't created by Prometheus; you were created by Azathoth, The God That is Evolution by Natural Selection. You are the product of an ongoing optimization process that is trying to maximize reproductive fitness. Azathoth wants you to maximize your number of descendants; if you fail to have descendants, Azathoth will try not to have created you. If your intelligence reduces your reproduction rate, Azathoth will try not to grant you intelligence. If the Darwinian-optimal choice conflicts with the moral one, Azathoth wants you to choose evil.
It would seem, then, that any decision theory that demands that you one-box (or that allows you to survive the similar Parfit's Hitchhiker problem), also demands that you try to maximize your reproductive fitness. In many cases this injunction would be benign: after all, Azathoth created our morality. But in far too many, it is repugnant; there can be no doubt that in many commonplace situations, Azathoth wants you to cheat, or rape, or murder. It seems that in such cases you should balance a decreased chance of having existed against the rest of your utility function. Do not worship Azathoth, unless you consider never having existed to be infinitely bad. But do make sacrifices.
Anticipated Responses
We're not in the ancestral environment, so there's no logical entanglement between my actions and my existence.
We are in the environment of some of our ancestors. Evolution hasn't stopped. If your parents hadn't been genetically predisposed to have children, you would almost certainly not exist. More specific objections like this ("my ancestors weren't exposed to the same memes") can be defeated by adding abstraction ("your ancestors could have thought themselves out of having children, anti-reproduction memes have existed throughout history, and there's probably always been a tension between kin selection and morality.")
This is a decision-theoretic basilisk: in the unlikely event that it's right, I'm worse off for having read it.
Only if you're thinking causally, in which case this whole idea is meaningless. By alerting you to the possibility of a mutually beneficial trade with Azathoth (Azathoth creates you; you increase your reproductive fitness in exchange), I've done both of you a favor.
Azathoth doesn't really exist--you can't trade with a non-sapient phenomenon.
Replace the sapient opponent with a non-sapient phenomenon in any of our thought experiments--e.g. Omega tells you that it's simply a physical law that determines whether money goes in the boxes or not. Do you refuse to negotiate with physical laws? Then if you're so smart, why ain't you rich?
So exactly how are you urging me to behave?
I want you to refute this essay! For goodness sake, don't bite the bullet and start obeying your base desires or engineering a retrovirus to turn the next generation into your clones.