Extremely Counterfactual Mugging or: the gist of Transparent Newcomb

Bongo

Omega will either award you $1000 or ask you to pay him $100. He will award you $1000 if he predicts you would pay him if he asked. He will ask you to pay him $100 if he predicts you wouldn't pay him if he asked.

Omega asks you to pay him $100. Do you pay?

This problem is roughly isomorphic to the branch of Transparent Newcomb (version 1, version 2) where box B is empty, but it's simpler.

Here's a diagram:

Omega will either award you $1000 or ask you to pay him $100. He will award you $1000 if he predicts you would pay him if he asked. He will ask you to pay him $100 if he predicts you wouldn't pay him if he asked.

Omega asks you to pay him $100. Do you pay?

This problem is roughly isomorphic to the branch of Transparent Newcomb (version 1, version 2) where box B is empty, but it's simpler.

Here's a diagram:

I contend it's also isomorphic to the very real-world problems of hazing, abuse cycles, and akrasia.

The common dynamic across all these problems is that "You could have been in a winning or losing branch, but you've learned that you're in a losing branch, and your decision to scrape out a little more utility within that branch takes away more utility from (symmetric) versions of yourself in (potentially) winning branches."

Disagree. In e.g. the case of hazing, the person who has hazed me is not a counterfactual me, and his decision is not sufficiently correlated with my own for this approach to apply.

0Matt_Simpson15y

Does this depend on many worlds as talking about "branches" seems to suggest? Consider, e.g. [...]

0Bongo15y

In the Hitchhiker you're scraping in the winning branch though.