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:

At this point it seems we're arguing over how to better formalize the original problem. The post asked what you should reply to Omega. Your reformulation asks what counterfactual-you should reply to counterfactual-Omega that doesn't even have to say the same thing as the original Omega, and whose judgment of you came from the counterfactual void rather than from looking at you. I'm not sure this constitutes a fair translation. Some of the commenters here (e.g. prase) seem to intuitively lean toward my interpretation - I agree it's not UDT-like, but think it might turn out useful.

At this point it seems we're arguing over how to better formalize the original problem.

It's more about making more explicit the question of what are observations, and what are boundaries of the agent (Which parts of the past lightcone are part of you? Just the cells in the brain? Why is that?), in deterministic decision problems. These were never explicitly considered before in the context of UDT. The problem statement states that something is "observation", but we lack a technical counterpart of that notion. Your questions resulted from treat... (read more)

0Vladimir_Nesov15y

Yes. If the agent doesn't know what Omega actually says, this can be an important consideration (decisions are made by considering agent-provable properties of counterfactuals, all of which except the actual one are inconsistent, but not agent-inconsistent). If Omega's decision is known (and not just observed), it just means that counterfactual-you's response to counterfactual-Omega doesn't control utility and could well be anything. But at this point I'm not sure in what sense anything can actually be logically known, and not in some sense just observed.