EHeller comments on Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory - Less Wrong

60 Post author: lukeprog 16 May 2011 06:28AM

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Comment author: EHeller 22 November 2014 02:29:05AM 0 points [-]

You've now destroyed the usefulness of Newcomb as a potentially interesting analogy to the real world. In real world games, my opponent is trying to infer my strategy and I'm trying to infer theirs.

If Newcomb is only about a weird world where omega can try and predict the player's actions, but the player is not allowed to predict omega's, then its sort of a silly problem. Its lost most of its generality because you've explicitly disallowed the majority of strategies.

If you allow the player to pursue his own strategy, then its still a silly problem, because the question ends up being inconsistent (because if omega plays omega, nothing can happen).

Comment author: nshepperd 22 November 2014 02:59:43AM *  0 points [-]

In real world games, we spend most our time trying to make action-conditional predictions. "If I play Foo, then my opponent will play Bar". There's no attempting to circularly predict yourself with unconditional predictions. The sensible formulation of Newcomb's matches that.

(For example, transparent boxes: Omega predicts "if I fill both boxes, then player will _" and fills the boxes based on that prediction. Or a few other variations on that.)

Comment author: EHeller 22 November 2014 04:17:13AM *  0 points [-]

In many (probably most?) games we consider the opponents strategy, not simply their next move. Making moves in an attempt to confuse your opponent's estimation of your own strategy is a common tactic in many games.

Your "modified Newcomb" doesn't allow the chooser to have a strategy- they aren't allowed to say "if I predict Omega did X, I'll do Y." Its a weird sort of game where my opponent takes my strategy into account, but something keeps me from considering my opponents.