Vaniver comments on Compressing Reality to Math - Less Wrong

20 Post author: Vaniver 15 December 2011 12:07AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (7)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Vaniver 20 December 2011 05:00:09PM 0 points [-]

Or do you mean that Newcomb's Problem is an impossible situation which doesn't approximate anything we might really face, and therefore we should stop worrying about it and move on?

This is my personal opinion, though I do not expect everyone to agree. I would go further and say that its connection to real situations is too tenuous to be valuable- many impossible scenarios are worth thinking about because they closely approximate real scenarios. The previous sentence- that any one explanation of why two-boxing or one-boxing is correct fails to understand why it's a problem- is something I expect everyone should agree with.

Comment author: orthonormal 22 December 2011 04:03:39AM *  0 points [-]

Well, then we have a bigger disagreement at stake. Also:

The previous sentence- that any one explanation of why two-boxing or one-boxing is correct fails to understand why it's a problem- is something I expect everyone should agree with.

You switched the quantifier on my question, and your version is much stronger than anything I'd agree to, much less expect to be uncontroversial.