orthonormal comments on Decision Theories: A Less Wrong Primer - Less Wrong

69 Post author: orthonormal 13 March 2012 11:31PM

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Comment author: gRR 13 March 2012 08:37:32AM 0 points [-]

That doesn't seem to make helping you appealing.

Yes, I have this problem, working on it. I'm sorry, and thanks for your patience!

The agent believes that it is has 50% chance of being in an actual Newcomb's problem and 50% chance of being in a simulation which will be used to present another agent with a Newcomb's problem some time in the future.

Yes, except for s/another agent/itself/. In what way this is not a correct description of a pure Newcomb's problem from the agent's point of view? This is my original still unanswered question.

Note: in the usual formulations of Newcomb's problem for UDT, the agent knows exactly that - it is called twice, and when it is running it does not know which of the two calls is being evaluated.

Orthonormal already explained this in the context.

I answered his explanation in the context, and he appeared to agree. His other objection seems to be based on a mistaken understanding.

Comment author: orthonormal 13 March 2012 09:43:19PM 0 points [-]

This is worth writing into its own post- a CDT agent with a non-self-centered utility function (like a paperclip maximizer) and a certain model of anthropics (in which, if it knows it's being simulated, it views itself as possibly within the simulation), when faced with a Predictor that predicts by simulating (which is not always the case), one-boxes on Newcomb's Problem.

This is a novel and surprising result in the academic literature on CDT, not the prediction they expected. But it seems to me that if you violate any of the conditions above, one-boxing collapses back into two-boxing; and furthermore, it won't cooperate in the Prisoner's Dilemma against a CDT agent with an orthogonal utility function. That, at least, is inescapable from the independence assumption.