For a while, I assumed that I would never understand UDT. I kept getting confused trying to understand why an agent wouldn't want or need to act on all available information and stuff. I also assumed that this intuition must simply be wrong because Vladimir Goddamned Nesov and Wei Motherfucking Dai created it or whatever and they are both straight upgrades from Grognor.

Yesterday, I saw an exchange involving Mitchell Porter, Vladimir Nesov, and Dmytry_messaging. The latter of these insisted that one-boxing in transparent Newcomb's (when the box is empty) was irrational, and I downvoted him because of course I knew he was wrong. Today at work (it is a mindless job), I thought for a while about the reply I would have given private_messaging if I did not consider it morally wrong to reply to trolls, and I started thinking things like how he either doesn't understand reflective consistency or doesn't understand why it's important and how if you two-box then Omega predicted correctly and I also thought,

"Well sure the box is empty, but you can't condition on that fact or else-"

It hit me like a lightning bolt. That's why it's called updateless! That's why you need to- oh man I get it I actually get it now!

I think this happened because of how much time I've spent thinking about this stuff and also thanks to just recently having finished reading the TDT paper (which I was surprised to find contained almost solely things I already knew).