gwern comments on A possible solution to pascals mugging. - Less Wrong

-19 Post author: staticIP 13 October 2012 12:00AM

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Comment author: gwern 13 October 2012 02:29:02AM 1 point [-]

I'm outside of your conception of time. So if they make the threat after this is of no concern to me.

You can't just wave your hands like that. What if the mugger offers a more complicated deal like a 2-step reward, where the second step overcomes your penalty? Are you just going to say 'fine my precommitment is to the net value'? But then the mugger can just toss in a Turing machine to his offer, and now your attempt to analyze his offer is equivalent to solving a halting problem! If you claim to have an oracle on hand, so can he, and that just relativizes the problem because with an oracle, now there are meta-halting problems... etc.

Your strategy doesn't work. Deal with it.