Andreas_Giger comments on Simulating Problems - Less Wrong
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It's not the antagonistic tone of your comments that puts me off, it's the way in which you seem to deliberately not understand things. For example my definition of analogous — what else could you possibly have expected in this context? No, don't answer that.
I believe I have said everything already, but I'll put it in a slightly different way:
Given a problem A, find an analogous problem B with the same payoff matrix for which it can be proven that any possible agent will make analogous decisions, or prove that such a problem B cannot exist.
For instance, how can we find a problem that is analogous to Newcomb, but without Omega? I have described such an analogous problem in my top-level post and demonstrated how CDT agents will in the initial state not make the analogous decision. What we're looking for is a problem in which any imaginable agent would, and we can prove it. If we believe that such a problem cannot exist without Omega, how can we prove that?
The meaning of analogous should be very clear by now. Screw practical and impractical.
As an aside note, I don't know what kind of stuff they teach at US grad schools, but what's of help here is familiarity with methods of proof and a mathematical mindset rather than mathematical knowledge, except some basic game theory and decision theory. As far as I know, what I'm trying to do here is uncharted territory.
The question is how close you wanted the analogy to be.
Okay, this is clearer.
I can point you to a large body of evidence that I have all of these things.
Close enough that anything we can infer from the analogous problem must apply to the original problem as well, especially concerning the decisions agents make. I thought I said that a few times.
Does that imply it is actually clear? Do you have an approach for this? A way to divide the problem into smaller chunks? An idea how to tackle the issue of "any possible agent"?
I'll give you a second data point to consider. I am a soon-to-be-graduated pure math undergraduate. I have no idea what you are asking, beyond very vague guesses. Nothing in your post or the proceeding discussion is of a "rather mathematical nature", let alone a precise specification of a mathematical problem.
If you think that you are communicating clearly, then you are wrong. Try again.