patrickscottshields comments on Decision Theory FAQ - Less Wrong
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Thanks for the response! I'm looking for a formal version of the viewpoint you reiterated at the beginning of your most recent comment:
That makes a lot of sense, but I haven't been able to find it stated formally. Wolpert and Benford's papers (using game theory decision trees or alternatively plain probability theory) seem to formally show that the problem formulation is ambiguous, but they are recent papers, and I haven't been able to tell how well they stand up to outside analysis.
If there is a consensus that the sufficient use of randomness prevents Omega from having perfect or nearly perfect predictions, then why is Newcomb's problem still relevant? If there's no randomness, wouldn't an appropriate application of CDT result in one-boxing since the decision-maker's choice and Omega's prediction are both causally determined by the decision-maker's algorithm, which was fixed prior to the making of the decision?
I'm curious: why can't normal CDT handle it by itself? Consider two variants of Newcomb's problem:
(Note: I'm out of my depth here, and I haven't given a great deal of thought to precommitment and the possibility of allowing algorithms to rewrite themselves.)
You can consider an ideal agent that uses argmax E to find what it chooses, where E is some environment function . Then what you arrive at is that argmax gets defined recursively - E contains argmax as well - and it just so happens that the resulting expression is only well defined if there's nothing in the first box and you choose both boxes. I'm writing a short paper about that.