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RomeoStevens comments on "Stupid" questions thread - Less Wrong
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the sci-fi bit is only to make it easier to think about. The real world scenarios it corresponds to require the reader to have quite a bit more background material under their belt to reason carefully about.
What are the real world scenarios it corresponds to? The only one I know of is the hitchhiker one, which is still pretty fantastic. I'm interested in learning about this.
Any kind of tragedy of the commons type scenario would qualify.
It's not obvious to me how tragedy of the commons/prisoner's dilemma is isomorphic to Newcomb's problem, but I definitely believe you that it could be. If TDT does in fact present a coherent solution to these types of problems, then I can easily see how it would be useful. I might try to read the pdf again sometime. Thanks.
They aren't isomorphic problems, however it is the case that CDT two-boxes and defects while TDT one boxes and co-operates (against some opponents).
http://lesswrong.com/lw/4sh/how_i_lost_100_pounds_using_tdt/
I imagine at least half of those upvotes were generated by the title alone.
In general, there are situations where act utilitarianism says a choice is permissible, but rule utilitarianism says the choice is not permissible.
The example I learned involved cutting across the grass as a shortcut instead of walking on a path. No one person can damage the grass, but if everyone walks across the grass, it dies, reducing everyone's utility more than gained by the shortcut.
For a real world example, I suspect that one's intuition about the acceptability of copyright piracy depends on one's intuitions about committing to pay for content and the amount of content that would exist.
In other words, it seems intuitive that the truly rational would voluntarily co-operate to avoid tragedies of the commons. But voluntary commitment to a course of action is hard to formally justify.
If everyone walks across the grass instead of on the path, that is strong evidence that the path is in the wrong place.
It does not follow from this that it would be good for everyone to cut across the grass.
It is done for AI research. The “real world scenarios” usually involve several powerful AIs, so depending on what you mean by “sci-fi” they might not apply. (Even if you don’t consider AIs sci-fi, the usual problem statements make lots of simplifying assumptions that are not necessarily realistic, like perfect guessing and things like that, but that’s just like ignoring friction in physics problems, nobody expects for the exact same thing to happen in practice.)