In Newcomb's problem, Omega knows what you will do using their superintelligence. Since you know you cannot two-box successfully, you should one-box.
In this case you are trying (futilely) so that you, very crudely speaking, are less likely to be in the futile situation in the first place.
If Omega didn't know what you would do with a fair degree of accuracy, two-boxing would work, obviously.
Yes, then it wouldn't be Newcomb's Problem. The important feature in the problem isn't boxes with arbitrary amounts of money in them. It is about interacting with a powerful predictor whose prediction has already been made and acted upon. See, in particular, the Transparent Newcomb's Problem (where you can ourtright see how much money is there). That makes the situation seem even more like this one.
Even closer would be the Transparent Newcomb's Problem combined with an Omega that is only 99% accurate. You find yourself looking at an empty 'big' box. What do you do? I'm saying you still one box the empty box. That makes it far less likely that you will be in a situation where you see an empty box at all.
Being a person who avoids plane crashes makes it less likely that you will be told "you will die in a plane crash", yes.
But probability is subjective - once you have the information that you will die in a car crash, your subjective estimate of this should vastly increase, regardless of the precautions you take.
Imagine looking at your hand, and knowing nothing of cells, nothing of biochemistry, nothing of DNA. You’ve learned some anatomy from dissection, so you know your hand contains muscles; but you don’t know why muscles move instead of lying there like clay. Your hand is just . . . stuff . . . and for some reason it moves under your direction. Is this not magic?
This was the theory of vitalism ; that the mysterious difference between living matter and non-living matter was explained by an Élan vital or vis vitalis. Élan vital infused living matter and caused it to move as consciously directed. Élan vital participated in chemical transformations which no mere non-living particles could undergo—Wöhler’s later synthesis of urea, a component of urine, was a major blow to the vitalistic theory because it showed that mere chemistry could duplicate a product of biology.
Calling “Élan vital” an explanation, even a fake explanation like phlogiston, is probably giving it too much credit. It functioned primarily as a curiosity-stopper. You said “Why?” and the answer was “Élan vital!”
When you say “Élan vital!” it feels like you know why your hand moves. You have a little causal diagram in your head that says:
But actually you know nothing you didn’t know before. You don’t know, say, whether your hand will generate heat or absorb heat, unless you have observed the fact already; if not, you won’t be able to predict it in advance. Your curiosity feels sated, but it hasn’t been fed. Since you can say “Why? Élan vital!” to any possible observation, it is equally good at explaining all outcomes, a disguised hypothesis of maximum entropy, et cetera.
But the greater lesson lies in the vitalists’ reverence for the Élan vital, their eagerness to pronounce it a mystery beyond all science. Meeting the great dragon Unknown, the vitalists did not draw their swords to do battle, but bowed their necks in submission. They took pride in their ignorance, made biology into a sacred mystery, and thereby became loath to relinquish their ignorance when evidence came knocking.
The Secret of Life was infinitely beyond the reach of science! Not just a little beyond, mind you, but infinitely beyond! Lord Kelvin sure did get a tremendous emotional kick out of not knowing something.
But ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. A phenomenon can seem mysterious to some particular person. There are no phenomena which are mysterious of themselves. To worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious is to worship your own ignorance.
Vitalism shared with phlogiston the error of encapsulating the mystery as a substance. Fire was mysterious, and the phlogiston theory encapsulated the mystery in a mysterious substance called “phlogiston.” Life was a sacred mystery, and vitalism encapsulated the sacred mystery in a mysterious substance called “Élan vital.” Neither answer helped concentrate the model’s probability density—helped make some outcomes easier to explain than others. The “explanation” just wrapped up the question as a small, hard, opaque black ball.
In a comedy written by Molière, a physician explains the power of a soporific by saying that it contains a “dormitive potency.” Same principle. It is a failure of human psychology that, faced with a mysterious phenomenon, we more readily postulate mysterious inherent substances than complex underlying processes.
But the deeper failure is supposing that an answer can be mysterious. If a phenomenon feels mysterious, that is a fact about our state of knowledge, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. The vitalists saw a mysterious gap in their knowledge, and postulated a mysterious stuff that plugged the gap. In doing so, they mixed up the map with the territory. All confusion and bewilderment exist in the mind, not in encapsulated substances.
This is the ultimate and fully general explanation for why, again and again in humanity’s history, people are shocked to discover that an incredibly mysterious question has a non-mysterious answer. Mystery is a property of questions, not answers.
Therefore I call theories such as vitalism mysterious answers to mysterious questions.
These are the signs of mysterious answers to mysterious questions:
1 Lord Kelvin, “On the Dissipation of Energy: Geology and General Physics,” in Popular Lectures and Addresses, vol. ii (London: Macmillan, 1894).
2 Lord Kelvin, “On the Mechanical action of Heat or Light: On the Power of Animated Creatures over Matter: On the Sources available to Man for the production of Mechanical Effect,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 3, no. 1 (1852): 108–113.
3 Silvanus Phillips Thompson, The Life of Lord Kelvin (American Mathematical Society, 2005).