Another idea that's equivalent to copying is having powerful agents that can predict your actions...
Can you explain this equivalence?
When a problem involves a predictor that's predicting your actions, it can often be transformed into another problem that has an indistinguishable copy of you inside the predictor. In some cases, like Counterfactual Mugging, the copy and the original can even receive different evidence, though they are still unable to tell which is which.
There are more complicated scenarios, where the predictor is doing high-level logical reasoning about you instead of running a simulation of you. In simple cases like Newcomb's Problem, that distinction doesn't matter, but...
ErinFlight said:
Thinking about it, I realized that this might be a common concern. There are probably plenty of people who've looked at various more-or-less technical or jargony Less Wrong posts, tried understanding them, and then given up (without posting a comment explaining their confusion).
So I figured that it might be good to have a thread where you can ask for explanations for any Less Wrong post that you didn't understand and would like to, but don't want to directly comment on for any reason (e.g. because you're feeling embarassed, because the post is too old to attract much traffic, etc.). In the spirit of various Stupid Questions threads, you're explicitly encouraged to ask even for the kinds of explanations that you feel you "should" get even yourself, or where you feel like you could get it if you just put in the effort (but then never did).
You can ask to have some specific confusing term or analogy explained, or to get the main content of a post briefly summarized in plain English and without jargon, or anything else. (Of course, there are some posts that simply cannot be explained in non-technical terms, such as the ones in the Quantum Mechanics sequence.) And of course, you're encouraged to provide explanations to others!