diegocaleiro comments on Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality - Less Wrong

64 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 31 January 2008 07:36PM

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Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 31 January 2008 08:28:53PM 12 points [-]

Either box B is already full or already empty.

I'm not going to go into the whole literature, but the dominant consensus in modern decision theory is that one should two-box, and Omega is just rewarding agents with irrational dispositions. This dominant view goes by the name of "causal decision theory".

I suppose causal decision theory assumes causality only works in one temporal direction. Confronted with a predictor that was right 100 out of 100 times, I would think it very likely that backward-in-time causation exists, and take only B. I assume this would, as you say, produce absurd results elsewhere.

Comment author: diegocaleiro 22 March 2010 07:28:42PM 27 points [-]

Decisions aren't physical.

The above statement is at least hard to defend. Your decisions are physical and occur inside of you... So these two-boxers are using the wrong model amongst these two (see the drawings....) http://lesswrong.com/lw/r0/thou_art_physics/

If you are a part of physics, so is your decision, so it must account for the correlation between your thought processes and the superintelligence. Once it accounts for that, you decide to one box, because you understood the entanglement of the computation done by omega and the physical process going inside your skull.

If the entanglement is there, you are not looking at it from the outside, you are inside the process.

Our minds have this quirk that makes us think there are two moments, you decide, and then you cheat, you get to decide again. But if you are only allowed to decide once, which is the case, you are rational by one-boxing.

Comment author: dlthomas 28 October 2011 09:43:00PM 1 point [-]

I think you capture the essence of the solution, here.