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NickRetallack comments on Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality - Less Wrong
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I'm with you. You have to look at the outcomes, otherwise you end up running into the same logical blinders that make Quantum Mechanics hard to accept.
After reading some of the Quantum Mechanics sequence, I am more willing to believe in Omega's omniscience. Quantum mechanics allows for multiple timelines leading to the same outcome to interfere and simply never happen, even if they would have been probable in classical mechanics. Perhaps all timelines leading to the outcome where
one-boxing does not yield moneyhappen to interfere. Even if you take a more literal interpretation of the problem statement, where it is your own mind that determines the box's content, your mind is made of particles which could conceivably affect the universe's configuration.I have more or less the same point of view and applied it to non iterated prisonner's dilemma (as Newcomb's is merely half a Prisonner's Dilemma as David Lewis suggested in an article, and on this I agree with him, but not on his conclusion).
What is at stakes here (in Newcomb's or PD) may not be that easy to accept anyway. It's probability and Bayes against causality. The doom loop in Newcomb's (reasoning loop leading to loose 1 million, as I see it) is stating that The content of the boxes is already put when you play, henceforth you action won't change anything. The quantum mechanical reasoning would go the other way: as long as you did'nt observe/interact with it it is merely a probability. You may even want to go futher than that: imagine that someone else see the content of the box, then see you choosing the predicted set of boxes. He will conclude you have no freewill, or something along theses lines. I understand that people puting freewill as a fact - not merely a belief that could be contradicted by experiment - and so reject unthinkingly the probabilist reasoning.
My comment about PD is in this Sequence (http://lesswrong.com/lw/hl8/other_prespective_on_resolving_the_prisoners/). I merely applty probability rules. I'm interrested to know if you see any fault in it from a probabilist point of view.