private_messaging 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: private_messaging 16 July 2014 03:07:50PM *  0 points [-]

The thing is, this 'modern decision theory', rather than being some sort of central pillar as you'd assume from the name, is mostly philosophers "struggling in the periphery to try to tell us something", as Feynman once said about philosophers of science.

When it comes to any actual software which does something, this everyday notion of 'causality' proves to be a very slippery concept. This Rude Goldberg machine - like model of the world, where you push a domino and it pushes another domino, and the chain goes to your reward, that's just very approximate physics that people tend to use to make decisions, it's not fundamental, and interesting models of decision making are generally set up to learn that from observed data (which of course makes it impossible to do lazy philosophy involving various verbal hypotheticals where the observations that would lead the agent to believe the problem set up are not specified).