In my situation, it is the same: you can "determine" whether your dial is set to the first or second position by making a decision about whether to smoke.

No.

You can not. You can't.

I'm struggling with this reply. I almost decided to stop trying to convince you. I will try one more time, but I need you to consider the possibility that you are wrong before you continue to the next paragraph. Consider the outside view: if you were right, Yudkowksy would be wrong, Anna would be wrong, everyone who read your post here and didn't upvote this revolutionary, shocking insight would be wrong. Are you sufficiently more intelligent than any of them to be confident in your conclusion? I'm saying this only so you to consider the possibility, nothing more.

You do not have an impact. The reason why you believe otherwise is probably that in Newcomb's problem, you do have an impact in an unintuitive way, and you generalized this without fully understanding why you have an impact in Newcomb's problem. It is not because you can magically choose to live in a certain world despite no causal connection.

In Newcomb's problem, the kind of person you are causally determines the contents of the opaque box, and it causally determines your decision to open them. You have the option to change the kind of person you are, i.e. decide you'll one-box in Newcomb's problem at any given moment before you are confronted with it (such as right now), therefore you causally determine how much money you will receive once you play it in the future. The intuitive argument "it is already decided, therefore it doesn't matter what I do" is actually 100% correct. Your choice to one-box or two-box has no influence on the contents of the opaque box. But the fact that you are the kind of person who one-boxes does, and it happens to be that you (supposedly) can't two-box without being the kind of person who two-boxes.

In the Smoking Lesion, in your alien scenario, this impact is not there. An independent source determines both the state of your box and your decision to smoke or not to smoke. A snapshot at all humans at any given time, with no forecasting ability, reveals exactly who will die of cancer and who won't. If superomega comes from the sky and convinces everyone to stop smoking, the exact same people will die as before. If everyone stopped smoking immediately, the exact same people will die as before. In the future, the exact same people who would otherwise have died still die. People with the box on the wrong state who decide to stop smoking still die.