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Alexei comments on Discussion for Eliezer Yudkowsky's paper: Timeless Decision Theory - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think the confusion comes from the difference in importance to win conflicts vs. to make the correct decision. Many people who think about this problem go "ah, doing X is the obvious solution." When asked to be more formal they come up with decision theories. Other people then explore those theories and find their flaws. Newcomb's problem is important because it led (may be not directly, but I think it contributed) to the schism into evidential decision theory and causal decision theory. Both have different approaches to solving problems.
As far as I can tell, that's because the causal decision theorists are crippled by using magicless thinking in a magical problem. The only outcome is "huh, people who use all the information provided by a problem do better than people who ignore some of the information!" As schisms go, that seems pretty tame.
The issue is expressing formally the algorithm which uses all the information to get the right answer in Newcomb's.
That does make it clearer why I'm a 0-boxer and uninterested by it, and suggests I should refrain from approaching it on a level as intense as Eliezer's paper until I am interested in formality, as a correct one-page explanation is unlikely to be formal and the reason the problem is interesting is in its formality.