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Andreas_Giger comments on Can anyone explain to me why CDT two-boxes? - Less Wrong Discussion

-12 Post author: Andreas_Giger 02 July 2012 06:06AM

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Comment author: Andreas_Giger 03 July 2012 02:10:28PM *  0 points [-]

We've already established that some of the disagreement comes from whether Newcomb includes backwards causality or not, with most posters agreeing that Newcomb including backwards causality is not realistic or interesting (see the excerpt from Nozick that I edited into my top level post) and the focus instead shifting onto weak (empirical) Newcomb, where Omega makes its predictions without looking into the future.

Right now, most posters also seem to be of the opinion that the answer to Newcomb is not to just one-box, but to precommit to one-boxing before Omega can make its decision, for example by choosing a different decision theory before encountering Newcomb. I argued that this is a different problem ("meta-Newcomb") that is fundamentally different from both Newcomb and weak Newcomb. The question of whether a CDT agent should change strategies (precommit) in meta-Newcomb seems to be dependent on whether such a strategy can be proven to never perform worse than CDT in non-Newcomb problems.

The last sentence is my personal assessment; the rest should be general consensus by now.