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aaronde comments on What's Wrong with Evidential Decision Theory? - Less Wrong Discussion

15 Post author: aaronde 23 August 2012 12:09AM

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Comment author: aaronde 23 August 2012 06:35:05PM 0 points [-]

If this were an option, it wouldn't change the problem. An EDT agent that would quit smoking for the good news value, without knowing whether it had the gene, would either avoid getting tested, or precommit to stop smoking regardless of the test results. It would do this for the same reason that, in Newcomb's problem, it wouldn't want to know whether the opaque box was empty before making its decision, even if it could.