I am sorry, I cannot understand what you are getting at in either of your paragraphs.
In the first one, are you arguing that the original Newcomb problem is contradictory? The problem assumes that Omega can predict your behavior. Presumablythis is not done magically but by knowing your initial state and running some sort of simulation. Here the initial state is defined as everything that affects your choice (otherwise Omega wouldn't be accurate) so if there is a Mentok, his initial state is included as well. I fail to see any contradiction.
In the second one, I agree with "The strength of the connection between the causal nodes makes a big difference in practice." but fail to see the relevance (I would say we are assuming in these problems that the connection is very strong in both Newcomb and Smoking), and cannot parse at all your reasoning in the last sentence. Could you elaborate?
In the first one, are you arguing that the original Newcomb problem is contradictory?
My argument is that Newcomb's Problem rests on these assumptions:
There's a hidden assumption that many people import: "Causality cannot flow backwards in time," or "Omega doesn't uses magic," which makes the problem troubling. If you draw a causal arrow from your choice to the second box, then everythi...
I stumbled upon this paper by Andy Egan and thought that its main result should be shared. We have the Newcomb problem as counterexample to CDT, but that can be dismissed as being speculative or science-fictiony. In this paper, Andy Egan constructs a smoking lesion counterexample to CDT, and makes the fascinating claim that one can construct counterexamples to CDT by starting from any counterexample to EDT and modifying it systematically.
The "smoking lesion" counterexample to EDT goes like this:
EDT implies that she should not smoke (since the likely outcome in a world where she doesn't smoke is better than the likely outcome in a world where she does). CDT correctly allows her to smoke: she shouldn't care about the information revealed by her preferences.
But we can modify this problem to become a counterexample to CDT, as follows:
Here EDT correctly tells her not to smoke. CDT refuses to use her possible decision as evidence that she has the gene and tells her to smoke. But this makes her very likely to get cancer, as she is very likely to have the gene given that she smokes.
The idea behind this new example is that EDT runs into paradoxes whenever there is a common cause (G) of both some action (S) and some undesirable consequence (C). We then take that problem and modify it so that there is a common cause G of both some action (S) and of a causal relationship between that action and the undesirable consequence (S→C). This is then often a paradox of CDT.
It isn't perfect match - for instance if the gene G were common, then CDT would say not to smoke in the modified smoker's lesion. But it still seems that most EDT paradoxes can be adapted to become paradoxes of CDT.