VincentYu comments on Counterfactual self-defense - Less Wrong Discussion
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Mmm... I implied it by saying in the first paragraph that Omega is reliable and that's common knowledge, but it's true that the wording could have been much clearer. I wonder if an edit would do more harm than good.
That's on purpose, and is exactly the information that the agent doesn't have in one-shot counterfactual mugging.
That is all well estabilished, I think. Yet:
A DT though that would accept only winning counterfactual but behaves in every other occasion like a TDT agent is even better. My problem is understanding if the rule proposed is consistent with this desiderata, or would turn a TDT back into a CDT.
Common knowledge of Omega's reliability is not sufficient. ArisKatsaris is pointing out that in your current post, Omega is allowed to condition its offer on the outcome of the coin flip. The original discussion on counterfactual mugging specifies that this is not allowed—Omega's offer is independent of the coin flip.
You do have the information. In counterfactual mugging, Omega tells you truthfully (with its trustworthiness being common knowledge) that it would have given the same offer if the coin had landed differently.
I'm starting to think that there's a deeper-than-I-thought point about the extraction of this information from the way I structured the dialogue. If all that Omega offers is a series of bet, and the TDT agent has no information about what would have Omega done if the coin toss came out differently or even if he will see Omega again, then it's not clear to me what a TDT agent should do.
Indeed. I think that's why it's sometimes better to imagine "Omega" as some sort of stable physical process whose complete functionality we know, instead of an as an agent with mysterious motivations.