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cameroncowan comments on Open thread, 25-31 August 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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The Smoking Lesion problem is
"Susan is debating whether or not to smoke. She knows that smoking is strongly correlated with lung cancer, but only because there is a common cause – a condition that tends to cause both smoking and cancer. Once we fix the presence or absence of this condition, there is no additional correlation between smoking and cancer. Susan prefers smoking without cancer to not smoking without cancer, and prefers smoking with cancer to not smoking with cancer. Should Susan smoke? Is seems clear that she should.”
But now assume that Susan suffers from painful anxiety proportional to her Bayesian estimate of the probability of her getting lung cancer. This anxiety plays a bigger role in her utility function than any enjoyment she might get from smoking. Should she still smoke?
Susan will have less anxiety if she doesn't smoke, so doesn't this mean she shouldn't smoke? But when Susan is making the decision about smoking couldn't she say to herself “whether I smoke will have no effect on the probability of my getting lung cancer, and since my brain makes a rational estimate of the probability of my getting lung cancer when deciding how much anxiety to dump on me, whether I smoke shouldn't impact my level of anxiety, so I should smoke since I enjoy it? Clearly, if Susan flipped a coin to decide if she should smoke, her anxiety would be the same regardless of how the coin landed. Also, is this functionally the same as Newcomb’s problem?
But that would depend on other factors not just the probability of lung cancer. That depends on what her motivation is to smoke (relaxation, social partnerships, reducing her anxiety, stress management). In that case the temporary benefit gained from smoking may outweigh the Bayesian probability of her getting lung cancer which will take 20-30 to take hold (most likely) rather than using other means to mitigate her very present problems. If she is deciding to smoke or not based solely on the probability of getting lung cancer and her anxiety level about that the rational brain usually chooses to do things that reduce risk rather than increase it and if she is looking to reduce the anxiety level she should choose not to smoke because the chances of lung cancer derived from smoking go down. However, she could also use nicotine as a way to cope with her stress or anxiety which may provide a much better present relief and mitigate any anxiety she has about developing lung cancer in the future.