You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

nshepperd comments on Open Thread, Apr. 20 - Apr. 26, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: Gondolinian 20 April 2015 12:02AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (350)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: nshepperd 22 July 2015 04:00:14AM *  0 points [-]

This is essentially just another version of the smoking lesion problem, in that there is no connection, causal or otherwise, beween the thing you care about and the action you take. Your decision theory has no specific effect on your likelyhood of dying, that being determined entirely by environmental factors that do not even attempt to predict you. All you are paying for is to determine whether or not you get a visit from the oracle.

ETA: Here's a UDT game tree (see here for an explanation of the format) of this problem, under the assumption that oracle visits everyone meeting his criteria, and uses exclusive-or:

ETA2: More explanation: the colours are states of knowledge. Blue = oracle asks for money, Orange = they leave you alone. Let's say the odds of being healthy are α. If you Pay the expected reward is α(-1000) + (1-α) DEATH; if you Don't Pay the expected reward is α 0 + (1-α) DEATH. Clearly (under UDT) paying is worse by a term of -1000α.