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ike comments on Two-boxing, smoking and chewing gum in Medical Newcomb problems - Less Wrong Discussion

14 Post author: Caspar42 29 June 2015 10:35AM

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Comment author: ike 29 June 2015 05:14:17PM 0 points [-]

And in such cases, it is perfectly possible to remove the correlation in the same way that you say. If I know how Omega is deciding who is likely to one-box and who is likely to two-box, I can purposely do the opposite of what he expects me to do.

Exactly; but since a vast majority of players won't do this, Omega can still be right most of the time.

But if you want to solve the real problem, you have to solve it in the case of 100% correlation, both in the original Newcomb's problem and in this case.

Can you formulate that scenario, then, or point me to somewhere it's been formulated? It would have to be a world with very different cognition than ours, if genes can determine choice 100% of the time; arguably, genes in that world would correspond to brain states in our world in a predictive sense, in which case this collapses to regular Newcomb, and I'd one-box.

The problem presented by the gene-scenario, as stated by OP, is

Now, how does this problem differ from the smoking lesion or Yudkowsky's (2010, p.67) chewing gum problem?

However, as soon as you add in a 100% correlation, it becomes very different, because you have no possibility of certain outcomes. If the smoking lesion problem was also 100%, then I'd agree that you shouldn't smoke, because whatever "gene" we're talking about can be completely identified (in a sense) with my brain state that leads to my decision.

Comment author: Unknowns 29 June 2015 05:26:37PM 2 points [-]

You are right that 100% correlation requires an unrealistic situation. This is true also in the original Newcomb, i.e. we don't actually expect anything in the real world to be able to predict our actions with 100% accuracy. Still, we can imagine a situation where Omega would predict our actions with a good deal of accuracy, especially if we had publicly announced that we would choose to one-box in such situations.

The genetic Newcomb requires an even more unrealistic scenario, since in the real world genes do not predict actions with anything close to 100% certitude. I agree with you that this case is no different from the original Newcomb; I think most comments here were attempting to find a difference, but there isn't one.

Comment author: ike 29 June 2015 05:34:55PM 0 points [-]

Still, we can imagine a situation where Omega would predict our actions with a good deal of accuracy, especially if we had publicly announced that we would choose to one-box in such situations.

We could, but I'm not going to think about those unless the problem is stated a bit more precisely, so we don't get caught up in arguing over the exact parameters again. The details on how exactly Omega determines what to do are very important. I've actually said elsewhere that if you didn't know how Omega did it, you should try to put probabilities on different possible methods, and do an EV calculation based on that; is there any way that can fail badly?

(Also, if there was any chance of Omega existing and taking cues from our public announcements, the obvious rational thing to do would be to stop talking about it in public.)

I agree with you that this case is no different from the original Newcomb; I think most comments here were attempting to find a difference, but there isn't one.

I think people may have been trying to solve the case mentioned in OP, which is less than 100%, and does have a difference.

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