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Pimgd comments on Counterfactual Mugging Alternative - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (23)
For what it's worth, this formulation appears to me substantially more confusing than the ordinary Counterfactual Mugging. It requires a hypothetical world with multiple confusing features (time travel! prophets! prophecies that are absolutely inevitable .. except, wait, no they aren't! or maybe they are but just might not have been!) And for extra confusion, you introduce the idea that I might believe the prophecy immutable when in fact it isn't, while (if I'm understanding right) asking me just to take on trust that in the real world (er, the real world of this hypothetical situation) it really truly definitely is immutable.
The ordinary Counterfactual Mugging is hard to think about, but (at least for me) it's reasonably clear what situation it's describing, whereas here I had to read your description several times before I was confident I'd correctly understood the problem statement (and I'm still not quite certain I have).
I'm also not sure this is equivalent to ordinary CM (is it meant to be?). Ordinary CM says there was a 50% chance of Omega's coin flip coming up either way, but here nothing seems quite to correspond to that. In particular, the 50% reduction in Pr(I perform the unwise action) in your scenario doesn't seem like it plays quite the same role. But maybe I'm misunderstanding something?
This conveys what I wanted to say but failed to say earlier.
I have to remind myself that it is okay to criticize the form of an argument, as long as you don't treat arguments against a form as arguments against the content (e.g. you made a typo thus what you said is lies). ... though saying "this is complicated and confusing" on a site where most topics discussed are complicated and confusing fits in a certain category bordering to "not constructive criticism", which might have helped in blinding me.