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AlephNeil comments on You're in Newcomb's Box - LessWrong
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Well for starters, existing people can be rewarded or punished. Non-existing people cannot. Any bet offered with a promise or punishment to a non-existing person, is a sucker's bait.
Btw, Transparent Newcomb also seems stupid to me. When Omega offers you the boxes you see what Omega has foreseen for you, and yet you're seemingly not allowed to update on the information, because being the sort of person who lets observed reality affect his decision-making means that Omega won't have chosen you in the first place. Or e.g. being the person who lets emotional outrage at Omega prejudging you affect his judgment.
I can precommit to honoring some known situations (Parfit's hitchhiker, Kavka's toxin), but I don't know how to self-modify to not self-modify at any situation. That looks like brain-damage to me, not rationality.
So you think that one-boxing is correct in the regular version of Newcomb's paradox but incorrect in the 'transparent boxes' version?
So then, if you had to play the "transparent boxes" version you might think to yourself beforehand "if only this was the regular Newcomb's problem I would almost certainly win $1m, but as things are I'm almost certainly only going to get $1k."
Help is available: Go into the room with a blanket or tea-cosy, and carefully shield your eyes until such time as you've located box B and thrown the blanket or tea-cosy over it. (Hopefully Omega will have anticipated such shenanigans from you, and filled the boxes accordingly.)
Not quite. Thinking it over, what I'm saying is that one-boxing in transparent Newcomb requires a level of committment that's different in kind to the level of commitment required by normal Newcomb. Here's why:
Our primary goal is to get a box filled with $1.000.000
In normal Newcomb, we can succeed in this by committing to taking the opaque box. Therefore we just have to trust Omega's predictive capabilities were good enough to predict us one-boxing, so that the opaque box IS the box with $1.000.000
In transparent Newcomb, we can succeed in getting a box filled with $1.000.000 only by committing to take an empty box instead if an empty box appears.Unless our senses are deluding us (e.g. simulation), this is a logical impossibility. So we must commit to a logical impossibility, which being a logical impossibility should never happen.
So normal Newcomb just requires a bit of trust in Omega's abilities, while transparent Newcomb requires committing to a logical impossibility (that the empty box is the filled box). Or perhaps altering your utility function so that you no longer want money-filled boxes.
But isn't it equally a "logical impossibility" in normal Newcomb that taking both boxes will give me less money than taking just one box?
I agree that with transparent boxes the "logical impossibility" feels more salient, especially if I don't think about the normal variant too carefully. So, sure, there's a difference. But I don't think the difference is what you are claiming here.
Note that this particular response to transparent Newcomb doesn't apply to the Prometheus variant, since you never see the empty box.
In the Prometheus variant we see we exist. I really can't take the Prometheus variant at all seriously, nor do I believe I should.