You're in Newcomb's Box
Part 1: Transparent Newcomb with your existence at stake Related: Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality Omega, a wise and trustworthy being, presents you with a one-time-only game and a surprising revelation. "I have here two boxes, each containing $100," he says. "You may choose to take both Box A and Box B, or just Box B. You get all the money in the box or boxes you take, and there will be no other consequences of any kind. But before you choose, there is something I must tell you." Omega pauses portentously. "You were created by a god: a being called Prometheus. Prometheus was neither omniscient nor particularly benevolent. He was given a large set of blueprints for possible human embryos, and for each blueprint that pleased him he created that embryo and implanted it in a human woman. Here was how he judged the blueprints: any that he guessed would grow into a person who would choose only Box B in this situation, he created. If he judged that the embryo would grow into a person who chose both boxes, he filed that blueprint away unused. Prometheus's predictive ability was not perfect, but it was very strong; he was the god, after all, of Foresight." Do you take both boxes, or only Box B? For some of you, this question is presumably easy, because you take both boxes in standard Newcomb where a million dollars is at stake. For others, it's easy because you take both boxes in the variant of Newcomb where the boxes are transparent and you can see the million dollars; just as you would know that you had the million dollars no matter what, in this case you know that you exist no matter what. Others might say that, while they would prefer not to cease existing, they wouldn't mind ceasing to have ever existed. This is probably a useful distinction, but I personally (like, I suspect, most of us) score the universe higher for having me in it. Others will cheerfully take the one box, logic-ing themselves into existence using whatever reasoning they used to q
I'm not sure the recursive argument even fully works for the stock market, these days--I suspect it's more like a sticky tradition that crudely mimic the incentive structure that used to exist, like a parasitic vine that still holds the shape of the rotted-away tree it killed. When there's any noise, recursion amplifies it with each iteration: a 1-year lookahead to a 1-year lookahead might be almost the same as a 2-year-lookahead, but it's slightly skewed by wanting to take into account short-scale price movements and different risk and time discounting. By the the time you get to a 1-year lookahead to a 1-year lookahead to a...*10, it's almost completely (maybe completely) decoupled from the actual 10-year lookahead, with no way to make money off of that decoupling.