I did say what I would do, given the premise that I know Omega is right with certainty. Perhaps I was insufficiently clear about this?

I am not trying to fight the hypothetical, I am trying to explain why one's intuition cannot resist fighting it. This makes the answer I give seem unintuitive.

So the standard formulation of a Newcomb-like paradox continues to work if you assume that Omega has a merely 99% accuracy.

Your formulation, however, doesn't work that way. If you precommit to suicide when Omega asks, but Omega is sometimes wrong, then you commit suicide with 1% probability (in exchange for having $990 expected winnings). If you don't precommit, then with a 1% chance you might get $1000 for free. In most cases, the second option is better.

Thus, the suicide strategy requires very strong faith in Omega, which is hard to imagine in practice. Even if Omega actually is infallible, it's hard to imagine evidence extraordinary enough to convince us that Omega is sufficiently infallible.

(I think I am willing to bite the suicide bullet as long as we're clear that I would require truly extraordinary evidence.)

Result spoilers: Fb sne, yvxvat nypbuby nccrnef gb or yvaxrq gb yvxvat pbssrr be pnssrvar, naq gb yvxvat ovggre naq fbhe gnfgrf. (Fbzr artngvir pbeeryngvba orgjrra yvxvat nypbuby naq yvxvat gb qevax ybgf bs jngre.)

I haven't done the responsible thing and plotted these (or, indeed, done anything else besides take whatever correlation coefficient my software has seen fit to provide me with), so take with a grain of salt.

I believe editing polls resets them, so there's no reason to do it if it's just an aesthetically unpleasant mistake that doesn't hurt the accuracy of the results.

Absolutely. We're bad at anything that we can't easily imagine. Probably, for many people, intuition for "torture vs. dust specks" imagines a guy with a broken arm on one side, and a hundred people saying 'ow' on the other.

The consequences of our poor imagination for large numbers of people (i.e. scope insensitivity) are well-studied. We have trouble doing charity effectively because our intuition doesn't take the number of people saved by an intervention into account; we just picture the typical effect on a single person.

What, I wonder, are the consequence of our poor imagination for extremity of suffering? For me, the prison system comes to mind: I don't know how bad being in prison is, but it probably becomes much worse than I imagine if you're there for 50 years, and we don't think about that at all when arguing (or voting) about prison sentences.

That wasn't obvious to me. It's certainly false that "people who use the strategy of always paying have the same odds of losing $1000 as people who use the strategy of never paying". This means that the oracle's prediction takes its own effect into account. When asking about my future, the oracle doesn't ask "Will Kindly give me $1000 or die in the next week?" but "If hearing a prophecy about it, will Kindly give me $1000 or die in the next week?"

Hearing the prediction certainly changes the odds that the first clause will come true; it's not obvious to me (and may not be obvious to the oracle, either) that it doesn't change the odds of the second clause.

It's true that if I precommit to the strategy of not giving money in this specific case, then as long as many other people do not so precommit, I'm probably safe. But if nobody gives the oracle money, the oracle probably just switches to a different strategy that some people are vulnerable to. There is certainly some prophecy-driven exploit that the oracle can use that will succeed against me; it's just a question of whether that strategy is sufficiently general that an oracle will use it on people. Unless an oracle is out to get me in particular.

You're saying that it's common knowledge that the oracle is, in fact, predicting the future; is this part of the thought experiment?

If so, there's another issue. Presumably I wouldn't be giving the oracle $1000 if the oracle hadn't approached me first; it's only a true prediction of the future because it was made. In a world where actual predictions of the future are common, there should be laws against this, similar to laws against blackmail (even though it's not blackmail).

(I obviously hand over the $1000 first, before trying to appeal to the law.)

Given that I remember spending a year of AP statistics only doing calculations with things we assumed to be normally distributed, it's not an unreasonable objection to at least some forms of teaching statistics.

Hopefully people with statistics degrees move beyond that stage, though.

There are varieties of strawberries that are not sour at all, so I suppose it's possible that you simply have limited experience with strawberries. (Well, you probably must, since you don't like them, but maybe that's the reason you don't think they're sour, as opposed to some fundamental difference in how you taste things.)

I actually don't like the taste of purely-sweet strawberries; the slightly-sour ones are better. A very unripe strawberry would taste very sour, but not at all sweet, and its flesh would also be very hard.