Of course, when I examined the thing's source code, I knew it would reason this way, and so I did not put the million.

Then you're talking about an evil decision problem. But neither in the original nor in the genetic Newcombe's problem is your source code investigated.

Not quite. I outlined the things that have to be going on for me to be making a decision.

Interesting, thanks! I thought that it was more or less consensus that the smoking lesion refutes EDT. So, where should I look to see EDT refuted? Absent-minded driver, Evidential Blackmail, counterfactual mugging or something else?

because there are no simulations of the agent involved.

The role that would normally be played by simulation is here played by a big evidential study of what people with different genes do. This is why it matters whether the people in the study are good decision-makers or not - only when the people in the study are in a position similar to my own do they fulfill this simulation-like role.

It does not seem to be more evil than Newcomb's problem, but I am not sure, what you mean by "evil". For every decision theory, it is possible, of course, to set up some decision problem, where this decision theory loses. Would you say that I set up the "genetic Newcomb problem" specifically to punish CDT/TDT?

Yeah, that sentence is phrased poorly, sorry. But I'll try to explain. The easy way to construct an evil decision problem (say, targeting TDT) is to figure out what action TDT agents take, and then set the hidden variables so that that action is suboptimal - in this way the problem can be tilted against TDT agents even if the hidden variables don't explicitly care that their settings came from this evil process.

In this problem, the "gene" is like a flag on a certain decision theory that tells what action it will take, and the hidden variables are set such that people with that decision theory (the decision theory that people with the one-box gene use) act suboptimally (people with the one-box gene who two-box get more money). So this uses very similar machinery to an evil decision problem. The saving grace is that the other action also gets its own flag (the two-box gene), which has a different setting of the hidden variables.

My problem with all this is, if hypothetical-me's decisionmaking process is made by genetics, why are you asking real-me what the decisionmaking process should be?

Real-me can come up with whatever logic and arguments, but hypothetical-me will ignore all that and choose by some other method.

(Traditional Newcomb is different, because in that case hypothetical-me can use the same decisionmaking process as real-me)

In the classic problem, Omega cannot influence my decision; it can only figure out what it is before I do. It is as though I am solving a math problem, and Omega solves it first; the only confusing bit is that the problem in question is self-referential.

If there is a gene that determines what my decision is, then I am not making the decision at all. Any true attempt to figure out what to do is going to depend on my understanding of logic, my familiarity with common mistakes in similar problems, my experience with all the arguments made about Newcomb's problem, and so on; if, despite all that, the box I choose has been determined since my birth, then none of these things (none of the things that make up me!) are a factor at all. Either my reasoning process is overridden in one specific case, or it is irreparably flawed to begin with.

You're describing regular Newcomb, not this gene version. (Also note that Omega needs to have more processing power than the programs to do what you want it to do, just like the human version.) The analogue would be defining a short program that Omega will run over the AIs code, that predicts what the AI will output correctly 99% of the time. Then it becomes a question of whether any given AI can outwit the program. If an AI thinks the program won't work on it, for whatever reason (by which I mean "conditioning on myself picking X doesn't cause my estimate of the prediction program outputting X to change, and vice-versa"), it's free to choose whatever it wants to.

Getting back to humans, I submit that a certain class of people that actually think about the problem will induce a far greater failure rate in Omega, and that therefore that severs the causal link between my decision and Omega's, in the same way as an AI might be able to predict that the prediction program won't work on it.

As I said elsewhere, were this incorrect, my position would change, but then you probably aren't talking about "genes" anymore. You shouldn't be able to get 100% prediction rates from only genes.

I think your last paragraph is more or less correct. The way I'd show it would be to place a node labelled 'decision' between the top node and the left node, representing a decision you make based on decision-theoretical or other reasoning. There are then two additional questions: 1) Do we remove the causal arrow from the top node to the bottom one and replace it with an arrow from 'decision' to the bottom? Or do we leave that arrow in place? 2) Do we add a 'free will' node representing some kind of outside causation on 'decision', or do we let 'decision' be determined solely by the top node?

In the smoking problem, there's usually no causal arrow from 'decision' to the bottom; in Newcomb's, there usually is. Thus, if we're assuming an independent 'free will' node, you should one-box but smoke.

Unknowns seems to be pushing the case where there's no 'free will' node; your decision is purely a product of the top node. In that case, I say the answer is not to waste any mental effort trying to decide the right choice because whether or not you deliberate doesn't matter. If you could change the top node, you'd want to change it so that you one-box and don't smoke, but you can't. If you could change your decision node without changing the top node, you'd want to change it so you one-box and smoke, but you can't do that either. There's no meaningful answer to which impossible change is the 'right' one.

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.

In the original, you would say: "in the world where I one-box, the million is more likely to be there, so I'll one-box".

the one-boxing gene is responsible for me reasoning this way rather than another way.

If there's a gene that makes you think black is white, then you're going to get killed on the next zebra crossing. If there's a gene that makes you misunderstand decision theory, you're going to make some strange decisions. If Omega is fond of people with that gene, then lucky you. But if you don't have the gene, then acting like you do won't help you.

Another reframing: in this version, Omega checks to see if you have the photic sneeze reflex, then forces you to stare at a bright light and checks whether or not you sneeze. Ve gives you $1k if you don't sneeze, and independently, $1M if you have the PSR gene.

If I can choose whether or not to sneeze, then I should not sneeze. Maybe the PSR gene makes it harder for me to not sneeze, in which case I can be really happy that I have to stifle the urge to sneeze, but I should still not sneeze.

But if the PSR gene just makes me sneeze, then why are we even asking whether I should sneeze or not?