I am strongly disagreeing with you. The cultures that existed on Earth for tens of millenia or more were recognizably human; one of them built an LHC "eventually", but any number of chance factors could have prevented this. Like I just said, modern science started with an extreme outlier.

...As I pointed out recently in another context, humans have existed for tens of thousands of years or more. Even civilization existed for millenia before obvious freak Isaac Newton started modern science. Your position is a contender for the nuttiest I've read today.

Possibly it could be made better by dropping this talk of worlds and focusing on possible observers, given the rise in population. But that just reminds me that we likely don't understand anthropics well enough to make any definite pronouncements.

wafflepudding is saying something similar to this:

You can suffer the $10,000 damage in two ways, Path A and Path B. Normally these two things happen equally often. If you pay the $100, you can prevent Path A from happening, with a 100% chance. That means if you pay, Path B will definitely happen. But it also means that since you're the sort of person who would pay in this situation, you will receive that prophecy only 50% as often, in general, as a person who would not pay; this happens because you only get the prophecy when path B is going to happen, instead of either Path A or path B.

I am not the sort of person who would pay in that situation, and I do not want to be. But I am the sort of person who might very well pay the $100 before hearing any prophecy, and therefore I will get the prophecy 50% as often anyway.

I would pay Omega in the counterfactual mugging, but I would not pay here.

The reason is that in the counterfactual mugging case, I would want to be the sort of person who pays when they get offered a deal like that.

Here, I would not want to be the sort of person who pays to fight an infallible prophecy.

However, I would want to be the sort of person who pays to fight a non-infallible prophecy, so I would be happy to precommit to pay in non-infallible prophecy situations.

He makes a self-contradictory statement and loses credibility points. Like, a lot of them. Maybe not in general, but a lot of them for this specific topic.

Imagine a mind as already exists. Now I install a small frog trained to kick its leg when you try to perform Occamian or Laplacian thinking, and its kicking leg hits a button that inverts your output so your conclusion is exactly backwards from the one you should/would have made but for the frog.

And thus symmetry.

I definitely would pay Omega. Here, I'm just going "that's one shady prophet".

I'm with gjm. I appreciate the attempt, but neither added weirdness (time travel nor prophetic causality) would meet your criterion of not contrived and easy to understand.

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?