I found this to be a very helpful article, but a bit more deliberation on the Smoking Lesion problem would be helpful; I looked it up on the wiki, but still don’t really understand it, or how it is solved.
In the smoking lesion problem, your choice of whether or not to smoke correlates with whether or not you’ll get cancer, but it doesn’t cause it (since the gene that causes smoking and cancer is already either with you or not). The correct option is to smoke because you can’t, even timelessly/acausally affect whether or not you have the gene (unlike the standard newcomb’s problem, in which you don’t cause the $1,000,000 to be there by one-boxing, but you do timelessly/acausally affect it).
I found this to be a very helpful article, but a bit more deliberation on the Smoking Lesion problem would be helpful; I looked it up on the wiki, but still don’t really understand it, or how it is solved.
In the smoking lesion problem, your choice of whether or not to smoke correlates with whether or not you’ll get cancer, but it doesn’t cause it (since the gene that causes smoking and cancer is already either with you or not). The correct option is to smoke because you can’t, even timelessly/acausally affect whether or not you have the gene (unlike the standard newcomb’s problem, in which you don’t cause the $1,000,000 to be there by one-boxing, but you do timelessly/acausally affect it).
Thanks for this! I do now know about such things, but this’ll be helpful for other readers.