I predict, with probability ~95%, that if Joe becomes unhappy in the marriage, he and Kate will get divorced, even though Joe and Kate, who is not as powerful a predictor as Omega, currently believe otherwise. Joe is, after all, running this “timeless decision theory” on hostile hardware.
(But I hope that they remain happy, and this prediction remains hypothetical.)
Perhaps, I didn’t look up any statistics. The “~” in “~95%” was supposed to indicate my meta uncertainty that this is the precise strength of belief an ideal rationalist should have given evidence observed by me. I am confident that I am closer to the ideal probability than 0% as believed by Kate.
Apparently 45% to 50% of first marriages in America end in divorce, but this does not account for whether the marriages were unhappy. Do you have a source for your assertion? I have not found anything with a quick Google search.
Good point; if we conquer death then there may be some marriages that do not end. It’d be interesting to see if people move towards near-universal divorce, sci-fi-novel-style limited-term marriages, or find ways to develop infinite-term compatibility. Or stop pairing up (inconceivable to present-day humans, but such is the nature of a Singularity).
That definitely would be interesting. It would perhaps be an indicator of preferences, as opposed to the current indicator of capability. If you have tools that can alter your mind you can cheat.
I suspect that getting a divorce requires some minimal amount of input from both parties—if I remember correctly I had to sign something saying that I’d received some paperwork, when mine happened, in order for it to go through.
I suspect that in the case I posited, the non-disappearing person would be able to get the disappearing person declared dead after a certain period of time, which doesn’t strictly require that the disappearing person be dead, and then remarry. If that’s accurate, that’d be a third option.
I suspect that in the case I posited, the non-disappearing person would be able to get the disappearing person declared dead after a certain period of time, which doesn’t strictly require that the disappearing person be dead, and then remarry. If that’s accurate, that’d be a third option.
100% of marriages that have ended have ended in divorce or legal death?
Where does ‘annulment’ fit into things? Is that when it is decided to just pretend the marriage never existed in the first place.
Where does ‘annulment’ fit into things? Is that when it is decided to just pretend the marriage never existed in the first place.
Yes. In the Catholic Church, a “declaration of nullity” was nearly a loophole to not being able to get divorced. Basically, there were certain preconditions that were assumed to hold when getting married, and if it turns out any of those preconditions did not actually obtain, then the marriage never actually happened. For example, it is assumed that the couple wants to have children; if it turns out that one party never intended to have children, that can be grounds for a declaration of nullity.
Several legal jurisdictions have adopted this idea, but it makes little sense when one can just get divorced and there are not strict preconditions for marriage.
As long as we’re picking nits, in some places marriages can also be annulled (though of course they will insist that this is retroactive, and for some purposes it is).
That’s what I understand; an annulment means the marriage never happened. (E.g. if it’s been “consummated” then annulment is not an option. I wonder how that interacts with modern pre-consummated marriages?)
I predict, with probability ~95%, that if Joe becomes unhappy in the marriage, he and Kate will get divorced, even though Joe and Kate
I predict with probability ~95% that if statisticians had arbitrarily decided many years ago to use 97% instead of 95% as their standard of proof, then all appearances of 95 and 97 in this comment would be reversed.
How does it change your prediction to learn that I was not considering statisticians’ arbitrary standard of proof, but I was thinking about numbers in base ten, and I had considered saying ~90% instead?
it’s a big open problem if some humans can precommit or not
No, it’s not. I don’t see any reason to believe that humans can reliably precommit, without setting up outside constraints, especially over time spans of decades.
What you have described is not Newcomb’s problem. Take what taw said, and realize that actual humans are in fact in this category:
If precommitment is not observable and/or changeable, then it can be rearranged, and we have:
Kate: accept or not—not having any clue what Joe did
Certainties can be replaced with 95%’s and it all still works the same. It’s a whole parametrized family of problems, not just one.
Try playing with the parameters. Maybe Kate only wants 90% certainty from Joe, and Joe is only 80% sure he’ll be happy. Then he doesn’t need a 100% precomitment, but only some kind of partial deterrent, and if Kate requires that he not resort to external self-restrictions, he can certainly self-modify partial pre-commitments into himself in the form of emotions.
Self-modification is robust, pre-commitment is robust, its detection is robust… these phenomena really aren’t going anywhere.
If they are rational enough to talk about divorce in order to avoid it, then he can make an economic commitment by writing a prenup that guarantees that any divorce becomes unfavorable. Of course, only making it relatively unfavorable will give her an incentive to leave him, so it is better if a big portion of their property is given away or burned in case of a divorce.
Yes, that is a strategy they can take, However, that sort of strategy is unnecessary in Newcomb’s problem, where you can just one-box and find the money there without having made any sort of precommitment.
This mapping does not work. Causal Decision Theory would commit (if available) in the marriage proposal problem, but two box in Newcomb’s problem. So the mapping does not preserve the relationship between the mapped elements.
This should be a sanity check for any scenario proposed to be equivalent to Newcomb’s problem. EDT/TDT/UDT should all do the equivalent of one-boxing, and CDT should do the equivalent of two-boxing.
CDT on Newcomb’s problem would, if possible, precommit to one-boxing as long as Omega’s prediction is based on observing the CDT agent after its commitment.
CDT in the marriage case would choose to leave once unhappy, absent specific precommitment.
So that exact mapping doesn’t work, but the problem does seem Newcomblike to me (like the transparent-boxes version, actually; which, I now realize, is like Kavka’s toxin puzzle without the vagueness of “intent”.) (ETA: assuming that Kate can reliably predict Joe, which I now see was the point under dispute to begin with.)
Would you care to share your reasoning? What is your mapping of strategies, and does it pass my sanity check? (EVT two-boxes on the transparent boxes variation.)
one-box ⇔ stay in marriage when unhappy two-box ⇔ leave marriage when unhappy precommit to one-boxing ⇔ precommit to staying in marriage
In both this problem and transparent-boxes Newcomb:
you don’t take the action under discussion (take boxes, leave or not) until you know whether you’ve won
if you would counterfactually take one of the choices if you were to win, you’ll lose
TDT and UDT win
CDT either precommits and wins or doesn’t and loses, as described in my previous comment
(I’m assuming that Kate can reliably predict Joe. I didn’t initially realize your objection might have more to do with that than the structure of the problem.)
CDT either precommits and wins or doesn’t and loses, as described in my previous comment
If Jack and Kate were already married it really would make no sense for Jack to not get a divorce just because Kate would have never married him had she suspected he would. CDT wins, here. The fact that CDT tells Jack to precommit now doesn’t make it Newcomblike. Precommiting is a rational strategy in lots of games that aren’t Newcomb like. The whole point of Newcomb is that even if you haven’t precommitted, CDT tells you the wrong thing to do once Omega shows up.
Even if that assumption is fair (since it obviously isn’t true I’m not sure why we would make it**) we’re still entering the scenario too early. It’s like being told Omega is going to offer you the boxes a year before he does. Jack now has the opportunity to precommit, but Omega doesn’t give you that chance.
** I’m sure glad my girlfriend isn’t a superintelligence that can predict my actions with perfect accuracy! Am I right guys?!
Point taken; the similarity is somewhat distant. (I made that assumption to show the problem’s broadly Newcomblike structure, since I wrongly read JGWeissman as saying that the problem never had Newcomblike structure. But as you say, there is another, more qualitative difference.)
(I’m assuming that Kate can reliably predict Joe. I didn’t initially realize your objection might have more to do with that than the structure of the problem.)
Yes, that is where my objection lies.
ETA: And the fact that in Newcomb’s problem, there is no opportunity after learning about the problem to precommit, the predictions of your behavior have already been made. So allowing precommitment in the marriage proposal problem sidesteps the problem that would be Newcomb like if Kate were a highly accurate predictor.
Causal decision theory precommits to one-boxing on Newcomb if it can and if Omega’s prediction is based on observation of the CDT agent after its opportunity to precommit.
Why is the parent comment being voted down, and its parent being voted up, when it correctly refutes the parent?
Why is the article itself being voted up, when it has been refuted? Are people so impressed by the idea of a real life Newcomb like problem that they don’t notice, even when it is pointed out, that the described story is not in fact a Newcomb like problem?
Why is the article itself being voted up, when it has been refuted?
I voted it up because it is a good article. The claim “this situation is a problem of the class Newcomblike” has been refuted. If Academian had belligerently defended the ‘It’s Newcomblike’ claim in response to correction I would have reversed my upvote. As it stands the discussion both in the original post and the comments are useful. I expect it has helped clarify how the situation as it is formalized here differs from Newcomb’s problem and what changes the scenario would need to actually be a Newcomblike problem. In fact, that is a follow up post that I would like to see.
Are people so impressed by the idea of a real life Newcomb like problem that they don’t notice, even when it is pointed out, that the described story is not in fact a Newcomb like problem?
Ease up. The “it’s not actually Newcomblike” comments are being upvoted. People get it. It’s just that sometimes correction is sufficient and a spiral of downvotes isn’t desirable.
It is an article in which poor thought leads to a wrong conclusion. I don’t consider that “good”.
If Academian had belligerently defended the ‘It’s Newcomblike’ claim in response to correction I would have reversed my upvote.
I wouldn’t say he was belligerent, but earlier in this thread he seemed to be Fighting a Rearguard Action Against the Truth, first saying, “it’s a big open problem if some humans can precommit or not”, and then saying the scenario still works if you replace certainties with high confidence levels, with those confidence levels also being unrealistic. I found “Self-modification is robust, pre-commitment is robust, its detection is robust… these phenomena really aren’t going anywhere.” to be particularly arrogant. He seems to have dropped out after I refuted those points.
My standard for changing this article from bad to sort of ok, would require an actual retraction of the wrong conclusion.
As it stands the discussion both in the original post and the comments are useful.
As it stands, someone can be led astray by reading just the article and not the comments.
The “it’s not actually Newcomblike” comments are being upvoted. People get it.
Not as much as the article. And this comment, which refuted a wrong argument that the scenario really is Newcomb’s problem, at the time I asked that question, was at −2.
It’s just that sometimes correction is sufficient and a spiral of downvotes isn’t desirable.
I am not saying everyone should vote it down so Academian loses so much karma he can never post another article. I think a small negative score is enough to make the point. A small positive score would be appropiate if he made a proper retraction. +27 is too high. I don’t think articles should get over +5 without the main point actually being correct, and they should be incredibly thought provoking to get that high.
I am also wary of making unsupportable claims that Newcomb’s problem happens in real life, which can overshadow other reasons we consider such problems, so these other reasons are forgotten when the unsupportable claim is knocked down.
I can empathise with your point of view here. Perhaps the fact that people (including me) still appreciate the post despite it getting the game theory discussion wrong is an indication that we would love to see more posts on ‘real life’ applications of decision theory!
Are people so impressed by the idea of a real life Newcomb like problem that they don’t notice, even when it is pointed out, that the described story is not in fact a Newcomb like problem?
That depends entirely on what characteristics you consider to be most “Newcomb like”. From an emotional point of view, the situation is very “Newcomb like”, even if the mathematics is different.
This sounds like a fully general excuse to support any position. What is this emotional view? If the emotions disagree with the logical analisys, why aren’t the emotions wrong? Correct emotions should be reactions to the actual state of reality.
What is this emotional view? If the emotions disagree with the logical analisys, why aren’t the emotions wrong? Correct emotions should be reactions to the actual state of reality.
We seem to be having a language difficulty. By “emotional point of view”, I mean that there are similarities in the human emotional experience of deciding Newcomb’s problem and the marriage proposal problem.
(Agree) Evolution built in (a vague approximation of) one boxing into our emotional systems. Humans actually can commit, without changing external payoffs. It isn’t a bullet proof commitment. Evolution will also try to create effective compartmentalization mechanisms so that humans can maximise signalling benefit vs actual cost to change later.
On a timescale of decades, the commitment has hardly any strength at all.
Fortunately, it isn’t meant to be. In a crude sense the emotions are playing a signalling game on a timescale of months to a couple of years. That the emotions tell us they are talking about ‘forever’ is just part of their game.
Then you agree that Joe’s commitment is not a good indicator that he will stay in the marriage for decades, so Joe did not get what he wanted by allowing Kate to make an accurate prediction that he will do what she wants?
Why, when we are discussing a problem that requires commitment on the scale of many decades, did you bring up that humans can make commitments up to maybe a couple of years?
Then you agree that Joe’s commitment is not a good indicator that he will stay in the marriage for decades, so Joe did not get what he wanted by allowing Kate to make an accurate prediction that he will do what she wants?
I haven’t said any such thing. Joe and Kate are counterfactual in as much as organic emotional responses were simplified to Kate having a predictive superpower and Joe the ability to magically (and reliably) self modify. Two real people would be somewhat more complex and their words and beliefs less literally correlated with reality.
Why, when we are discussing a problem that requires commitment on the scale of many decades, did you bring up that humans can make commitments up to maybe a couple of years?
The basic mechanism of conversation requires that I follow the flow rather than making every comment as a reply to the original post. When I learned that from a book there was an analogy about tennis involved which I found helpful.
You did say “In a crude sense the emotions are playing a signaling game on a timescale of months to a couple of years.” And the scenario does involve predictions of events which take place over the time scale of decades. Do you disagree with my assessment of the time scales, or do you somehow disagree with the conclusion?
Joe and Kate are counterfactual in as much as organic emotional responses were simplified to Kate having a predictive superpower and Joe the ability to magically (and reliably) self modify. Two real people would be somewhat more complex and their words and beliefs less literally correlated with reality.
The scenario was presented as something that actually happened, to two real people, with Kate’s beliefs literally correlating with reality.
I am comfortable with leaving my previous statements as they stand.
I think we are taking a somewhat different approach to discussion here and remind myself that my way of thinking may not be strictly better than yours, merely different (P vs J).
There are similarities in the human emotional experience of deciding Newcomb’s problem and the marriage proposal problem.
If that is true (which I am not sure of, and it is hard to tell since your vague claim doesn’t specify the common emotional experience), isn’t that just an example of how our human emotions are misleading?
I hate to have to ask this sort of question again, but would the downvoters care to explain why it is wrong for me to ask why PJEby thinks we should draw conclusions about decision theory from human emotional reactions, or to ask what particular emotional reactions he is talking about?
That’s the reason why I never get why people are against marriage contracts. Even ignoring the inherent uncertainty of love & marriage, if I walk under a bus tomorrow and lose for example all empathy due to brain damage, my current self would wish you to divorce future psychopath-me as quickly as possible.
As for the OP, good article. If anyone ever asks why I spend my time theorizing away over ‘impossible’ things like AI or decision theory I can use this as an example.
Did you mean to say you don’t understand why people are in favor of marriage contracts? I don’t see how the marriage contract helps in the bus example.
Sorry, I used the wrong terminology. I meant an prenuptial agreement. The bus example was to show that even if you precommit there is always the possibility that you will change your mind (i.e. in this case by losing empathy). I used the extreme method of brain damage because it’s completely out of your control. You cannot precommit on not being run over by a bus.
I predict, with probability ~95%, that if Joe becomes unhappy in the marriage, he and Kate will get divorced, even though Joe and Kate, who is not as powerful a predictor as Omega, currently believe otherwise. Joe is, after all, running this “timeless decision theory” on hostile hardware.
(But I hope that they remain happy, and this prediction remains hypothetical.)
Your prediction is overconfident. Less than 95% of unhappy marriages end in divorce.
Perhaps, I didn’t look up any statistics. The “~” in “~95%” was supposed to indicate my meta uncertainty that this is the precise strength of belief an ideal rationalist should have given evidence observed by me. I am confident that I am closer to the ideal probability than 0% as believed by Kate.
Apparently 45% to 50% of first marriages in America end in divorce, but this does not account for whether the marriages were unhappy. Do you have a source for your assertion? I have not found anything with a quick Google search.
http://www.ultimate-self.com/unhappy-marriage-statistics/
100% of marriages end in divorce or death.
100% of marriages that have ended ended in divorce or death.
Good point; if we conquer death then there may be some marriages that do not end. It’d be interesting to see if people move towards near-universal divorce, sci-fi-novel-style limited-term marriages, or find ways to develop infinite-term compatibility. Or stop pairing up (inconceivable to present-day humans, but such is the nature of a Singularity).
That definitely would be interesting. It would perhaps be an indicator of preferences, as opposed to the current indicator of capability. If you have tools that can alter your mind you can cheat.
Historically.
Which of those does it count as when one of the parties just leaves and becomes unfindable?
My understanding is that you’re still married until one of you goes and gets a divorce, but I can’t admit to having researched such a thing.
I suspect that getting a divorce requires some minimal amount of input from both parties—if I remember correctly I had to sign something saying that I’d received some paperwork, when mine happened, in order for it to go through.
I suspect that in the case I posited, the non-disappearing person would be able to get the disappearing person declared dead after a certain period of time, which doesn’t strictly require that the disappearing person be dead, and then remarry. If that’s accurate, that’d be a third option.
100% of marriages that have ended have ended in divorce or legal death?
Where does ‘annulment’ fit into things? Is that when it is decided to just pretend the marriage never existed in the first place.
Yes. In the Catholic Church, a “declaration of nullity” was nearly a loophole to not being able to get divorced. Basically, there were certain preconditions that were assumed to hold when getting married, and if it turns out any of those preconditions did not actually obtain, then the marriage never actually happened. For example, it is assumed that the couple wants to have children; if it turns out that one party never intended to have children, that can be grounds for a declaration of nullity.
Several legal jurisdictions have adopted this idea, but it makes little sense when one can just get divorced and there are not strict preconditions for marriage.
Wikipedia: Annulment
As long as we’re picking nits, in some places marriages can also be annulled (though of course they will insist that this is retroactive, and for some purposes it is).
That’s what I understand; an annulment means the marriage never happened. (E.g. if it’s been “consummated” then annulment is not an option. I wonder how that interacts with modern pre-consummated marriages?)
I predict with probability ~95% that if statisticians had arbitrarily decided many years ago to use 97% instead of 95% as their standard of proof, then all appearances of 95 and 97 in this comment would be reversed.
How does it change your prediction to learn that I was not considering statisticians’ arbitrary standard of proof, but I was thinking about numbers in base ten, and I had considered saying ~90% instead?
Not much for me. I think it about six times more likely that you used base ten numbers to “get to” 95% than it is you came to 95% by coincidence.
Yeah, it’s a big open problem if some humans can precommit or not, making the issue of its value all the more relevant.
No, it’s not. I don’t see any reason to believe that humans can reliably precommit, without setting up outside constraints, especially over time spans of decades.
What you have described is not Newcomb’s problem. Take what taw said, and realize that actual humans are in fact in this category:
added:
Try playing with the parameters. Maybe Kate only wants 90% certainty from Joe, and Joe is only 80% sure he’ll be happy. Then he doesn’t need a 100% precomitment, but only some kind of partial deterrent, and if Kate requires that he not resort to external self-restrictions, he can certainly self-modify partial pre-commitments into himself in the form of emotions.
Self-modification is robust, pre-commitment is robust, its detection is robust… these phenomena really aren’t going anywhere.
Replacing the certainties with 95% still does not reflect reality. I don’t think Kate can assign probability to whether she and Joe will get divorced any better than by taking the percentage of marriages, possibly in some narrow reference class they are part of, that end in divorce. Even if Joe can signal that he belongs to some favorable reference class, it still won’t work.
If they are rational enough to talk about divorce in order to avoid it, then he can make an economic commitment by writing a prenup that guarantees that any divorce becomes unfavorable. Of course, only making it relatively unfavorable will give her an incentive to leave him, so it is better if a big portion of their property is given away or burned in case of a divorce.
Yes, that is a strategy they can take, However, that sort of strategy is unnecessary in Newcomb’s problem, where you can just one-box and find the money there without having made any sort of precommitment.
I think that the translation to Newcombe’s was that committing == one boxing and hedging == two boxing.
This mapping does not work. Causal Decision Theory would commit (if available) in the marriage proposal problem, but two box in Newcomb’s problem. So the mapping does not preserve the relationship between the mapped elements.
This should be a sanity check for any scenario proposed to be equivalent to Newcomb’s problem. EDT/TDT/UDT should all do the equivalent of one-boxing, and CDT should do the equivalent of two-boxing.
CDT on Newcomb’s problem would, if possible, precommit to one-boxing as long as Omega’s prediction is based on observing the CDT agent after its commitment.
CDT in the marriage case would choose to leave once unhappy, absent specific precommitment.
So that exact mapping doesn’t work, but the problem does seem Newcomblike to me (like the transparent-boxes version, actually; which, I now realize, is like Kavka’s toxin puzzle without the vagueness of “intent”.) (ETA: assuming that Kate can reliably predict Joe, which I now see was the point under dispute to begin with.)
Would you care to share your reasoning? What is your mapping of strategies, and does it pass my sanity check? (EVT two-boxes on the transparent boxes variation.)
one-box ⇔ stay in marriage when unhappy
two-box ⇔ leave marriage when unhappy
precommit to one-boxing ⇔ precommit to staying in marriage
In both this problem and transparent-boxes Newcomb:
you don’t take the action under discussion (take boxes, leave or not) until you know whether you’ve won
if you would counterfactually take one of the choices if you were to win, you’ll lose
TDT and UDT win
CDT either precommits and wins or doesn’t and loses, as described in my previous comment
(I’m assuming that Kate can reliably predict Joe. I didn’t initially realize your objection might have more to do with that than the structure of the problem.)
If Jack and Kate were already married it really would make no sense for Jack to not get a divorce just because Kate would have never married him had she suspected he would. CDT wins, here. The fact that CDT tells Jack to precommit now doesn’t make it Newcomblike. Precommiting is a rational strategy in lots of games that aren’t Newcomb like. The whole point of Newcomb is that even if you haven’t precommitted, CDT tells you the wrong thing to do once Omega shows up.
As I said, I assumed that Kate = Omega.
Even if that assumption is fair (since it obviously isn’t true I’m not sure why we would make it**) we’re still entering the scenario too early. It’s like being told Omega is going to offer you the boxes a year before he does. Jack now has the opportunity to precommit, but Omega doesn’t give you that chance.
** I’m sure glad my girlfriend isn’t a superintelligence that can predict my actions with perfect accuracy! Am I right guys?!
Point taken; the similarity is somewhat distant. (I made that assumption to show the problem’s broadly Newcomblike structure, since I wrongly read JGWeissman as saying that the problem never had Newcomblike structure. But as you say, there is another, more qualitative difference.)
Yes, that is where my objection lies.
ETA: And the fact that in Newcomb’s problem, there is no opportunity after learning about the problem to precommit, the predictions of your behavior have already been made. So allowing precommitment in the marriage proposal problem sidesteps the problem that would be Newcomb like if Kate were a highly accurate predictor.
Causal decision theory precommits to one-boxing on Newcomb if it can and if Omega’s prediction is based on observation of the CDT agent after its opportunity to precommit.
Why is the parent comment being voted down, and its parent being voted up, when it correctly refutes the parent?
Why is the article itself being voted up, when it has been refuted? Are people so impressed by the idea of a real life Newcomb like problem that they don’t notice, even when it is pointed out, that the described story is not in fact a Newcomb like problem?
I voted it up because it is a good article. The claim “this situation is a problem of the class Newcomblike” has been refuted. If Academian had belligerently defended the ‘It’s Newcomblike’ claim in response to correction I would have reversed my upvote. As it stands the discussion both in the original post and the comments are useful. I expect it has helped clarify how the situation as it is formalized here differs from Newcomb’s problem and what changes the scenario would need to actually be a Newcomblike problem. In fact, that is a follow up post that I would like to see.
Ease up. The “it’s not actually Newcomblike” comments are being upvoted. People get it. It’s just that sometimes correction is sufficient and a spiral of downvotes isn’t desirable.
It is an article in which poor thought leads to a wrong conclusion. I don’t consider that “good”.
I wouldn’t say he was belligerent, but earlier in this thread he seemed to be Fighting a Rearguard Action Against the Truth, first saying, “it’s a big open problem if some humans can precommit or not”, and then saying the scenario still works if you replace certainties with high confidence levels, with those confidence levels also being unrealistic. I found “Self-modification is robust, pre-commitment is robust, its detection is robust… these phenomena really aren’t going anywhere.” to be particularly arrogant. He seems to have dropped out after I refuted those points.
My standard for changing this article from bad to sort of ok, would require an actual retraction of the wrong conclusion.
As it stands, someone can be led astray by reading just the article and not the comments.
Not as much as the article. And this comment, which refuted a wrong argument that the scenario really is Newcomb’s problem, at the time I asked that question, was at −2.
I am not saying everyone should vote it down so Academian loses so much karma he can never post another article. I think a small negative score is enough to make the point. A small positive score would be appropiate if he made a proper retraction. +27 is too high. I don’t think articles should get over +5 without the main point actually being correct, and they should be incredibly thought provoking to get that high.
I am also wary of making unsupportable claims that Newcomb’s problem happens in real life, which can overshadow other reasons we consider such problems, so these other reasons are forgotten when the unsupportable claim is knocked down.
I can empathise with your point of view here. Perhaps the fact that people (including me) still appreciate the post despite it getting the game theory discussion wrong is an indication that we would love to see more posts on ‘real life’ applications of decision theory!
That depends entirely on what characteristics you consider to be most “Newcomb like”. From an emotional point of view, the situation is very “Newcomb like”, even if the mathematics is different.
This sounds like a fully general excuse to support any position. What is this emotional view? If the emotions disagree with the logical analisys, why aren’t the emotions wrong? Correct emotions should be reactions to the actual state of reality.
We seem to be having a language difficulty. By “emotional point of view”, I mean that there are similarities in the human emotional experience of deciding Newcomb’s problem and the marriage proposal problem.
(Agree) Evolution built in (a vague approximation of) one boxing into our emotional systems. Humans actually can commit, without changing external payoffs. It isn’t a bullet proof commitment. Evolution will also try to create effective compartmentalization mechanisms so that humans can maximise signalling benefit vs actual cost to change later.
On a timescale of decades, the commitment has hardly any strength at all.
Fortunately, it isn’t meant to be. In a crude sense the emotions are playing a signalling game on a timescale of months to a couple of years. That the emotions tell us they are talking about ‘forever’ is just part of their game.
Then you agree that Joe’s commitment is not a good indicator that he will stay in the marriage for decades, so Joe did not get what he wanted by allowing Kate to make an accurate prediction that he will do what she wants?
Why, when we are discussing a problem that requires commitment on the scale of many decades, did you bring up that humans can make commitments up to maybe a couple of years?
I haven’t said any such thing. Joe and Kate are counterfactual in as much as organic emotional responses were simplified to Kate having a predictive superpower and Joe the ability to magically (and reliably) self modify. Two real people would be somewhat more complex and their words and beliefs less literally correlated with reality.
The basic mechanism of conversation requires that I follow the flow rather than making every comment as a reply to the original post. When I learned that from a book there was an analogy about tennis involved which I found helpful.
You did say “In a crude sense the emotions are playing a signaling game on a timescale of months to a couple of years.” And the scenario does involve predictions of events which take place over the time scale of decades. Do you disagree with my assessment of the time scales, or do you somehow disagree with the conclusion?
The scenario was presented as something that actually happened, to two real people, with Kate’s beliefs literally correlating with reality.
I am comfortable with leaving my previous statements as they stand.
I think we are taking a somewhat different approach to discussion here and remind myself that my way of thinking may not be strictly better than yours, merely different (P vs J).
If that is true (which I am not sure of, and it is hard to tell since your vague claim doesn’t specify the common emotional experience), isn’t that just an example of how our human emotions are misleading?
I hate to have to ask this sort of question again, but would the downvoters care to explain why it is wrong for me to ask why PJEby thinks we should draw conclusions about decision theory from human emotional reactions, or to ask what particular emotional reactions he is talking about?
That’s the reason why I never get why people are against marriage contracts. Even ignoring the inherent uncertainty of love & marriage, if I walk under a bus tomorrow and lose for example all empathy due to brain damage, my current self would wish you to divorce future psychopath-me as quickly as possible.
As for the OP, good article. If anyone ever asks why I spend my time theorizing away over ‘impossible’ things like AI or decision theory I can use this as an example.
Did you mean to say you don’t understand why people are in favor of marriage contracts? I don’t see how the marriage contract helps in the bus example.
Sorry, I used the wrong terminology. I meant an prenuptial agreement. The bus example was to show that even if you precommit there is always the possibility that you will change your mind (i.e. in this case by losing empathy). I used the extreme method of brain damage because it’s completely out of your control. You cannot precommit on not being run over by a bus.
I’m pretty sure thinking about scenarios with low probability, especially over the long term, is considered “unromantic”.
Disclaimer: commenter is generally anti-marriage and not typically romantic.