You are completely right that there is a somewhat illicit factor-of-1000 intuition pump in a certain direction in the normal problem specification, which makes it a bit one-sided. Will McAskill and I had half-written a paper on this and related points regarding decision-theoretic uncertainty and Newcomb’s problem before discovering that Nozick had already considered it (even if very few people have read or remembered his commentary on this).
We did still work out though that you can use this idea to create compound problems where for any reasonable distribution of credences in the types of decision theory, you should one-box on one of them and two-box on the other: something that all the (first order) decision theories agree is wrong. So much the worse for them, we think. I’ve stopped looking into this, but I think Will has a draft paper where he talks about this alongside some other issues.
Carl,
You are completely right that there is a somewhat illicit factor-of-1000 intuition pump in a certain direction in the normal problem specification, which makes it a bit one-sided. Will McAskill and I had half-written a paper on this and related points regarding decision-theoretic uncertainty and Newcomb’s problem before discovering that Nozick had already considered it (even if very few people have read or remembered his commentary on this).
We did still work out though that you can use this idea to create compound problems where for any reasonable distribution of credences in the types of decision theory, you should one-box on one of them and two-box on the other: something that all the (first order) decision theories agree is wrong. So much the worse for them, we think. I’ve stopped looking into this, but I think Will has a draft paper where he talks about this alongside some other issues.
Thanks, I’ll ask him for a copy.