I’m not sure William Newcomb would agree to pose as Omega, and if you’re going to change the problem, you really ought to explore the ramifications. Like what happens if the prediction is wrong—it becomes a boring “convince the agent you’ll one-box, then two-box” problem if you assume only human-like predictive abilities. Being a cloaked psychopath in a community of cooperators probably nets you more points than just cooperating all the time.
Also, Hofstadter’s idea of superrationality deserves a link in the “other sources” list.
I considered calling the players A and B, but several of the folks who proofread this found that hard to understand, so I changed it to use the same names as Critch’s post: “you” and “newcomb”.
as for prediction power, a core point I’m making is that no, humans really are good enough at this to be able to administer the test. it is possible to trick people, but I predict that it’s possible to do much better than chance at predicting what any given human would do in a trust problem. certainly scammers exist, but they don’t succeed as often as all that. a big part of why is that over an extended period of time, you can include previous behavior on newcomblike problems as evidence about whether an agent will two box again. if you two box once, you immediately lose trust. if you reliably do not two box, in a variety of situations, people will learn to trust you.
humans really are good enough at this to be able to administer the test
laugh. Not even close.
much better than chance
this is my objection. Changing the prediction from “has never been wrong, in enough trials to overcome a fairly conservative prior about trickery vs predictive power” to ’better than chance” completely changes the problem.
If the guess is somewhat better than chance, it matters a lot how much better, and in which directions, and under what conditions the guesser is wrong. I think it’d pay to study how to manipulate the guesser so he expects one-boxing, and then two-box.
I’m not sure William Newcomb would agree to pose as Omega, and if you’re going to change the problem, you really ought to explore the ramifications. Like what happens if the prediction is wrong—it becomes a boring “convince the agent you’ll one-box, then two-box” problem if you assume only human-like predictive abilities. Being a cloaked psychopath in a community of cooperators probably nets you more points than just cooperating all the time.
Also, Hofstadter’s idea of superrationality deserves a link in the “other sources” list.
I think this is explored in Critch’s post (which is linked at the bottom)
http://acritch.com/deserving-trust/
I considered calling the players A and B, but several of the folks who proofread this found that hard to understand, so I changed it to use the same names as Critch’s post: “you” and “newcomb”.
as for prediction power, a core point I’m making is that no, humans really are good enough at this to be able to administer the test. it is possible to trick people, but I predict that it’s possible to do much better than chance at predicting what any given human would do in a trust problem. certainly scammers exist, but they don’t succeed as often as all that. a big part of why is that over an extended period of time, you can include previous behavior on newcomblike problems as evidence about whether an agent will two box again. if you two box once, you immediately lose trust. if you reliably do not two box, in a variety of situations, people will learn to trust you.
laugh. Not even close.
this is my objection. Changing the prediction from “has never been wrong, in enough trials to overcome a fairly conservative prior about trickery vs predictive power” to ’better than chance” completely changes the problem.
If the guess is somewhat better than chance, it matters a lot how much better, and in which directions, and under what conditions the guesser is wrong. I think it’d pay to study how to manipulate the guesser so he expects one-boxing, and then two-box.