We could do a modified Newcomb’s Problem where the perfectly honest, all knowing Omega tells you that you’re not the simulation but the actual person and the simulation has already been done which seems to resolve that possibility discussed above.
An All-knowing Omega by definition contains a simulation of this exact scenario.
And in that simulation they aren’t being perfectly honest, but I still believe they are.
If Omega is in fact all-knowing, all possible scenarios exist in simulation within it’s infinite knowledge.
This is why throwing all-knowing entities into problems always buggers things up
I feel that finding a way for CDT to answer Newcomb’s Problem via the specifics of the way Omega predicts your reactions is a similar response—trying to respecify the argument in such a way that an answer can be found rather than looking at the abstracted conception of the argument.
Given the abstracted conception, prediction through simulation seems to be the most probable explanation. This results in CDT working.
It’s not starting from wanting CDT to work, it’s starting from examining the problem, working out the situation from the evidence, and then working out what CDT would say to do.
If I can’t apply reason when using CDT, CDT will fail when I’m presented with an “opportunity” to buy a magic rock that costs £10,000, and will make me win the lottery within a month.
Replace Omega with a genius Psychologist who only gets it right 99% of the time and CDT will have you walk off with $1000 while correct thinking leaves you with $1,000,000 almost all of the time, it’s just that in that scenario people will uselessly argue that the 1% chance to get lucky somehow makes it rational.
How is the genius psychologist likely to be predicting your actions?
To me, it seems probable that he’s simulating you, imperfectly, within his own mind.
How would you explain his methodology?
EDIT: to clarify my reasoning, I simulate people, myself included, often. Generally when I want to predict their actions.
I’m not very good at it.
Were I a genius psychologist, and hence obviously great at simulating people, I don’t see why I would be any less likely to simulate people.
Maybe she had her grad students talk with you on various subjects and subject you to various stealth psychological experiments over the last 10 years and watched it all on video, all based on your signing an agreement to take part in a psychological experiment that didn’t specify a duration 15 years ago that was followed by a dummy experiment and that you promptly forgot about.
Maybe she is secretly your mother.
Maybe she is just that good and tell it by the way you shaked her hand.
In any case 99% shouldn’t require imagining the actions of a reflectively indistinguishable from you copy of you.
Those are all ways of her having gathered the evidence.
From the evidence, how has she reached the conclusion?
The most plausible scenario for getting from evidence to conclusion is mental simulation as far as I can tell.
You haven’t even proposed a single alternative yet
EDIT: (did you edit this in, or did I miss it?)
In any case 99% shouldn’t require imagining the actions of a reflectively indistinguishable from you copy of you.
You expect the copy to be able to tell it’s a copy? Why? Why would the psychologist simulate it discovering that it is the copy?
When you simulate someone’s reaction to possible courses of action, do you simulate them as being aware of being a simulation?
None of my internal simulations have ever been aware of being simulations.
In any case 99% shouldn’t require imagining the actions of a reflectively indistinguishable from you copy of you.
You expect the copy to be able to tell it’s a copy? Why? Why would the psychologist simulate it discovering that it is the copy? When you simulate someone’s reaction to possible courses of action, do you simulate them as being aware of being a simulation?
None of my internal simulations have ever been aware of being simulations.
There are four possibilities:
The copy never wonders whether it’s a copy.
The copy wonders about being a copy and concludes that it is.
The copy concludes that it cannot be a copy.
The copy is from it’s point of view reflectively indistinguishable from you.
Only in case 4. will you seriously have to wonder whether you are a copy. In case 1. you will know that you are not as soon as you consider the possibility, case 2. is irrelevant unless you also assume that the real you will also conclude that it’s a copy, which is logically inconsistent.
Nevertheless case 1. should be sufficient for predicting the actions you take once you conclude that you are not a copy to a reasonable accuracy.
Case 1 is sufficient to predict my actions IFF I would never wonder about whether I was a copy.
Given that I would in fact wonder whether I was a copy, and that that thought-process is significant to the scenario, Case 1 seems likely to be woefully inadequate for simulating me.
Case 4 is therefore much more plausible for a genius psychologist (with 99% accuracy) from my PoV.
The psychologist tells you that she simply isn’t capable of case 4 (there are all sorts of at least somewhat verifiable facts that you would expect yourself to know and that she doesn’t [e. g. details about your job that have to make sense and be consistent with a whole web of other details, that she couldn’t plausibly have spied out or invented a convincing equivalent thereof herself]). Given that you just wondered you can’t be a simulation. What do you do?
Case 4 just requires that the simulation not recognise that it is a simulation when it considers whether or not it’s a simulation, ie. that whatever question it asks itself, it finds an answer.
It can’t actually check for consistency, remember, it’s a simulation, if it would find an inconsistency “change detail [removing inconsistency], run” or “insert thought ‘yep, that’s all consistent’; run”
If she’s capable of case 1, she’s capable of case 4, even if she has to insert the memory on it being requested, rather than prior to request.
The stealth psychological experiments could have included an isomorphic problem, or she could be using a more sophisticated version of
New ager: one box
Thinks time travel conflicts with free will: two box
uses EDT: one box
TDT/UDT; one box
bog standard CDT: two box
CDT, but takes simulation hypothesis seriously: one box if thinking it possible that in a simulation, two box otherwise.
Stealth psychological experiments you forgot about allowed her to determine necessary and/or sufficient conditions for you assuming that you might be in a simulation that you yourself are unaware of, and she set the whole thing up in a such a way that she can tell with high confidence whether you do.
The categorisation possibility is reasonable. Personally I would estimate the probability of 99% accuracy achieved through categorisation lower than the probability of 99% accuracy achieved through mental simulation, but it’s certainly a competitive hypothesis.
Assuming she tells you that she predicted your actions through some unspecified mechanism other than imagining your thought process in sufficient detail for the imagined version to ask itself whether it just exists in her imagination, what do you do?
I question what reason I have to assume she’s being honest, and is in fact correct.
Given her psychological genius she is likely correct about the methods she used, although not certainly (she may not be good at self-analysis).
If I conclude that:
either A) she is being honest or B) the whole pay-off is a lie
Then I will probably act on the second most plausible (to my mind) scenario.
I’ve yet to work out what that is.
Repeating the experiment often enough to get statistics that are precise enough for 99% accuracy would be extremely costly with the standard pay-out scheme; so while I jumped towards that as my secondary scenario it’s actually very implausible.
The psychologist is hooked up to a revolutionary lie detector that is 99% reliable, there is the standing price of $ 1,000,000,000 for anyone who can after calibration deceive it on more than 10 out of 50 statements (with no further calibration during the trial). The psychologist is known to have tried the test three times and failed (with 1, 4, and 3 successful deceptions).
Well, the psychologist’s track record of successful lying is within a plausible range of the 99% reliability.
With the payoffs decreased by a factor of 100, and the lie detector added in, my best guess would be that she’s repeated the experiment often, and gathered up a statistical model of people to which she can compare me, and to which I will be added.
In such a circumstance I think I would still tend to one-box, but the reason is slightly different.
I value the wellbeing of people who are like me. If I one-box, others like me will be more likely to receive the $10,000; rather than just the $10
Are you sure you are actually trying to make a valid defense of CDT and not just looking for excuses?
What would you do if that somehow were not a consideration? (What would you do if you were more selfish, what would an otherwise identical more selfish simulation of you do, what would you do if you could be reasonably sure that you won’t affect the payoff for anyone else you would care about for some reason that doesn’t change your estimation of the accuracy of the prediction and the way it came about [e. g. you are the last subject and everyone before you for whom it would matter was asked what they would have done if they had been the last subject]?)
Are you sure you’re not just trying to destroy CDT rather than think rationally?
If you think I am being irrationally defensive of CDT, check the OTHER thread off my first reply.
You seem to be trying very hard indeed to tear down CDT.
CDT gives the correct result in the original posted scenario, for reasons which are not immediately obvious but are none-the-less present.
You appear to have accepted that, what with your gradually moving further and further from the original scenario.
In your scenario, designed specifically to make CDT not work, it would still work for me, because of who I am.
If I was more selfish, I don’t see CDT working in your scenario. If there is a reason why it should work, I haven’t realised it. But then, it’s a scenario contrived with the specific intention of CDT not working.
Your “everyone was the last subject” scenario breaks down somewhat; if everyone is told they are the last subject then I can’t take being told that I’m the last subject seriously.
If I AM the last subject, I will be extremely skeptical, given the sample-size I expect to be needed for the 99% accuracy, and thus I will tend to behave as though I am not the last subject due to not believing I am the last subject.
My original point was simply that the starting post, while claiming to show problems with CDT, failed. It used a scenario that didn’t illustrate any problem with CDT.
Do you still disagree with my original point?
EDIT: You seem to think that I’m doing my best to defend CDT. I’m really not, I have no major vested interest in defending CDT except when it was unfairly attacked. Adambell has posted two scenarios where CDT works fine, with claims that CDT doesn’t work in those scenarios.
Almost everyone agrees that CDT two-boxes in the original scenario, both proponents and opponents of CDT. The only way to make CDT “work” are excuses that are completely irrelevant to the original point of the scenario and amount to deliberately understand the scenario as different than intended. This discussion thread has shown that the existence of such excuses is not implied by the structure of the problem, so any issues with a particular formulation are irrelevant. It’s sort of like arguing that EDT is right in the smoke lesion problem because any evidence that smoking and cancer are caused by lesions rather than cancer by smoking would be dubious and avoiding smoking just to be sure would be prudent.
So because I disagree with your consensus, my rational objection must be wrong?
I didn’t change the scenario. I looked at the scenario, and asked what someone applying CDT rationally, who understood that it’s impossible to tell whether you’re being simulated or not, would do.
And, as it happened, I got the answer “they would one-box, because they’re probably a simulation”.
If I posted a scenario where an EDT person would choose to walk through a minefield, because they’ve never seen anyone walk through a minefield and thus don’t consider walking through a minefield to be evidence that they won’t live much longer, would you not think my scenario-crafting skills were a bit weak?
So because I disagree with your consensus, my rational objection must be wrong?
Not wrong, beside the point. Objections like that don’t touch the core of the problem at all. Finding clever ways for decision theory differences in example cases not to matter doesn’t change the validity of the decision theories.
Your mine field example is different in that the original formulation of Newcomb’s problem gets the point across for almost everyone while I’m not sure what the point in the mine field example would be. That EDT would be even stupider than it already is if it restricted what kinds of evidence could be considered? Well, yes, of course. I won’t defend EDT, it’s wronger than CDT (though at least a bit better defined).
Not wrong, beside the point. Objections like that don’t touch the core of the problem at all. Finding clever ways for decision theory differences in example cases not to matter doesn’t change the validity of the decision theories.
CDT is seemingly imperfect. I have acknowledged such.
But pointing to CDT as failing when it doesn’t fail doesn’t help. Pointing to where it DOES fail helps.
When I see someone getting the right answer for the wrong reason I criticise their reasoning.
The point you should take away from newcomb’s paradox isn’t that CDT fails (in some formulations it seems to, in others it’s just hard to apply) it’s that CDT is really hard to apply, so using something that gets the right answer easily is better.
Newcomb’s problem tries to show that CDT only caring about things caused by your decisions afterwards can be a weakness by providing an example where things caused by accurate predictions of your decisions outweight those things. Everything else is just window dressing. You are using the window dressing to explain how you care about these other things caused by the decision, so you coincidentally act just as if you also cared about the causes of accurate predictions of your decisions. But as long as you make out the things caused by the decision that should, according to the intention of the problem statement, cause the less desirable things afterwards actually cause more desirable things afterwards you are not addressing Newcomb’s problem. You are just showing that what is a particular formulation of Newcomb’s problem for most people isn’t a formulation of Newcomb’s problem for you. In a way that doesn’t generalize.
The “accurate prediction” is a central part of Newcomb’s problem. The issue of whether it’s possible (I feel it is) and IN WHAT WAYS it is possible, are central to the validity of Newcomb’s problem.
If all possible ways of the accurate prediction were to make CDT work, then Newcomb’s problem wouldn’t be a problem for CDT. (apart from the practical one of it being hard to apply correctly)
At present, it seems like there are possible ways that make CDT work, and possible ways that make CDT not work. If it were to someday be proved that all possible ways make CDT work, that would be a major proof. If it were to be proved (beyond all doubt) that a possible way was completely incompatible with CDT, that could also be important for AI creation.
I will admit, given the prevalence of CDT users to fail in this scenario, my objection isn’t that strong, CDT tends to lead people to the wrong answer in this scenario, so it’s not useful to them.
I suggest that the way you use ‘CDT’ is actually a hop and a jump in the direction of TDT. When you already have a box containing $1,000,000 in your hand you are looking at a $10,000 sitting on the table and deciding not to take it. Even though you know that nothing you do now has any way of causing the money you already have to disappear. Pure CDT agents just don’t do that.
If you don’t know whether you’re a simulation or not, you don’t know whether or not your taking the second box will cause the real-world money not to be there.
And, as a simulation, you probably won’t get to spend any of that sim-world money you’ve got there.
To be fair, I don’t particularly use CDT consciously, because it seems to be flawed somehow (or at least, harder to use than intuition, and I’m lazy). But I came across newcomb’s paradox, thought about it, and realised that in the traditional formulation I’m probably a simulation.
I don’t see why realising I’m probably a simulation is something a CDT agent can’t do?
If you don’t know whether you’re a simulation or not, you don’t know whether or not your taking the second box will cause the real-world money not to be there. And, as a simulation, you probably won’t get to spend any of that sim-world money you’ve got there.
Replace ‘Omega’ with Patrick Jane. No sims. What do you do?
A) I one-box. I will one-box in most reasonable scenarios.
B)How do you predict other people’s actions?
Personally, I mentally simulate them. Not particularly well, mind, but I do mentally simulate them.
Am I unusual in this?
I’ve never watched the Mentalist, but if Patrick Jane is sufficiently good to get a 99% success rate, I’m guessing his simulations are pretty damn good.
An All-knowing Omega by definition contains a simulation of this exact scenario.
No, he doesn’t (necessarily). He could prove the inevitable outcome based of elements of the known state of your brain without ever simulating anything. If you read reduction of could you will find a somewhat similar distinction that may make things clearer.
And in that simulation they aren’t being perfectly honest, but I still believe they are.
… So we can’t conclude this.
If I can’t apply reason when using CDT, CDT will fail when I’m presented with an “opportunity” to buy a magic rock that costs £10,000, and will make me win the lottery within a month.
This suggests you don’t really understand the problem (or perhaps CDT). That is not the same kind of reasoning.
No, he doesn’t (necessarily). He could prove the inevitable outcome based of elements of the known state of your brain without ever simulating anything. If you read reduction of could you will find a somewhat similar distinction that may make things clearer.
Does he not know the answer to “what will happen after this” with regards to every point in the scenario?
If he doesn’t, is he all-knowing?
If he does know the answer at every point, in what way doesn’t he contain the entire scenario?
EDIT: A non-all-knowing superintelligence could presumably find ways other than simulation of getting my answer, as I said simulation just strikes me as the most probable. If you think I should update my probability estimate of the other methods, that’s a perfectly reasonable objection to my logic re: a non-all-knowing superint.
EDIT: A non-all-knowing superintelligence could presumably find ways other than simulation of getting my answer, as I said simulation just strikes me as the most probable.
Certainly. That is what I consider Omega doing when I think about these problems. It is a useful intuition pump, something we can get our head around.
An All-knowing Omega by definition contains a simulation of this exact scenario. And in that simulation they aren’t being perfectly honest, but I still believe they are.
If Omega is in fact all-knowing, all possible scenarios exist in simulation within it’s infinite knowledge.
This is why throwing all-knowing entities into problems always buggers things up
Given the abstracted conception, prediction through simulation seems to be the most probable explanation. This results in CDT working.
It’s not starting from wanting CDT to work, it’s starting from examining the problem, working out the situation from the evidence, and then working out what CDT would say to do.
If I can’t apply reason when using CDT, CDT will fail when I’m presented with an “opportunity” to buy a magic rock that costs £10,000, and will make me win the lottery within a month.
Sigh.
You are missing the point.
Replace Omega with a genius Psychologist who only gets it right 99% of the time and CDT will have you walk off with $1000 while correct thinking leaves you with $1,000,000 almost all of the time, it’s just that in that scenario people will uselessly argue that the 1% chance to get lucky somehow makes it rational.
How is the genius psychologist likely to be predicting your actions?
To me, it seems probable that he’s simulating you, imperfectly, within his own mind.
How would you explain his methodology?
EDIT: to clarify my reasoning, I simulate people, myself included, often. Generally when I want to predict their actions. I’m not very good at it. Were I a genius psychologist, and hence obviously great at simulating people, I don’t see why I would be any less likely to simulate people.
She doesn’t tell you in the scenario.
Maybe she had her grad students talk with you on various subjects and subject you to various stealth psychological experiments over the last 10 years and watched it all on video, all based on your signing an agreement to take part in a psychological experiment that didn’t specify a duration 15 years ago that was followed by a dummy experiment and that you promptly forgot about.
Maybe she is secretly your mother.
Maybe she is just that good and tell it by the way you shaked her hand.
In any case 99% shouldn’t require imagining the actions of a reflectively indistinguishable from you copy of you.
Those are all ways of her having gathered the evidence.
From the evidence, how has she reached the conclusion?
The most plausible scenario for getting from evidence to conclusion is mental simulation as far as I can tell.
You haven’t even proposed a single alternative yet
EDIT: (did you edit this in, or did I miss it?)
You expect the copy to be able to tell it’s a copy? Why? Why would the psychologist simulate it discovering that it is the copy? When you simulate someone’s reaction to possible courses of action, do you simulate them as being aware of being a simulation?
None of my internal simulations have ever been aware of being simulations.
There are four possibilities:
The copy never wonders whether it’s a copy.
The copy wonders about being a copy and concludes that it is.
The copy concludes that it cannot be a copy.
The copy is from it’s point of view reflectively indistinguishable from you.
Only in case 4. will you seriously have to wonder whether you are a copy. In case 1. you will know that you are not as soon as you consider the possibility, case 2. is irrelevant unless you also assume that the real you will also conclude that it’s a copy, which is logically inconsistent.
Nevertheless case 1. should be sufficient for predicting the actions you take once you conclude that you are not a copy to a reasonable accuracy.
Case 1 is sufficient to predict my actions IFF I would never wonder about whether I was a copy.
Given that I would in fact wonder whether I was a copy, and that that thought-process is significant to the scenario, Case 1 seems likely to be woefully inadequate for simulating me.
Case 4 is therefore much more plausible for a genius psychologist (with 99% accuracy) from my PoV.
The psychologist tells you that she simply isn’t capable of case 4 (there are all sorts of at least somewhat verifiable facts that you would expect yourself to know and that she doesn’t [e. g. details about your job that have to make sense and be consistent with a whole web of other details, that she couldn’t plausibly have spied out or invented a convincing equivalent thereof herself]). Given that you just wondered you can’t be a simulation. What do you do?
I know she’s lying.
Case 4 just requires that the simulation not recognise that it is a simulation when it considers whether or not it’s a simulation, ie. that whatever question it asks itself, it finds an answer. It can’t actually check for consistency, remember, it’s a simulation, if it would find an inconsistency “change detail [removing inconsistency], run” or “insert thought ‘yep, that’s all consistent’; run”
If she’s capable of case 1, she’s capable of case 4, even if she has to insert the memory on it being requested, rather than prior to request.
The stealth psychological experiments could have included an isomorphic problem, or she could be using a more sophisticated version of
New ager: one box
Thinks time travel conflicts with free will: two box
uses EDT: one box
TDT/UDT; one box
bog standard CDT: two box
CDT, but takes simulation hypothesis seriously: one box if thinking it possible that in a simulation, two box otherwise.
Stealth psychological experiments you forgot about allowed her to determine necessary and/or sufficient conditions for you assuming that you might be in a simulation that you yourself are unaware of, and she set the whole thing up in a such a way that she can tell with high confidence whether you do.
The categorisation possibility is reasonable. Personally I would estimate the probability of 99% accuracy achieved through categorisation lower than the probability of 99% accuracy achieved through mental simulation, but it’s certainly a competitive hypothesis.
Assuming she tells you that she predicted your actions through some unspecified mechanism other than imagining your thought process in sufficient detail for the imagined version to ask itself whether it just exists in her imagination, what do you do?
I question what reason I have to assume she’s being honest, and is in fact correct.
Given her psychological genius she is likely correct about the methods she used, although not certainly (she may not be good at self-analysis).
If I conclude that: either A) she is being honest or B) the whole pay-off is a lie Then I will probably act on the second most plausible (to my mind) scenario. I’ve yet to work out what that is. Repeating the experiment often enough to get statistics that are precise enough for 99% accuracy would be extremely costly with the standard pay-out scheme; so while I jumped towards that as my secondary scenario it’s actually very implausible.
Reduce both payoffs by a factor of 100.
The psychologist is hooked up to a revolutionary lie detector that is 99% reliable, there is the standing price of $ 1,000,000,000 for anyone who can after calibration deceive it on more than 10 out of 50 statements (with no further calibration during the trial). The psychologist is known to have tried the test three times and failed (with 1, 4, and 3 successful deceptions).
Well, the psychologist’s track record of successful lying is within a plausible range of the 99% reliability.
With the payoffs decreased by a factor of 100, and the lie detector added in, my best guess would be that she’s repeated the experiment often, and gathered up a statistical model of people to which she can compare me, and to which I will be added. In such a circumstance I think I would still tend to one-box, but the reason is slightly different.
I value the wellbeing of people who are like me. If I one-box, others like me will be more likely to receive the $10,000; rather than just the $10
Are you sure you are actually trying to make a valid defense of CDT and not just looking for excuses?
What would you do if that somehow were not a consideration? (What would you do if you were more selfish, what would an otherwise identical more selfish simulation of you do, what would you do if you could be reasonably sure that you won’t affect the payoff for anyone else you would care about for some reason that doesn’t change your estimation of the accuracy of the prediction and the way it came about [e. g. you are the last subject and everyone before you for whom it would matter was asked what they would have done if they had been the last subject]?)
Are you sure you’re not just trying to destroy CDT rather than think rationally? If you think I am being irrationally defensive of CDT, check the OTHER thread off my first reply. You seem to be trying very hard indeed to tear down CDT.
CDT gives the correct result in the original posted scenario, for reasons which are not immediately obvious but are none-the-less present. You appear to have accepted that, what with your gradually moving further and further from the original scenario.
In your scenario, designed specifically to make CDT not work, it would still work for me, because of who I am.
If I was more selfish, I don’t see CDT working in your scenario. If there is a reason why it should work, I haven’t realised it. But then, it’s a scenario contrived with the specific intention of CDT not working.
Your “everyone was the last subject” scenario breaks down somewhat; if everyone is told they are the last subject then I can’t take being told that I’m the last subject seriously. If I AM the last subject, I will be extremely skeptical, given the sample-size I expect to be needed for the 99% accuracy, and thus I will tend to behave as though I am not the last subject due to not believing I am the last subject.
My original point was simply that the starting post, while claiming to show problems with CDT, failed. It used a scenario that didn’t illustrate any problem with CDT. Do you still disagree with my original point?
EDIT: You seem to think that I’m doing my best to defend CDT. I’m really not, I have no major vested interest in defending CDT except when it was unfairly attacked. Adambell has posted two scenarios where CDT works fine, with claims that CDT doesn’t work in those scenarios.
Almost everyone agrees that CDT two-boxes in the original scenario, both proponents and opponents of CDT. The only way to make CDT “work” are excuses that are completely irrelevant to the original point of the scenario and amount to deliberately understand the scenario as different than intended. This discussion thread has shown that the existence of such excuses is not implied by the structure of the problem, so any issues with a particular formulation are irrelevant. It’s sort of like arguing that EDT is right in the smoke lesion problem because any evidence that smoking and cancer are caused by lesions rather than cancer by smoking would be dubious and avoiding smoking just to be sure would be prudent.
So because I disagree with your consensus, my rational objection must be wrong?
I didn’t change the scenario. I looked at the scenario, and asked what someone applying CDT rationally, who understood that it’s impossible to tell whether you’re being simulated or not, would do. And, as it happened, I got the answer “they would one-box, because they’re probably a simulation”.
If I posted a scenario where an EDT person would choose to walk through a minefield, because they’ve never seen anyone walk through a minefield and thus don’t consider walking through a minefield to be evidence that they won’t live much longer, would you not think my scenario-crafting skills were a bit weak?
Not wrong, beside the point. Objections like that don’t touch the core of the problem at all. Finding clever ways for decision theory differences in example cases not to matter doesn’t change the validity of the decision theories.
Your mine field example is different in that the original formulation of Newcomb’s problem gets the point across for almost everyone while I’m not sure what the point in the mine field example would be. That EDT would be even stupider than it already is if it restricted what kinds of evidence could be considered? Well, yes, of course. I won’t defend EDT, it’s wronger than CDT (though at least a bit better defined).
CDT is seemingly imperfect. I have acknowledged such.
But pointing to CDT as failing when it doesn’t fail doesn’t help. Pointing to where it DOES fail helps.
When I see someone getting the right answer for the wrong reason I criticise their reasoning.
The point you should take away from newcomb’s paradox isn’t that CDT fails (in some formulations it seems to, in others it’s just hard to apply) it’s that CDT is really hard to apply, so using something that gets the right answer easily is better.
Newcomb’s problem tries to show that CDT only caring about things caused by your decisions afterwards can be a weakness by providing an example where things caused by accurate predictions of your decisions outweight those things. Everything else is just window dressing. You are using the window dressing to explain how you care about these other things caused by the decision, so you coincidentally act just as if you also cared about the causes of accurate predictions of your decisions. But as long as you make out the things caused by the decision that should, according to the intention of the problem statement, cause the less desirable things afterwards actually cause more desirable things afterwards you are not addressing Newcomb’s problem. You are just showing that what is a particular formulation of Newcomb’s problem for most people isn’t a formulation of Newcomb’s problem for you. In a way that doesn’t generalize.
The “accurate prediction” is a central part of Newcomb’s problem. The issue of whether it’s possible (I feel it is) and IN WHAT WAYS it is possible, are central to the validity of Newcomb’s problem.
If all possible ways of the accurate prediction were to make CDT work, then Newcomb’s problem wouldn’t be a problem for CDT. (apart from the practical one of it being hard to apply correctly)
At present, it seems like there are possible ways that make CDT work, and possible ways that make CDT not work. If it were to someday be proved that all possible ways make CDT work, that would be a major proof. If it were to be proved (beyond all doubt) that a possible way was completely incompatible with CDT, that could also be important for AI creation.
I suggest that the way you use ‘CDT’ is actually a hop and a jump in the direction of TDT. When you already have a box containing $1,000,000 in your hand you are looking at a $10,000 sitting on the table and deciding not to take it. Even though you know that nothing you do now has any way of causing the money you already have to disappear. Pure CDT agents just don’t do that.
If you don’t know whether you’re a simulation or not, you don’t know whether or not your taking the second box will cause the real-world money not to be there. And, as a simulation, you probably won’t get to spend any of that sim-world money you’ve got there.
To be fair, I don’t particularly use CDT consciously, because it seems to be flawed somehow (or at least, harder to use than intuition, and I’m lazy). But I came across newcomb’s paradox, thought about it, and realised that in the traditional formulation I’m probably a simulation.
I don’t see why realising I’m probably a simulation is something a CDT agent can’t do?
Replace ‘Omega’ with Patrick Jane. No sims. What do you do?
A) I one-box. I will one-box in most reasonable scenarios.
B)How do you predict other people’s actions?
Personally, I mentally simulate them. Not particularly well, mind, but I do mentally simulate them. Am I unusual in this?
I’ve never watched the Mentalist, but if Patrick Jane is sufficiently good to get a 99% success rate, I’m guessing his simulations are pretty damn good.
Patrick Jane is a fictional character in the TV show The Mentalist. He’s a former (fake) psychic who now uses his cold reading skills to fight crime.
Cheers, had been looking that up, oddly my edit to my post didn’t seem to update it.
No, he doesn’t (necessarily). He could prove the inevitable outcome based of elements of the known state of your brain without ever simulating anything. If you read reduction of could you will find a somewhat similar distinction that may make things clearer.
… So we can’t conclude this.
This suggests you don’t really understand the problem (or perhaps CDT). That is not the same kind of reasoning.
Does he not know the answer to “what will happen after this” with regards to every point in the scenario?
If he doesn’t, is he all-knowing?
If he does know the answer at every point, in what way doesn’t he contain the entire scenario?
EDIT: A non-all-knowing superintelligence could presumably find ways other than simulation of getting my answer, as I said simulation just strikes me as the most probable. If you think I should update my probability estimate of the other methods, that’s a perfectly reasonable objection to my logic re: a non-all-knowing superint.
Certainly. That is what I consider Omega doing when I think about these problems. It is a useful intuition pump, something we can get our head around.