This is really cool puzzle. By accepting the £10, you’re in a conditional “Alpha never sent you the money”, but by refusing you’re in conditional “Alpha sent you the money”. However, that choice doesn’t actually affect Alpha sending or not sending you the money. This is unlike the Newcomb’s problem, where you can truly choose, acausally, what the opaque box will contain.
What gets me is the peculiarly elaborate pitfall into which I, at least, fell.
Suppose you said: “Invent a thought-experiment which could trick people who know to one-box in the classic Newcomb’s paradox, into thinking that here was a higher-order analogue; the source of the error to be, that people who reason wrongly do experience a higher payoff in this case.”
Perhaps it should be called Armstrong’s trap. But did he make it by design, or did he just fall into it first?
It’s all built on Drescher’s version, just stripped down.
And I didn’t fall into Drescher’s trap: I incorrectly stated the correct answer, then thought about it really hard and really long, and correctly stated the correct answer.
This is really cool puzzle. By accepting the £10, you’re in a conditional “Alpha never sent you the money”, but by refusing you’re in conditional “Alpha sent you the money”. However, that choice doesn’t actually affect Alpha sending or not sending you the money. This is unlike the Newcomb’s problem, where you can truly choose, acausally, what the opaque box will contain.
What gets me is the peculiarly elaborate pitfall into which I, at least, fell.
Suppose you said: “Invent a thought-experiment which could trick people who know to one-box in the classic Newcomb’s paradox, into thinking that here was a higher-order analogue; the source of the error to be, that people who reason wrongly do experience a higher payoff in this case.”
Perhaps it should be called Armstrong’s trap. But did he make it by design, or did he just fall into it first?
It’s all built on Drescher’s version, just stripped down.
And I didn’t fall into Drescher’s trap: I incorrectly stated the correct answer, then thought about it really hard and really long, and correctly stated the correct answer.