I’m going to post this anyway since its blog-day and not important-quality-writing day but I’m not sure this blog has much of a purpose anymore.
I liked the characterization of decision theory and the comment that the problem naively seems trivial from this perspective. Also liked the description of Newcomb’s problem as a version of the prisoners dilemma. So it totally had a purpose!
Thanks a lot for the link. I’ll put it in the reading list (if you don’t mind).
I would be interested to hear what you think about the more technical version of the problem. Do you also think that that can have no good solution, or do you think that a solution just won’t have the nice philosophical consequences?
Also, I’m excited to know a smart waterfall apologist and if you’re up for it I would really like to talk more with you about the argument in your thesis when I have thought about it a bit more.