Arjun Panickssery's Shortform

Arjun Panickssery

This is a special post for quick takes by Arjun Panickssery. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

Newcomb's Problem creates an apparent conflict between
1) Dominance: pick the choice that never leaves you worse off
2) EV: pick the choice that maximizes your EV

Intuitively the dominance principle is more fundamental, and indeed it's correct: EVM doesn't mean you should do things that increase evidential probability 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘪𝘯𝘧𝘰. And you can't change the fixed past.

People who one-box are often interpreting the situation as if from an imagined earlier stage, similar to people who interpret the organ-transplant problem from an earlier stage of "deciding societal rules." (Some have more exotic theories like causing things to happen backward in time.)

So the answer to the scenario is that the agent should two box—unrelatedly, if a different thought experiment presented you with the choice to "commit" (whatever that means) to one-boxing in such a scenario, then you should take that option.

Some further reading:

Michael Huemer, 2021 — "The Solution to Newcomb's Problem"
@basil.halperin, 2022 — "Newcomb's problem is just a standard time consistency problem"

2Canaletto5mo

1. Maybe principle of dominance gives wrong action recommendations in some situations? How do you evaluate your principles? 2. That's not the point? The point is, you would commit to "check on what date hour and minute Omega looked at me and one box if after, two box if before", with whatever method you have you can constrain your future actions. Which is kinda crazy, like, just commit to one boxing if you are into commitments.

1Arjun Panickssery5mo

I don't see why the principle of dominance would give the wrong action. It just says that you should take an action if it is never improved by another action regardless of other actors.

Well, you can consider some situations and think, does it give good recommendation in them? If not, maybe it's a motivation to start the search for other principles?

Here is one, even more exaggerated:

Imagine even stronger predictor. It offers you 20 Newcomb's games in a row. And the predictor is already gone, dead etc. For simplicity boxes you didn't take burst into flames or something. CDT agent will not experiment with this and just straight up two box 20 times in a row. Where as normal humans would pick one box some of the time, see it gives them more m... (read more)