Upvoted for the little gem in the middle:
"Anyway, this is just a simple prank, not point wasting extra energy on it. If they two-box, they get $1000, if they one-box they get $1,000,000. But adding the magic incantation "I have accurately predicted your choice before you made it!" will throw a large number of them into a loop, to the degree that they will two-box.
Sadly the rest suffered from a fair amount of formatting issues (it seems to be missing paragraph breaks in a number of places, which makes it hard to tell who is speaking), and being framed inexplicably as a story about Greek gods.
Upvoted for providing a nice way to visualize the Newcomb's box problem differently (given a model where the decider decides truly, it doesn't matter if the decision was made in advance or subsequently) - but I think the story would actually improve with a bit of trimming; removing the needless paragraphs about Cassandra/centipedes, etc.
Probably 4 or 5 paragraphs could be removed, making the point sharper.
This is consistent with my understanding of the problem. If you believe in god(s), you one box. If you believe whoever is running the experiment is scamming and will pay $1,000,000 to keep up the illusion of god-seeming power, you one box.
I give humorous posts half a point of karma, i.e. flip a coin to decide if I upvote. The coin dictated that I upvote you. Congrats.
"OK, so here is the plan: You and I bet on whether Nozick one-boxes or not, and then I tell him that I can predict what he chooses and set up the opaque box accordingly ahead of time." Hermes looked extremely pleased with his new idea.
"You can't seriously expect even someone as stupid as a mortal to two-box, when you all but promised them that one-boxing gives them so many more of those green paper thingies they use as a surrogate of happiness?" Iris was still incredulous.
"You underestimate how gullible people are, my lovely Iris, they get stuck in simple logical fallacies all the time. Remember the time I made a centipede ponder the order it moves its legs and the poor creature froze in place? Humans are just like that."
"But, but... a centipede doesn't even have a brain, just a bunch of gangia! A Homo Sapiens' brain has some 20 billion neurons, all highly interconnected! Surely they will figure it out in an instant. What can you possibly say to Bob that would make him doubt one-boxing for even a second?"
"As I said, all I have to do is a small misdirection, and they are stuck like that centipede". "But Hermie, you are not going to waste Predictor's time to actually try to figure out what a human will decide, will you?"
"Of course not, there is no point, why bother Cassandra if there is no way to tell the difference. Ever since Apollo's curse was lifted from her after her death, she has been quite busy predicting which of the many worlds we will end up in after each split." "All of them, of course, no?" Hermes just smirked. "Wait, what was that?" Iris looked at the divine trickster with more than a mild suspicion. "Did you have a hand in that, too?" "I will neither confirm, nor deny..." intoned Hermes.
"Anyway, this is just a simple prank, not point wasting extra energy on it. If they two-box, they get $1000, if they one-box they get $1,000,000. But adding the magic incantation "I have accurately predicted your choice before you made it!" will throw a large number of them into a loop, to the degree that they will two-box, justifying it with counterfactuals, such as "Since the prediction has already been made, two-boxing gives you a larger expected payout". They will use words like "rationality", "causality", "universality" and even, believe it or not, "I have free will, so I had no choice."
"But they do have Occam's razor to shave your fluff away, won't they do that?" "I doubt it, they have dozens of interpretations of Quantum Mechanics, all completely identical in their predictive power, which is as pure a fluff as it gets. I wish I could count this as one of my pranks. Hmm, maybe I'll add one or two for good measure. How does "many minds" sound? In any case, plain sight is often the best place to hide the "fluff", as you put it, and telling them everything upfront is as plain-sight as it gets."
"Wait, if they believe you, they should one-box because that is what you accurately predicted, and if they do not believe you, they can rely on their past experience that shows that one-boxing is superior. You know, Hermes, your trickster reputation is well deserved, but in this case, I'm going to bet that, except for a few cranks, everyone will one-box".
"You're on! I will even go as far as to guess that the educated sort will argue about it for ages, publish philosophy papers on it, give this prank... err... paradox a name, and, in accordance with the well-known law, it will not even bear Nozick's name. Hah! Better than that! Instead of disrupting their economy with unauthorized currency production, I will only hint at the problem to Robert and he will run with it. There, nice and clean."
"Now, my dear Iris, what do you suppose our stakes should be?"