Nice example! I think I understood better why this picks out the particular weakness of EDT (and why it’s not a general exploit that can be used against any DT) when I thought of it less as a money-pump and more as “Not only does EDT want to manage the news, you can get it to pay you a lot for the privilege”.
There is a nuance that needs to be mentioned here. If the EDT agent is aware of the researcher’s ploys ahead of time, it will set things up so that emails from the researcher go straight to the spam folder, block the researcher’s calls, and so on. It is not actually happy to pay the researcher for managing the news!
This is less pathological than listening to the researcher and paying up, but it’s still an odd news-management strategy that’s result of EDT.
True. This looks to me like an effect of EDT not being stable under self-modification, although here the issue is handicapping itself through external means rather than self-modification—like, if you offer a CDT agent a potion that will make it unable to lift more than one box before it enters Newcomb’s problem (i.e., before Omega makes its observation of the agent), then it’ll cheerfully take it and pay you for the privilege.
Thanks! I didn’t really think at all about whether or not “money-pump” was the appropriate word (I’m not sure what the exact definition is); have now changed “way to money-pump EDT agents” into “way to get EDT agents to pay you for managing the news for them”.
Hm, I don’t know what the definition is either. In my head, it means “can get an arbitrary amount of money from”, e.g. by taking it around a preference loop as many times as you like. In any case, glad the feedback was helpful.
Nice example! I think I understood better why this picks out the particular weakness of EDT (and why it’s not a general exploit that can be used against any DT) when I thought of it less as a money-pump and more as “Not only does EDT want to manage the news, you can get it to pay you a lot for the privilege”.
There is a nuance that needs to be mentioned here. If the EDT agent is aware of the researcher’s ploys ahead of time, it will set things up so that emails from the researcher go straight to the spam folder, block the researcher’s calls, and so on. It is not actually happy to pay the researcher for managing the news!
This is less pathological than listening to the researcher and paying up, but it’s still an odd news-management strategy that’s result of EDT.
True. This looks to me like an effect of EDT not being stable under self-modification, although here the issue is handicapping itself through external means rather than self-modification—like, if you offer a CDT agent a potion that will make it unable to lift more than one box before it enters Newcomb’s problem (i.e., before Omega makes its observation of the agent), then it’ll cheerfully take it and pay you for the privilege.
Thanks! I didn’t really think at all about whether or not “money-pump” was the appropriate word (I’m not sure what the exact definition is); have now changed “way to money-pump EDT agents” into “way to get EDT agents to pay you for managing the news for them”.
Hm, I don’t know what the definition is either. In my head, it means “can get an arbitrary amount of money from”, e.g. by taking it around a preference loop as many times as you like. In any case, glad the feedback was helpful.