People suck at predicting their actions. I suspect that in a real-life situation even philosophers would one-box. For example, suppose a two-boxer sees a street magician predict people’s behavior and consistently punish two-boxers (in some suitable version, like a card trick). Odds are, he will one-box, especially if the punishment for correctly predicted two-boxing is harsh enough. It would be an interesting psychological experiment, if someone could get the funding.
If a philosopher sees a street magician making “predictions” he should be rational enough to see that the street magician isn’t engaging in prediction but is cheating.
magician isn’t engaging in prediction but is cheating.
If by cheating you mean “removes the reward after you made your choice to two-box”, this can be mitigated by having a third party, like philosopher’s friend, write down what’s in the boxes before the philosopher in question makes his decision. I imagine that in such a situation the number of two-boxers would go down dramatically.
If you really remove the option to cheat then how will the street magician to be able to accurately predict whether the philosopher two-boxes?
There are people who might learn with practice to have a high degree of accuracy in classify people as one-boxers or two boxers if they had months of practice but that’s not a skillset that your average street magician possesses.
Finding a suitable person and then training the person to have that skillset is probably a bigger issue than securing the necessary funds for a trial.
I still believe that it will be increadibly hard to set up an experiment that makes an atheist philosopher or an average Lesswrong participant follower think that the predictions are genuine predictions.
I don’t know how philosphers would react. I one-box the question when posed on a theoretical level.
If you would put my in a practical situation against a person who’s doing genuine prediction I might try to do some form of occlumency to hide that I’m two-boxing.
This is a bit like playing Werewolf. In the round with people with NLP training in which I’m playing Werewolf there are a bunch of people who are good enough to a bunch of people when they play Werewolf with “normal” people.
On the other hand in that round with NLP people nearly everyone has good control of his own state and doesn’t let other people read them.
The last time I played one girl afterwards told me that I was very authentic even when playing a fake role.
I’m not exactly sure about the occlumency skills of the average philosophy major but I would guess that there are many philosophy majors who believe that they themselves have decent occlumency skills.
As a sidenote any good attempt at finding out whether someone is one-boxing or two-boxing might change whether he’s one-boxing or two-boxing.
Unless I’ve misunderstood this it isn’t an adversarial game.
you’re not trying to trick the predictor if you’re one boxing.
if anything you want the predictor to know that with as much certainty as possible.
wearing your heart on your sleeve is good for you.
the first description I came across with this had a huge difference between boxes A and B on the order of 1000 vs 1,000,000.
At that level there doesn’t seem much point even intending to 2 box, better to let the predictor have his good record as a predictor while I get the million. an improvement of an extra 1000 just isn’t convincing.
though restated with a smaller difference like 2000 in one box, 1000 in the other and the choice of 2 boxing for 3000 vs 2000 is more appealing.
The easiest way is to have the result be determined by the decision; the magician arranges the scenario such that the money is under box A IFF you select only box A. That is only cheating if you can catch him.
The details of how that is done are a trade secret, I’m afraid.
Wheter or not it’s cheating doesn’t depend on whether you catch him. A smart person will think “The magician is cheating” when faced with a street magician even if he doesn’t get the exact trick.
I don’t know exactly how David Copperfield flies around but I don’t think that’s he’s really can do levitation.
Why doesn’t a smart person think that Omega is cheating? What’s the difference between the observations one has of Omega and the observations one has of the street magician?
By the way, if I think of Omega as equivalent to the street magician, I change to a consistent one-boxer from a much more complicated position.
Why doesn’t a smart person think that Omega is cheating?
Because Omega has per definition the ability to predict. Street magicians on the other hand are in the deception business.
That means that a smart person has different priors about both classes.
Yes, as long as we can only observe the end result.
Priors matter when you have incomplete knowledge and guess the principle that lead to a particular result.
Believing that a particular principle led to an observed result helps make future predictions about that result when the principle that we believe is relevant;
If we believe that the street magician is cheating, but he claims to be predicting, is each case in which we see the prediction and result match evidence that he is predicting or evidence that he is cheating? Is it evidence that when our turn comes up, we should one-box, or is it evidence that the players before us are colluding with the magician?
If we believe that Omega is a perfect predictor, does that change the direction in which the evidence points?
Is it just that we have a much higher prior that everybody we see is colluding with the magician (or that the magician is cheating in some other way) than that everybody is colluding with Omega, or that Omega is cheating?
Suppose that the magician is known to be playing with house money, and is getting paid based on how accurately rewards are allocated to contestants (leaving the question open as to whether he is cheating or predicting, but keeping the payoff matrix the same). Is the reasoning for one-boxing for the magician identical to the reasoning for one-boxing for Omega, or is there some key difference that I’m missing?
Is the reasoning for one-boxing for the magician identical to the reasoning for one-boxing for Omega, or is there some key difference that I’m missing?
If a magician is cheating than there a direct causal link between the subject choosing to one-box and the money being in the box.
Causality matters for philosophers who analyse Newcomb’s problem.
I don’t know whether one can meaningfully speak about decision theory for a world without causal links.
If your actions don’t cause anything how can one decision be better than another?
If I’m wet because it rains there a causal link between the two.
If I kick a ball and the ball moves there a causal link between me kicking the ball and the ball moving.
Really? I feel like I would be more inclined to two-box in the real life scenario. There will be two physical boxes in front of me that already have money in them (or not). It’ll just be me and two boxes whose contents are already fixed. I will really want to just take them both.
I was surprised by the more general statement “that in a real-life situation even philosophers would one-box.” In the specific example of an iterated Newcomb (or directly observing the results of others) I agree that two-boxers would probably move towards a one-box strategy.
The reason for this, at least as far as I can introspect, has to do with the saliency of actually experiencing a Newcomb situation. When reasoning about the problem in the abstract I can easily conclude that one-boxing is the obviously correct answer. However, when I sit and really try to imagine the two boxes sitting in front of me, my model of myself in that situation two-boxes more than the person sitting at his computer. I think a similar effect may be at play when I imagine myself physically present as person after person two-boxes and finds one of the boxes empty.
So I think we agree that observe(many two-box failures) --> more likely to one-box.
I do think that experiencing the problem as traditionally stated (no iteration or actually watching other people) will have a relationship of observe(two physical boxes, predictor gone) --> more likely to two-box.
The second effect is probably weak as I think I would be able to override the impulse to two-box with fairly high probability.
I was surprised by the more general statement “that in a real-life situation even philosophers would one-box.”
By a “real-life situation” I meant a Newcomb-like problem we routinely face but don’t recognize as such, like deciding on the next move in a poker game, or on the next play in a sports game. Whenever I face a situation where my opponent has likely precommitted to a course of action based on their knowledge of me, and I have reliable empirical evidence of that knowledge, and betting against such evidence carries both risks and rewards, I am in a Newcomb situation.
I don’t see how those are Newcomb situations at all. When I try to come up with an example of a Newcomb-like sports situation (eg football since plays are preselected and revealed simultaneously more or less) I get something like the following:
you have two plays A and B (one-box, two-box)
the opposing coach has two plays X and Y
if the opposing coach predicts you will select A they will select X and if they predict you will select B they will select Y.
A vs X results in a moderate gain for you.
A vs Y results in no gain for you.
B vs Y results in a small gain for you.
B vs X results in a large gain for you.
You both know all this.
The problem lies in the 3rd assumption. Why would the opposing coach ever select play X? Symmetrically, if Omega was actually competing against you and trying to minimize your winnings why would it ever put a million dollars in the second box.
Newcomb’s works, in part, due to Omega’s willingness to select a dominated strategy in order to mess with you. What real-life situation involves an opponent like that?
Newcomb’s problem does happen (and has happened) in real life. Also, omega is trying to maximize his stake rather than minimize yours; he made a bet with alpha with much higher stakes than the $1,000,000. Not to mention newcomb’s problem bears some vital semblance to the prisoners’ dilemma, which occurs in real life.
Sure, I didn’t mean to imply that there were literally zero situations that could be described as Newcomb-like (though I think that particular example is a questionable fit). I just think they are extremely rare (particularly in a competitive context such as poker or sports).
edit: That example is more like a prisoner’s dilemma where Kate gets to decide her move after seeing Joe’s. Agree that Newcomb’s definitely has similarities with the relatively common PD.
Oddly enough, that problem is also solved better by a time-variable agent: Joe proposes sincerely, being an agent who would never back out of a commitment of this level. If his marriage turns out poorly enough, Joe, while remaining the same agent that used to wouldn’t back out, backs out.
And the prisoners’ dilemma as it is written cannot occur in real life, because it requires no further interaction between the agents.
If I have even a little bit of reason to believe the problem is newcomboid (like, I saw it make two or three successful predictions, and no unsuccessful ones, or I know the omega would face bad consequences for predicting wrongly (even just in terms of reputation), or I know the omega studied me well), I’d one box in real-life too.
Well, I am referring specifically to an instinctive/emotional impulse driven by the heavily ingrained belief that money does not appear or disappear from closed boxes. If you don’t experience that impulse or will always be able to override it then yes, one-boxing in real life would be just as easy as in the abstract.
As per my above response to shminux, I think this effect would be diminished and eventually reversed after personally observing enough successful predictions.
I agree, if the accuracy was high and there was a chance for learning. It would also be interesting to ask those who favor two-boxing how they think their views would evolve if they repreatedly experienced such situations. Some may find they are not reflectively consistent on the point.
Right, good point about revealed reflective inconsistency. I’d guess that repeated experiments would probably turn any two-boxer into a one-boxer pretty quickly, if the person actually cares about the payoff, not about making a point, like Asimov supposedly would, as quoted by William Craig in this essay pointed out by Will Newsome. And those who’d rather make a point than make money can be weeded out by punishing predicted two-boxing sufficiently harshly.
Odds are, he will one-box, especially if the punishment for correctly predicted two-boxing is harsh enough.
This isn’t an argument (at least not a direct argument) that one-boxing is more rational. Two-boxers grant that one-boxing gets you more money. They just say that sometimes, a situation might arise that punishes rational decision making. And they may well agree that in such a situation, they would one box irrationally. The question isn’t ‘what would you do?‘, the question is ‘what is it rational to do?’
You might reply that what’s rational is just what gets you the most money, but that’s precisely the point that’s up for dispute. If you assume that rationality is just whatever makes you richer, you beg the question.
People suck at predicting their actions. I suspect that in a real-life situation even philosophers would one-box. For example, suppose a two-boxer sees a street magician predict people’s behavior and consistently punish two-boxers (in some suitable version, like a card trick). Odds are, he will one-box, especially if the punishment for correctly predicted two-boxing is harsh enough. It would be an interesting psychological experiment, if someone could get the funding.
If a philosopher sees a street magician making “predictions” he should be rational enough to see that the street magician isn’t engaging in prediction but is cheating.
This is also a perfectly reasonable explanation for Omega’s success rate.
If by cheating you mean “removes the reward after you made your choice to two-box”, this can be mitigated by having a third party, like philosopher’s friend, write down what’s in the boxes before the philosopher in question makes his decision. I imagine that in such a situation the number of two-boxers would go down dramatically.
If you really remove the option to cheat then how will the street magician to be able to accurately predict whether the philosopher two-boxes?
There are people who might learn with practice to have a high degree of accuracy in classify people as one-boxers or two boxers if they had months of practice but that’s not a skillset that your average street magician possesses.
Finding a suitable person and then training the person to have that skillset is probably a bigger issue than securing the necessary funds for a trial.
So… if I point out a reasonably easy way to verifiably implement this without cheating, would you agree with my original premise?
I still believe that it will be increadibly hard to set up an experiment that makes an atheist philosopher or an average Lesswrong participant follower think that the predictions are genuine predictions.
I don’t know how philosphers would react. I one-box the question when posed on a theoretical level. If you would put my in a practical situation against a person who’s doing genuine prediction I might try to do some form of occlumency to hide that I’m two-boxing.
This is a bit like playing Werewolf. In the round with people with NLP training in which I’m playing Werewolf there are a bunch of people who are good enough to a bunch of people when they play Werewolf with “normal” people. On the other hand in that round with NLP people nearly everyone has good control of his own state and doesn’t let other people read them. The last time I played one girl afterwards told me that I was very authentic even when playing a fake role.
I’m not exactly sure about the occlumency skills of the average philosophy major but I would guess that there are many philosophy majors who believe that they themselves have decent occlumency skills.
As a sidenote any good attempt at finding out whether someone is one-boxing or two-boxing might change whether he’s one-boxing or two-boxing.
Unless I’ve misunderstood this it isn’t an adversarial game.
you’re not trying to trick the predictor if you’re one boxing. if anything you want the predictor to know that with as much certainty as possible. wearing your heart on your sleeve is good for you.
He’s trying to trick the predictor into thinking that he’s going to one-box, but then to actually two-box.
I see now.
the first description I came across with this had a huge difference between boxes A and B on the order of 1000 vs 1,000,000.
At that level there doesn’t seem much point even intending to 2 box, better to let the predictor have his good record as a predictor while I get the million. an improvement of an extra 1000 just isn’t convincing.
though restated with a smaller difference like 2000 in one box, 1000 in the other and the choice of 2 boxing for 3000 vs 2000 is more appealing.
The easiest way is to have the result be determined by the decision; the magician arranges the scenario such that the money is under box A IFF you select only box A. That is only cheating if you can catch him.
The details of how that is done are a trade secret, I’m afraid.
Wheter or not it’s cheating doesn’t depend on whether you catch him. A smart person will think “The magician is cheating” when faced with a street magician even if he doesn’t get the exact trick.
I don’t know exactly how David Copperfield flies around but I don’t think that’s he’s really can do levitation.
Why doesn’t a smart person think that Omega is cheating? What’s the difference between the observations one has of Omega and the observations one has of the street magician?
By the way, if I think of Omega as equivalent to the street magician, I change to a consistent one-boxer from a much more complicated position.
Because Omega has per definition the ability to predict. Street magicians on the other hand are in the deception business. That means that a smart person has different priors about both classes.
The expected observations are identical in either case, right?
Yes, as long as we can only observe the end result. Priors matter when you have incomplete knowledge and guess the principle that lead to a particular result.
Believing that a particular principle led to an observed result helps make future predictions about that result when the principle that we believe is relevant;
If we believe that the street magician is cheating, but he claims to be predicting, is each case in which we see the prediction and result match evidence that he is predicting or evidence that he is cheating? Is it evidence that when our turn comes up, we should one-box, or is it evidence that the players before us are colluding with the magician?
If we believe that Omega is a perfect predictor, does that change the direction in which the evidence points?
Is it just that we have a much higher prior that everybody we see is colluding with the magician (or that the magician is cheating in some other way) than that everybody is colluding with Omega, or that Omega is cheating?
Suppose that the magician is known to be playing with house money, and is getting paid based on how accurately rewards are allocated to contestants (leaving the question open as to whether he is cheating or predicting, but keeping the payoff matrix the same). Is the reasoning for one-boxing for the magician identical to the reasoning for one-boxing for Omega, or is there some key difference that I’m missing?
If a magician is cheating than there a direct causal link between the subject choosing to one-box and the money being in the box.
Causality matters for philosophers who analyse Newcomb’s problem.
So the magician can only cheat in worlds where causal links happen?
I don’t know whether one can meaningfully speak about decision theory for a world without causal links. If your actions don’t cause anything how can one decision be better than another?
So, if the magician is cheating there is a causal link between the decision and the contents of the box, and if he isn’t there is still a causal link.
How is that a difference?
If I’m wet because it rains there a causal link between the two. If I kick a ball and the ball moves there a causal link between me kicking the ball and the ball moving.
How’s that a difference?
Did you kick the ball because it was raining, or are you wet because you kicked the ball?
Really? I feel like I would be more inclined to two-box in the real life scenario. There will be two physical boxes in front of me that already have money in them (or not). It’ll just be me and two boxes whose contents are already fixed. I will really want to just take them both.
Maybe the first time. What will you do the second time?
I was surprised by the more general statement “that in a real-life situation even philosophers would one-box.” In the specific example of an iterated Newcomb (or directly observing the results of others) I agree that two-boxers would probably move towards a one-box strategy.
The reason for this, at least as far as I can introspect, has to do with the saliency of actually experiencing a Newcomb situation. When reasoning about the problem in the abstract I can easily conclude that one-boxing is the obviously correct answer. However, when I sit and really try to imagine the two boxes sitting in front of me, my model of myself in that situation two-boxes more than the person sitting at his computer. I think a similar effect may be at play when I imagine myself physically present as person after person two-boxes and finds one of the boxes empty.
So I think we agree that observe(many two-box failures) --> more likely to one-box.
I do think that experiencing the problem as traditionally stated (no iteration or actually watching other people) will have a relationship of observe(two physical boxes, predictor gone) --> more likely to two-box.
The second effect is probably weak as I think I would be able to override the impulse to two-box with fairly high probability.
By a “real-life situation” I meant a Newcomb-like problem we routinely face but don’t recognize as such, like deciding on the next move in a poker game, or on the next play in a sports game. Whenever I face a situation where my opponent has likely precommitted to a course of action based on their knowledge of me, and I have reliable empirical evidence of that knowledge, and betting against such evidence carries both risks and rewards, I am in a Newcomb situation.
I don’t see how those are Newcomb situations at all. When I try to come up with an example of a Newcomb-like sports situation (eg football since plays are preselected and revealed simultaneously more or less) I get something like the following:
you have two plays A and B (one-box, two-box)
the opposing coach has two plays X and Y
if the opposing coach predicts you will select A they will select X and if they predict you will select B they will select Y.
A vs X results in a moderate gain for you. A vs Y results in no gain for you. B vs Y results in a small gain for you. B vs X results in a large gain for you.
You both know all this.
The problem lies in the 3rd assumption. Why would the opposing coach ever select play X? Symmetrically, if Omega was actually competing against you and trying to minimize your winnings why would it ever put a million dollars in the second box.
Newcomb’s works, in part, due to Omega’s willingness to select a dominated strategy in order to mess with you. What real-life situation involves an opponent like that?
Newcomb’s problem does happen (and has happened) in real life. Also, omega is trying to maximize his stake rather than minimize yours; he made a bet with alpha with much higher stakes than the $1,000,000. Not to mention newcomb’s problem bears some vital semblance to the prisoners’ dilemma, which occurs in real life.
And Parfit’s Hitchhiker scenarios, and blackmail attempts, not to mention voting.
Sure, I didn’t mean to imply that there were literally zero situations that could be described as Newcomb-like (though I think that particular example is a questionable fit). I just think they are extremely rare (particularly in a competitive context such as poker or sports).
edit: That example is more like a prisoner’s dilemma where Kate gets to decide her move after seeing Joe’s. Agree that Newcomb’s definitely has similarities with the relatively common PD.
Oddly enough, that problem is also solved better by a time-variable agent: Joe proposes sincerely, being an agent who would never back out of a commitment of this level. If his marriage turns out poorly enough, Joe, while remaining the same agent that used to wouldn’t back out, backs out.
And the prisoners’ dilemma as it is written cannot occur in real life, because it requires no further interaction between the agents.
If I have even a little bit of reason to believe the problem is newcomboid (like, I saw it make two or three successful predictions, and no unsuccessful ones, or I know the omega would face bad consequences for predicting wrongly (even just in terms of reputation), or I know the omega studied me well), I’d one box in real-life too.
Well, I am referring specifically to an instinctive/emotional impulse driven by the heavily ingrained belief that money does not appear or disappear from closed boxes. If you don’t experience that impulse or will always be able to override it then yes, one-boxing in real life would be just as easy as in the abstract.
As per my above response to shminux, I think this effect would be diminished and eventually reversed after personally observing enough successful predictions.
I agree, if the accuracy was high and there was a chance for learning. It would also be interesting to ask those who favor two-boxing how they think their views would evolve if they repreatedly experienced such situations. Some may find they are not reflectively consistent on the point.
Right, good point about revealed reflective inconsistency. I’d guess that repeated experiments would probably turn any two-boxer into a one-boxer pretty quickly, if the person actually cares about the payoff, not about making a point, like Asimov supposedly would, as quoted by William Craig in this essay pointed out by Will Newsome. And those who’d rather make a point than make money can be weeded out by punishing predicted two-boxing sufficiently harshly.
This isn’t an argument (at least not a direct argument) that one-boxing is more rational. Two-boxers grant that one-boxing gets you more money. They just say that sometimes, a situation might arise that punishes rational decision making. And they may well agree that in such a situation, they would one box irrationally. The question isn’t ‘what would you do?‘, the question is ‘what is it rational to do?’
You might reply that what’s rational is just what gets you the most money, but that’s precisely the point that’s up for dispute. If you assume that rationality is just whatever makes you richer, you beg the question.
I’m not sure they do.