I wonder how many people come up with this answer.
I’ve come up with a related answer with the past, but I don’t think that defense is the best angle to take anymore when it comes to Newcomb’s.
Am I missing something?
It helps to be very specific with why you’re rejecting a thought experiment. The statement “Omega doesn’t exist in reality” needs to be traced to the axioms that give you an impossibility proof. This both allows you to update your conclusion as soon as those axioms come into question and generalize from those axioms to other situations.
For example, the ‘frailty’ approach to Newcomb’s is to say “given that 1) my prior probability of insanity is higher than my prior probability of Omega and 2) any evidence for Omega’s supernatural ability is at least as strong evidence for my insanity, I can’t reach a state where I think that it’s more likely that Omega has supernatural powers than that I’m insane.” This generalizes to, say, claims from con men; you might think that any evidence they present for their claims is also evidence for their untrustworthiness, and reach a point where you literally can’t believe them. (Is this a good state to be in?) But it’s not clear that 2 is true, and even if the conclusion follows through, it helps to have a decision theory for what to do when you think you’re insane!
Another approach to Newcomb’s problem is to get very specific about what we mean by ‘causality,’ because Newcomb’s is a situation where we have a strong verbal argument that causality shouldn’t exist and a strong verbal argument that causality should exist. In order to resolve the argument, we need to figure out what causality means mathematically, and then we can generalize much more broadly, and the time spent formalizing causality is not at all wasted.
Thanks for your reply. I didn’t expect to get so much feedback.
I tend to assume that I am not insane. Maybe I am overconfident in that regard :-)
I would call my approach to Newcomb’s problem an example of rational ignorance. I think the cost of thinking about this problem (my time) is higher than the possible benefit I could get out of it.
I’ve come up with a related answer with the past, but I don’t think that defense is the best angle to take anymore when it comes to Newcomb’s.
It helps to be very specific with why you’re rejecting a thought experiment. The statement “Omega doesn’t exist in reality” needs to be traced to the axioms that give you an impossibility proof. This both allows you to update your conclusion as soon as those axioms come into question and generalize from those axioms to other situations.
For example, the ‘frailty’ approach to Newcomb’s is to say “given that 1) my prior probability of insanity is higher than my prior probability of Omega and 2) any evidence for Omega’s supernatural ability is at least as strong evidence for my insanity, I can’t reach a state where I think that it’s more likely that Omega has supernatural powers than that I’m insane.” This generalizes to, say, claims from con men; you might think that any evidence they present for their claims is also evidence for their untrustworthiness, and reach a point where you literally can’t believe them. (Is this a good state to be in?) But it’s not clear that 2 is true, and even if the conclusion follows through, it helps to have a decision theory for what to do when you think you’re insane!
Another approach to Newcomb’s problem is to get very specific about what we mean by ‘causality,’ because Newcomb’s is a situation where we have a strong verbal argument that causality shouldn’t exist and a strong verbal argument that causality should exist. In order to resolve the argument, we need to figure out what causality means mathematically, and then we can generalize much more broadly, and the time spent formalizing causality is not at all wasted.
Thanks for your reply. I didn’t expect to get so much feedback.
I tend to assume that I am not insane. Maybe I am overconfident in that regard :-)
I would call my approach to Newcomb’s problem an example of rational ignorance. I think the cost of thinking about this problem (my time) is higher than the possible benefit I could get out of it.