It is an article in which poor thought leads to a wrong conclusion. I don’t consider that “good”.
If Academian had belligerently defended the ‘It’s Newcomblike’ claim in response to correction I would have reversed my upvote.
I wouldn’t say he was belligerent, but earlier in this thread he seemed to be Fighting a Rearguard Action Against the Truth, first saying, “it’s a big open problem if some humans can precommit or not”, and then saying the scenario still works if you replace certainties with high confidence levels, with those confidence levels also being unrealistic. I found “Self-modification is robust, pre-commitment is robust, its detection is robust… these phenomena really aren’t going anywhere.” to be particularly arrogant. He seems to have dropped out after I refuted those points.
My standard for changing this article from bad to sort of ok, would require an actual retraction of the wrong conclusion.
As it stands the discussion both in the original post and the comments are useful.
As it stands, someone can be led astray by reading just the article and not the comments.
The “it’s not actually Newcomblike” comments are being upvoted. People get it.
Not as much as the article. And this comment, which refuted a wrong argument that the scenario really is Newcomb’s problem, at the time I asked that question, was at −2.
It’s just that sometimes correction is sufficient and a spiral of downvotes isn’t desirable.
I am not saying everyone should vote it down so Academian loses so much karma he can never post another article. I think a small negative score is enough to make the point. A small positive score would be appropiate if he made a proper retraction. +27 is too high. I don’t think articles should get over +5 without the main point actually being correct, and they should be incredibly thought provoking to get that high.
I am also wary of making unsupportable claims that Newcomb’s problem happens in real life, which can overshadow other reasons we consider such problems, so these other reasons are forgotten when the unsupportable claim is knocked down.
I can empathise with your point of view here. Perhaps the fact that people (including me) still appreciate the post despite it getting the game theory discussion wrong is an indication that we would love to see more posts on ‘real life’ applications of decision theory!
It is an article in which poor thought leads to a wrong conclusion. I don’t consider that “good”.
I wouldn’t say he was belligerent, but earlier in this thread he seemed to be Fighting a Rearguard Action Against the Truth, first saying, “it’s a big open problem if some humans can precommit or not”, and then saying the scenario still works if you replace certainties with high confidence levels, with those confidence levels also being unrealistic. I found “Self-modification is robust, pre-commitment is robust, its detection is robust… these phenomena really aren’t going anywhere.” to be particularly arrogant. He seems to have dropped out after I refuted those points.
My standard for changing this article from bad to sort of ok, would require an actual retraction of the wrong conclusion.
As it stands, someone can be led astray by reading just the article and not the comments.
Not as much as the article. And this comment, which refuted a wrong argument that the scenario really is Newcomb’s problem, at the time I asked that question, was at −2.
I am not saying everyone should vote it down so Academian loses so much karma he can never post another article. I think a small negative score is enough to make the point. A small positive score would be appropiate if he made a proper retraction. +27 is too high. I don’t think articles should get over +5 without the main point actually being correct, and they should be incredibly thought provoking to get that high.
I am also wary of making unsupportable claims that Newcomb’s problem happens in real life, which can overshadow other reasons we consider such problems, so these other reasons are forgotten when the unsupportable claim is knocked down.
I can empathise with your point of view here. Perhaps the fact that people (including me) still appreciate the post despite it getting the game theory discussion wrong is an indication that we would love to see more posts on ‘real life’ applications of decision theory!