But, alas, it’s the wish that maximizes my expected utility—for the malicious genie, anyway.
Possibly. I don’t off hand see what a malicious genie could do about that statement. However it does at least require it to honor a certain interpretation of your words as well as your philosophy about causality—in particular accept a certain idea of what the ‘default’ is relative to which ‘no effect’ can have meaning. There is enough flexibility in how to interpret your wish that I begin to suspect that conditional on the genie being sufficiently amiable and constrained that it gives you what you want in response to this wish there is likely to be possible to construct another wish that has no side effects beyond something that you can exploit as a fungible resource.
“No effect” is a whole heap more complicated and ambiguous than it looks!
But, alas, it’s the wish that maximizes my expected utility—for the malicious genie, anyway.
Possibly. I don’t off hand see what a malicious genie could do about that statement. However it does at least require it to honor a certain interpretation of your words as well as your philosophy about causality—in particular accept a certain idea of what the ‘default’ is relative to which ‘no effect’ can have meaning. There is enough flexibility in how to interpret your wish that I begin to suspect that conditional on the genie being sufficiently amiable and constrained that it gives you what you want in response to this wish there is likely to be possible to construct another wish that has no side effects beyond something that you can exploit as a fungible resource.
“No effect” is a whole heap more complicated and ambiguous than it looks!