I’m not sure I understand your comment. It is true that in their framing of the Moral Newcomb problem you can at most get 10 cures (because the predictor is perfectly reliable). But what you care about (your utility to maximize) is not only how many cures you personally receive, but how many such cures people similar to you (in other parts of the universe) receive (because allegedly you care about maximizing happiness or people not dying, and obtaining your 10 cures is only instrumental for that). And of course that utility is not necessarily bounded by the 10 cures you personally receive, and can be way bigger if your action provides evidence that many such cures are being obtained across the universe. The authors explain this in page 4:
This means that the simple state-consequence matrix above does not in fact capture everything that is relevant to the decision problem: we have to refine the state space so that it also describes whether or not correlated agents face boxes with cures in both. By taking one box, you gain evidence not only that you will obtain more doses of the cure, but also that these other agents will achieve good outcomes too. Therefore, the existence of correlated agents has the effect of increasing the stakes for EDT.
I’m not sure I understand your comment. It is true that in their framing of the Moral Newcomb problem you can at most get 10 cures (because the predictor is perfectly reliable). But what you care about (your utility to maximize) is not only how many cures you personally receive, but how many such cures people similar to you (in other parts of the universe) receive (because allegedly you care about maximizing happiness or people not dying, and obtaining your 10 cures is only instrumental for that). And of course that utility is not necessarily bounded by the 10 cures you personally receive, and can be way bigger if your action provides evidence that many such cures are being obtained across the universe. The authors explain this in page 4:
Thanks, I guess I don’t really understand what the authors are trying to do here.