I agree (of course!) that there is a difference between “pay up and die” and “pay up or die”. But I don’t understand how this difference can be responsible for the difference in your opinions about the two scenarios.
Scenario 1: I choose for things to be so arranged that in unlikely situation S (where if I pay Bob back I die), if I don’t pay Bob back then I also die. You agree with me (I think—you haven’t actually said so explicitly) that it can be to my benefit for things to be this way, if this is the precondition for getting the loan from Bob.
Scenario 2: I choose for things to be so arranged that in unlikely scenario S (where, again, if I pay Bob back I die), I will definitely pay. You think this state of affairs can’t be to my advantage.
How is scenario 2 actually worse for me than scenario 1? Outside situation S, they are no different (I will not be faced with such strong incentive not to pay Bob back, and I will in fact pay him back, and I will not die). In situation S, scenario 1 means I die either way, so I might as well pay my debts; scenario 2 means I will pay up and die. I’m equally dead in each case. I choose to pay up in each case.
In scenario 1, I do have the option of saying a mental “fuck you” to Bob, not repaying my debt, and dying at the hand of his infernal machinery rather than whatever other thing I could save myself from with the money. But I’m equally dead either way, and I can’t see why I’d prefer this, and in any case it’s beyond my understanding why having this not-very-appealing extra option would be enough for scenario 1 to be good and scenario 2 to be bad.
What am I missing?
I think we are at cross purposes somehow about the “predictor turns out to have erred” thing. I do understand that this feature is present in the OP’s thought experiment and absent in mine. My thought experiment isn’t meant to be equivalent to the one in the OP, though it is meant to be similar in some ways (and I think we are agreed that it is similar in the ways I intended it to be similar). It’s meant to give me another view of something in your thinking that I don’t understand, in the hope that I might understand it better (hopefully with the eventual effect of improving either my thinking or yours, if it turns out that one of us is making a mistake rather than just starting from axioms that seem alien to one another).
Anyway, it probably doesn’t matter, because so far as I can tell you do in fact have “the same” opinion about the OP’s thought experiment and mine; I was asking about disanalogies between the two in case it turned out that you agreed with all the numbered points in the paragraph before that question. I think you don’t agree with them all, but I’m not sure exactly where the disagreements are; I might understand better if you could tell me which of those numbered points you disagree with.
I agree (of course!) that there is a difference between “pay up and die” and “pay up or die”. But I don’t understand how this difference can be responsible for the difference in your opinions about the two scenarios.
Scenario 1: I choose for things to be so arranged that in unlikely situation S (where if I pay Bob back I die), if I don’t pay Bob back then I also die. You agree with me (I think—you haven’t actually said so explicitly) that it can be to my benefit for things to be this way, if this is the precondition for getting the loan from Bob.
Scenario 2: I choose for things to be so arranged that in unlikely scenario S (where, again, if I pay Bob back I die), I will definitely pay. You think this state of affairs can’t be to my advantage.
How is scenario 2 actually worse for me than scenario 1? Outside situation S, they are no different (I will not be faced with such strong incentive not to pay Bob back, and I will in fact pay him back, and I will not die). In situation S, scenario 1 means I die either way, so I might as well pay my debts; scenario 2 means I will pay up and die. I’m equally dead in each case. I choose to pay up in each case.
In scenario 1, I do have the option of saying a mental “fuck you” to Bob, not repaying my debt, and dying at the hand of his infernal machinery rather than whatever other thing I could save myself from with the money. But I’m equally dead either way, and I can’t see why I’d prefer this, and in any case it’s beyond my understanding why having this not-very-appealing extra option would be enough for scenario 1 to be good and scenario 2 to be bad.
What am I missing?
I think we are at cross purposes somehow about the “predictor turns out to have erred” thing. I do understand that this feature is present in the OP’s thought experiment and absent in mine. My thought experiment isn’t meant to be equivalent to the one in the OP, though it is meant to be similar in some ways (and I think we are agreed that it is similar in the ways I intended it to be similar). It’s meant to give me another view of something in your thinking that I don’t understand, in the hope that I might understand it better (hopefully with the eventual effect of improving either my thinking or yours, if it turns out that one of us is making a mistake rather than just starting from axioms that seem alien to one another).
Anyway, it probably doesn’t matter, because so far as I can tell you do in fact have “the same” opinion about the OP’s thought experiment and mine; I was asking about disanalogies between the two in case it turned out that you agreed with all the numbered points in the paragraph before that question. I think you don’t agree with them all, but I’m not sure exactly where the disagreements are; I might understand better if you could tell me which of those numbered points you disagree with.