Phil, you can look at it another way: the commonality is that to win you have to make yourself believe a demonstrably false statement.
But I don’t. The problem, phrased in a real world situation that could possibly occur, is that a superintelligence is somehow figuring out what people are likely to do, or else is very lucky. The real-world solution is either
if you know ahead of time that you’re going to be given this decision, either pre-commit to one-boxing, or try to game the superintelligence. Neither option is irrational; it doesn’t take any fancy math; one-boxing is positing that your committing to one-boxing has a direct causal effect on what will be in the boxes.
if you didn’t know ahead of time that you’d be given this decision, choose both boxes.
You can’t, once the boxes are on the ground, decide to one-box and think that’s going to change the past. That’s not the real world, and describing the problem in a way that makes it seem convincing that choosing to one-box actually CAN change the past, is just spinning fantasies.
This is one of a class of apparent paradoxes that arise only because people posit situations that can’t actually happen in our universe. Like the ultraviolet catastrophe, or being able to pick any point from a continuum.
if you know ahead of time that you’re going to be given this decision, either pre-commit to one-boxing, or try to game the superintelligence. Neither option is irrational; it doesn’t take any fancy math; one-boxing is positing that your committing to one-boxing has a direct causal effect on what will be in the boxes.
if you didn’t know ahead of time that you’d be given this decision, choose both boxes.
You can’t, once the boxes are on the ground, decide to one-box and think that’s going to change the past. That’s not the real world, and describing the problem in a way that makes it seem convincing that choosing to one-box actually CAN change the past, is just spinning fantasies.
This is one of a class of apparent paradoxes that arise only because people posit situations that can’t actually happen in our universe. Like the ultraviolet catastrophe, or being able to pick any point from a continuum.