Unless being more rational caused you to decide to one-box. Actually, I can’t see where someone’s intuition about that problem would go from one-boxing to two-boxing as they learned rationality. Nor do I see how knowing less would make you want the Philosopher’s Stone but not want to use it.
To be honest, looking back at that from three months on I’m not sure exactly what I was thinking. I do still think there’s a lot of interest and story potential in a magical item that allows you to edit your own mind to some extent: if pulling out memories also removes your associations with them, you don’t just have external storage, you have something very close to a general personality editor.
I’d actually be a little surprised if it doesn’t come up down the road—but the specific application that 20110929!Gest suggested up there looks far-fetched to me now. You’d have to have a very good idea of what’s linked to what in your head, and you’d probably have to make some pretty extensive changes to change your answer to a Newcomblike problem. Enough to make the whole operation uncertain and rather dangerous. I don’t think I’d try it, anyway.
Unless being more rational caused you to decide to one-box. Actually, I can’t see where someone’s intuition about that problem would go from one-boxing to two-boxing as they learned rationality. Nor do I see how knowing less would make you want the Philosopher’s Stone but not want to use it.
Am I missing something here?
To be honest, looking back at that from three months on I’m not sure exactly what I was thinking. I do still think there’s a lot of interest and story potential in a magical item that allows you to edit your own mind to some extent: if pulling out memories also removes your associations with them, you don’t just have external storage, you have something very close to a general personality editor.
I’d actually be a little surprised if it doesn’t come up down the road—but the specific application that 20110929!Gest suggested up there looks far-fetched to me now. You’d have to have a very good idea of what’s linked to what in your head, and you’d probably have to make some pretty extensive changes to change your answer to a Newcomblike problem. Enough to make the whole operation uncertain and rather dangerous. I don’t think I’d try it, anyway.
Yeah, I agree with this.