There’s a fellow named James Omega who (with the funding of certain powerful philosophy departments), travels around the country offering random individuals the chance to participate in Newcomb’s problem, with James as Omega. Rather than scanning your brain with his magic powers, he spends a day observing you in your daily life, and uses this info to make his decision. Here’s the catch: he’s done this 300 times, and never once mis-predicted. He’s gone up against philosophers and lay-people, people that knew they were being observed and people that didn’t, but it makes no difference: he just has an intuition that good. When it comes time to do the experiment, it’s set up in such a way that you can be totally sure (and other very prestigous parties have verified) that the amounts in the box do not change after your decision.
So when you’re selected, what do you do? Nothing quite supernatural is going on, we just have the James fellow with an amazing track record, and you with no particular reason to believe that you’ll be his first failure. Even if he is just human, isn’t it rational to assume the ridiculously likely thing (301/302 chance according to Laplace’s Law) that he’ll guess you correctly? Even if we adjust for the possibility of error, the payoff matrix is still so lopsided that it seems crazy to two-box.
See if that helps, and of course everyone else is free to offer improvements if I’ve missed something. You know, help get this Least Convenient Possible World going.
Now I want to read a series of stories starring James Omega in miscellaneous interesting situations. The kind of ability implied by accuracy at Newcomb’s Dilemma would seem to imply capability in other situations as well. (If nothing else, he would kill at rock-paper-scissors.)
It’s not perfect, per se, but try this:
There’s a fellow named James Omega who (with the funding of certain powerful philosophy departments), travels around the country offering random individuals the chance to participate in Newcomb’s problem, with James as Omega. Rather than scanning your brain with his magic powers, he spends a day observing you in your daily life, and uses this info to make his decision. Here’s the catch: he’s done this 300 times, and never once mis-predicted. He’s gone up against philosophers and lay-people, people that knew they were being observed and people that didn’t, but it makes no difference: he just has an intuition that good. When it comes time to do the experiment, it’s set up in such a way that you can be totally sure (and other very prestigous parties have verified) that the amounts in the box do not change after your decision.
So when you’re selected, what do you do? Nothing quite supernatural is going on, we just have the James fellow with an amazing track record, and you with no particular reason to believe that you’ll be his first failure. Even if he is just human, isn’t it rational to assume the ridiculously likely thing (301/302 chance according to Laplace’s Law) that he’ll guess you correctly? Even if we adjust for the possibility of error, the payoff matrix is still so lopsided that it seems crazy to two-box.
See if that helps, and of course everyone else is free to offer improvements if I’ve missed something. You know, help get this Least Convenient Possible World going.
Now I want to read a series of stories starring James Omega in miscellaneous interesting situations. The kind of ability implied by accuracy at Newcomb’s Dilemma would seem to imply capability in other situations as well. (If nothing else, he would kill at rock-paper-scissors.)