As stated, the only trap the white box contains is information… which is quite enough, really. A prediction can be considered a true statement if it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, after all. More seriously, if such a thing as a basilisk is possible, the white box will contain a basilisk. Accordingly, it’s feasible that the fact could be something like “Shortly after you finish reading this, you will drop into an irreversible, excruciatingly painful, minimally aware coma, where by all outward appearances you look fine, yet you find out the world goes downhill while you get made to live forever”, and there’s some kind of sneaky pattern encoded in the pattern of the text and the border of the page or whatever that causes your brain to lock up and start firing pain receptors, such that the pattern is self-sustaining. Everything else about the world and living forever and such would have to have been something that would have happened anyway, lacking your action to prevent it, but if Omega knows UFAI will happen near enough in the future, and knows that such a UFAI would catch you in your coma and stick you with immortality nanites without caring about your torture-coma state… then yeah, just such a statement is entirely possible.
But the information in either box is clearly an influence on the universe—you can’t just create information. I’m operating under the assumption that Omega’s boxes don’t violate the entropy principles here, and it just seems virtually impossible to construct a mind such that Omega could not possibly, with sufficient data on the universe, construct a truth and a falsehood for which when learned by you would arrive at causal disruption of the world in the worst-possible-by-your-utility-function and best-possible-by-your-utility-function manners respectively.
As such, since Omega is saying the truth and Omega has fully optimized these two boxes among a potentially-infinite space of facts correlating to a potentially-infinite (unverified) space of causal influences on the world depending on your mind. To me, it seems >99% likely that opening the white box will result in the worst possible universe for the vast majority of mindspace, and the black box in the best possible universe for the vast majority of mindspace.
I can conceive of minds that would circumvent this, but these are not even remotely close to anything I would consider capable of discussing with Omega (e.g. a mind that consists entirely of “+1 utilon on picking Omega’s White Box, −9999 utilon on any other choice” and nothing else), and I infer all of those minds to be irrelevant to the discussion at hand since all such minds I can imagine currently are.
As stated, the only trap the white box contains is information… which is quite enough, really. A prediction can be considered a true statement if it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, after all. More seriously, if such a thing as a basilisk is possible, the white box will contain a basilisk. Accordingly, it’s feasible that the fact could be something like “Shortly after you finish reading this, you will drop into an irreversible, excruciatingly painful, minimally aware coma, where by all outward appearances you look fine, yet you find out the world goes downhill while you get made to live forever”, and there’s some kind of sneaky pattern encoded in the pattern of the text and the border of the page or whatever that causes your brain to lock up and start firing pain receptors, such that the pattern is self-sustaining. Everything else about the world and living forever and such would have to have been something that would have happened anyway, lacking your action to prevent it, but if Omega knows UFAI will happen near enough in the future, and knows that such a UFAI would catch you in your coma and stick you with immortality nanites without caring about your torture-coma state… then yeah, just such a statement is entirely possible.
But the information in either box is clearly an influence on the universe—you can’t just create information. I’m operating under the assumption that Omega’s boxes don’t violate the entropy principles here, and it just seems virtually impossible to construct a mind such that Omega could not possibly, with sufficient data on the universe, construct a truth and a falsehood for which when learned by you would arrive at causal disruption of the world in the worst-possible-by-your-utility-function and best-possible-by-your-utility-function manners respectively.
As such, since Omega is saying the truth and Omega has fully optimized these two boxes among a potentially-infinite space of facts correlating to a potentially-infinite (unverified) space of causal influences on the world depending on your mind. To me, it seems >99% likely that opening the white box will result in the worst possible universe for the vast majority of mindspace, and the black box in the best possible universe for the vast majority of mindspace.
I can conceive of minds that would circumvent this, but these are not even remotely close to anything I would consider capable of discussing with Omega (e.g. a mind that consists entirely of “+1 utilon on picking Omega’s White Box, −9999 utilon on any other choice” and nothing else), and I infer all of those minds to be irrelevant to the discussion at hand since all such minds I can imagine currently are.