I know that this is a very old post, but I thought that I should add a link to The Counterfactual Prisoner’s Dilemma, which is a thought experiment Cousin_it and I independently came up with to demonstrate why you should care about this dilemma.
The setup is as follows:
Omega, a perfect predictor, flips a coin. If if comes up heads, Omega asks you for $100, then pays you $10,000 if it predict you would have paid if it had come up tails and you were told it was tails. If it comes up tails, Omega asks you for $100, then pays you $10,000 if it predicts you would have paid if it had come up heads and you were told it was heads
In this case if you always pay you receive $9900, while if you never pay you receive nothing. Crucially, you perform better regardless of whether the coin comes up heads or tails.
I know that this is a very old post, but I thought that I should add a link to The Counterfactual Prisoner’s Dilemma, which is a thought experiment Cousin_it and I independently came up with to demonstrate why you should care about this dilemma.
The setup is as follows:
In this case if you always pay you receive $9900, while if you never pay you receive nothing. Crucially, you perform better regardless of whether the coin comes up heads or tails.