But in every example you supply, what you really want is not exactly to be irrational; rather it is to be believed irrational by the other player in the game.
I don’t think that’s the real problem: after all, Parfit’s Hitchhiker and Newcomb’s problem also eliminate this distinction by positing an Omega that will not be wrong in its predictions.
The real problem is that Chappell has delineated a failure mode that we don’t care about. TDT/UDT are optimized for situations in which the world only cares about what you would do, not why you decide to do so. In Chappell’s example’s, there’s no corresponding action that forms the basis of the failure; the “ritual of cognition” alone determines your punishment.
The EY article he linked to (“Newcomb’s Problem and the Regret of Rationality”) makes the irrelevance of these cases very clear:
Next, let’s turn to the charge that Omega favors irrationalists. I can conceive of a superbeing who rewards only people born with a particular gene, regardless of their choices. I can conceive of a superbeing who rewards people whose brains inscribe the particular algorithm of “Describe your options in English and choose the last option when ordered alphabetically,” but who does not reward anyone who chooses the same option for a different reason. But Omega rewards people who choose to take only box B, regardless of which algorithm they use to arrive at this decision, and this is why I don’t buy the charge that Omega is rewarding the irrational. Omega doesn’t care whether or not you follow some particular ritual of cognition; Omega only cares about your predicted decision.
...It is precisely the notion that Nature does not care about our algorithm, which frees us up to pursue the winning Way—without attachment to any particular ritual of cognition, apart from our belief that it wins. Every rule is up for grabs, except the rule of winning. [bold added]
So Chappell has not established a benefit to being irrational, and any mulitplication of his examples would be predicated on the same error.
Of course, as I said here, it’s true that there are narrow circumstances where the decision theory “always jump off the nearest cliff” will win—but it won’t win on average, and any theory designed specifically for such scenarios will quickly lose.
(I really wish I had joined this conversation earlier to point this out.)
I don’t think that’s the real problem: after all, Parfit’s Hitchhiker and Newcomb’s problem also eliminate this distinction by positing an Omega that will not be wrong in its predictions.
The real problem is that Chappell has delineated a failure mode that we don’t care about. TDT/UDT are optimized for situations in which the world only cares about what you would do, not why you decide to do so. In Chappell’s example’s, there’s no corresponding action that forms the basis of the failure; the “ritual of cognition” alone determines your punishment.
The EY article he linked to (“Newcomb’s Problem and the Regret of Rationality”) makes the irrelevance of these cases very clear:
So Chappell has not established a benefit to being irrational, and any mulitplication of his examples would be predicated on the same error.
Of course, as I said here, it’s true that there are narrow circumstances where the decision theory “always jump off the nearest cliff” will win—but it won’t win on average, and any theory designed specifically for such scenarios will quickly lose.
(I really wish I had joined this conversation earlier to point this out.)