because there are no simulations of the agent involved.
The role that would normally be played by simulation is here played by a big evidential study of what people with different genes do. This is why it matters whether the people in the study are good decision-makers or not—only when the people in the study are in a position similar to my own do they fulfill this simulation-like role.
It does not seem to be more evil than Newcomb’s problem, but I am not sure, what you mean by “evil”. For every decision theory, it is possible, of course, to set up some decision problem, where this decision theory loses. Would you say that I set up the “genetic Newcomb problem” specifically to punish CDT/TDT?
Yeah, that sentence is phrased poorly, sorry. But I’ll try to explain. The easy way to construct an evil decision problem (say, targeting TDT) is to figure out what action TDT agents take, and then set the hidden variables so that that action is suboptimal—in this way the problem can be tilted against TDT agents even if the hidden variables don’t explicitly care that their settings came from this evil process.
In this problem, the “gene” is like a flag on a certain decision theory that tells what action it will take, and the hidden variables are set such that people with that decision theory (the decision theory that people with the one-box gene use) act suboptimally (people with the one-box gene who two-box get more money). So this uses very similar machinery to an evil decision problem. The saving grace is that the other action also gets its own flag (the two-box gene), which has a different setting of the hidden variables.
The role that would normally be played by simulation is here played by a big evidential study of what people with different genes do. This is why it matters whether the people in the study are good decision-makers or not—only when the people in the study are in a position similar to my own do they fulfill this simulation-like role.
Yes, the idea is that they are sufficiently similar to you so that the study can be applied (but also sufficiently different to make it counter-intuitive to say it’s a simulation). The subjects of the study may be told that there already exists a study, so that their situation is equivalent to yours. It’s meant to be similar to the medical Newcomb problems in that regard.
I briefly considered the idea that TDT would see the study as a simulation, but discarded the possibility, because in that case the studies in classic medical Newcomb problems could also be seen as simulations of the agent to some degree. The “abstract computation that an agent implements” is a bit vague, anyway, I assume, but if one were willing to go this far, is it possible that TDT conflates with EDT?
Under the formulation that leads to one-boxing here, TDT will be very similar to EDT whenever the evidence is about the unknown output of your agent’s decision problem. They are both in some sense trying to “join the winning team”—EDT by expecting the winning-team action to make them have won, and TDT only in problems where what team you are on is identical to what action you take.
This is not an “evil decision problem” for the same reason original Newcomb is not, namely that whoever chooses only one box gets the reward, not matter what process he uses.
The role that would normally be played by simulation is here played by a big evidential study of what people with different genes do. This is why it matters whether the people in the study are good decision-makers or not—only when the people in the study are in a position similar to my own do they fulfill this simulation-like role.
Yeah, that sentence is phrased poorly, sorry. But I’ll try to explain. The easy way to construct an evil decision problem (say, targeting TDT) is to figure out what action TDT agents take, and then set the hidden variables so that that action is suboptimal—in this way the problem can be tilted against TDT agents even if the hidden variables don’t explicitly care that their settings came from this evil process.
In this problem, the “gene” is like a flag on a certain decision theory that tells what action it will take, and the hidden variables are set such that people with that decision theory (the decision theory that people with the one-box gene use) act suboptimally (people with the one-box gene who two-box get more money). So this uses very similar machinery to an evil decision problem. The saving grace is that the other action also gets its own flag (the two-box gene), which has a different setting of the hidden variables.
Yes, the idea is that they are sufficiently similar to you so that the study can be applied (but also sufficiently different to make it counter-intuitive to say it’s a simulation). The subjects of the study may be told that there already exists a study, so that their situation is equivalent to yours. It’s meant to be similar to the medical Newcomb problems in that regard.
I briefly considered the idea that TDT would see the study as a simulation, but discarded the possibility, because in that case the studies in classic medical Newcomb problems could also be seen as simulations of the agent to some degree. The “abstract computation that an agent implements” is a bit vague, anyway, I assume, but if one were willing to go this far, is it possible that TDT conflates with EDT?
Under the formulation that leads to one-boxing here, TDT will be very similar to EDT whenever the evidence is about the unknown output of your agent’s decision problem. They are both in some sense trying to “join the winning team”—EDT by expecting the winning-team action to make them have won, and TDT only in problems where what team you are on is identical to what action you take.
This is not an “evil decision problem” for the same reason original Newcomb is not, namely that whoever chooses only one box gets the reward, not matter what process he uses.