I’m glad to have this to read. I was surprised to find many examples and arguments that EY hadn’t given before (or at least formalized this way). I liked the Newcomb’s soda problem in particular. I had been worried that EY had presented enough of his TDT justification that someone could “scoop” him, but there’s a lot more depth to it. (Anyone up-to-date on the chance that he could get a PhD just for this?)
And I also appreciated that the modified the smoking lesion problem to be one where people aren’t distracted by their existing knowledge of smoking, and that this was the reason for transforming the example.
I read up to ~p. 35, and I think I have a better understanding now of the relevance of time consistency and how it varies across examples.
That said, I agree with the others who say it could use some mroe polish.
Yeah, Newcomb’s Soda and Solomon’s Problem are really interesting! If I faced the problems right now, I would one-box, skip the gum, and eat chocolate ice cream, because those choices put me in the groups that win, so I guess that classifies me as an evidentialist. At the same time, I haven’t reasoned out these conclusions thoroughly—I can’t argue formally against causal reasoning or dominance, or formally for evidentialism.
Looks like I have some more reading to do before I get this resolved.
Edit:
All right, I think I can clarify my positions. I would not say that I am choosing based on evidential reasoning, but rather that I am confused by the mind-altering properties of the CGTA gene and the chocolate soda. How do CGTA and chocolate soda influence peoples’ decisions? Do they alter peoples’ decision-types?
Maybe the CGTA gene gives you an itchy throat or makes you like to chew things. At any rate, chewing the gum is always the right choice (assuming the others costs of gum-chewing are negligible).
One intuition pump: if someone else forced you to chew gum, this wouldn’t have any bearing on whether you have CGTA, and it would lower your chances of abcess in either case, and so you’d be glad they’d done so. However, if someone else forced you to two-box, you’d be quite angry at having missed out on the million dollars.
In Newcomb’s problem, the result depends directly on your decision making process (by the definition of Omega/the Predictor), whereas with the gum example it doesn’t.
I think I see a difference in the intuitions surrounding the Newcomb’s and Solomon’s. This could explain why one-boxing and gum-chewing are compatible, and points to a strengthened version of Solomon’s that I think is a better parallel of Newcomb’s. I’ll try to explain it, but it’s too bad this is happening over the internet and not in front of a whiteboard.
tl;dr: Newcomb’s predictor is inescapable, but CGTA’s influence is escapable. Therefore you should one-box and chew gum. This is not an attempt at a new decision theory, just an argument that jogged my intuition.
Each problem involves a two-pronged causal processes emanating from a root cause. They state that because of the causal relationship between the root and the prongs, the prongs will likely “match”.
In Newcomb’s, the root cause is your mental state earlier in the day, and the prongs are your decision and the state of box B. The prongs “match” if the predictor predicted you correctly and filled box B accordingly.
According to the statement of the problem, the process that leads from the state of the root to matching prongs is inescapable. No matter how complex your decision process is, you cannot trick the predictor, because your decision process is what it is accurately predicting.
In Solomon’s, the root cause is your CGTA-status and the prongs are your gum-decision and your abscesses (or lack thereof). The prongs “match” if you are in the statistically common group for your decision (if you chew and have abscesses, or if you do not and do not).
Unlike Newcomb’s predictor, the process that makes your gum chewing match your throat abscesses seems escapable. The biological process that turns CGTA into throat abscesses is not predicting your decision process, so how could it make your throat-abscesses match your choice? The outcome in which you chew gum and don’t have abscesses seems very possible; after all, the people in the study didn’t know about any of this, did they? You should be able to act as though your decision is independent of your CGTA status, and take advantage of the benefits of gum-chewing.
Looking at the problems this way, I can see why I would one-box and chew gum. Newcomb’s predictor has been demonstrated to be inescapable in its accuracy, but CGTA hasn’t really been tested, and seems vulnerable to exploitation by well-considered decisions.
Consider an extension of Solomon’s problem, though, in which the link between gum-chewing and throat abscesses persists after the study. The link between CGTA and gum-chewing is so strong that, even after the study becomes well known, you can only convince CGTA-positive people to chew gum, and CGTA-negative people invariably decide not to, no matter the arguments. Well-known decision scientists publish papers arguing one way or another, and are always found to be CGTA-positive if they favor gum-chewing. Even after someone tests negative for CGTA, they refuse to chew gum, giving absurd-sounding reasons!
In this strengthened version of Solomon’s, I think that it now becomes reasonable to assume that CGTA is somehow deeply tied into human cognition, and attempting to escape its influence is as futile as trying to trick Newcomb’s Predictor.
… the chance that he could get a PhD just for this?
A Ph.D. in what? The subject matter fits into some odd interdisciplinary combination of Philosophy, Economics, Operations Research, AI/CompSci, and Statistics. In general, the research requirements for a PhD in CompSci are roughly equivalent to something like 4 published research papers plus a ~200 page dissertation containing material that can be worked into either a monograph or another half-dozen publishable papers. But there are other requirements besides research, and many institutions don’t like to allow people to “test out” of those requirements because it looks bad to the accrediting agencies.
I’m glad to have this to read. I was surprised to find many examples and arguments that EY hadn’t given before (or at least formalized this way). I liked the Newcomb’s soda problem in particular. I had been worried that EY had presented enough of his TDT justification that someone could “scoop” him, but there’s a lot more depth to it. (Anyone up-to-date on the chance that he could get a PhD just for this?)
And I also appreciated that the modified the smoking lesion problem to be one where people aren’t distracted by their existing knowledge of smoking, and that this was the reason for transforming the example.
I read up to ~p. 35, and I think I have a better understanding now of the relevance of time consistency and how it varies across examples.
That said, I agree with the others who say it could use some mroe polish.
Yeah, Newcomb’s Soda and Solomon’s Problem are really interesting! If I faced the problems right now, I would one-box, skip the gum, and eat chocolate ice cream, because those choices put me in the groups that win, so I guess that classifies me as an evidentialist. At the same time, I haven’t reasoned out these conclusions thoroughly—I can’t argue formally against causal reasoning or dominance, or formally for evidentialism.
Looks like I have some more reading to do before I get this resolved.
Edit: All right, I think I can clarify my positions. I would not say that I am choosing based on evidential reasoning, but rather that I am confused by the mind-altering properties of the CGTA gene and the chocolate soda. How do CGTA and chocolate soda influence peoples’ decisions? Do they alter peoples’ decision-types?
Maybe the CGTA gene gives you an itchy throat or makes you like to chew things. At any rate, chewing the gum is always the right choice (assuming the others costs of gum-chewing are negligible).
Ah, maybe you can help me out. Why should I chew gum, but not two-box?
One intuition pump: if someone else forced you to chew gum, this wouldn’t have any bearing on whether you have CGTA, and it would lower your chances of abcess in either case, and so you’d be glad they’d done so. However, if someone else forced you to two-box, you’d be quite angry at having missed out on the million dollars.
In Newcomb’s problem, the result depends directly on your decision making process (by the definition of Omega/the Predictor), whereas with the gum example it doesn’t.
I think I see a difference in the intuitions surrounding the Newcomb’s and Solomon’s. This could explain why one-boxing and gum-chewing are compatible, and points to a strengthened version of Solomon’s that I think is a better parallel of Newcomb’s. I’ll try to explain it, but it’s too bad this is happening over the internet and not in front of a whiteboard.
tl;dr: Newcomb’s predictor is inescapable, but CGTA’s influence is escapable. Therefore you should one-box and chew gum. This is not an attempt at a new decision theory, just an argument that jogged my intuition.
Each problem involves a two-pronged causal processes emanating from a root cause. They state that because of the causal relationship between the root and the prongs, the prongs will likely “match”.
In Newcomb’s, the root cause is your mental state earlier in the day, and the prongs are your decision and the state of box B. The prongs “match” if the predictor predicted you correctly and filled box B accordingly.
According to the statement of the problem, the process that leads from the state of the root to matching prongs is inescapable. No matter how complex your decision process is, you cannot trick the predictor, because your decision process is what it is accurately predicting.
In Solomon’s, the root cause is your CGTA-status and the prongs are your gum-decision and your abscesses (or lack thereof). The prongs “match” if you are in the statistically common group for your decision (if you chew and have abscesses, or if you do not and do not).
Unlike Newcomb’s predictor, the process that makes your gum chewing match your throat abscesses seems escapable. The biological process that turns CGTA into throat abscesses is not predicting your decision process, so how could it make your throat-abscesses match your choice? The outcome in which you chew gum and don’t have abscesses seems very possible; after all, the people in the study didn’t know about any of this, did they? You should be able to act as though your decision is independent of your CGTA status, and take advantage of the benefits of gum-chewing.
Looking at the problems this way, I can see why I would one-box and chew gum. Newcomb’s predictor has been demonstrated to be inescapable in its accuracy, but CGTA hasn’t really been tested, and seems vulnerable to exploitation by well-considered decisions.
Consider an extension of Solomon’s problem, though, in which the link between gum-chewing and throat abscesses persists after the study. The link between CGTA and gum-chewing is so strong that, even after the study becomes well known, you can only convince CGTA-positive people to chew gum, and CGTA-negative people invariably decide not to, no matter the arguments. Well-known decision scientists publish papers arguing one way or another, and are always found to be CGTA-positive if they favor gum-chewing. Even after someone tests negative for CGTA, they refuse to chew gum, giving absurd-sounding reasons!
In this strengthened version of Solomon’s, I think that it now becomes reasonable to assume that CGTA is somehow deeply tied into human cognition, and attempting to escape its influence is as futile as trying to trick Newcomb’s Predictor.
A Ph.D. in what? The subject matter fits into some odd interdisciplinary combination of Philosophy, Economics, Operations Research, AI/CompSci, and Statistics. In general, the research requirements for a PhD in CompSci are roughly equivalent to something like 4 published research papers plus a ~200 page dissertation containing material that can be worked into either a monograph or another half-dozen publishable papers. But there are other requirements besides research, and many institutions don’t like to allow people to “test out” of those requirements because it looks bad to the accrediting agencies.