In the smoking lesion variant where smoking is actually protective against cancer, but not enough to overcome the damage done by the lesion (leading to a Simpson’s Paradox), standard EDT recommends against smoking (because it increases your chance of having a lesion) and standard CDT recommends for smoking (because you sever the link to having a lesion, and so only the positive direct effect remains).
Smoking lesion problems are generally underspecified. If you can fill in additional detail, the “correct” decision changes. And I argue that a properly applied EDT outputs it.
Consider the scenario where the lesion affects your probabilty of smoking by affecting your conscious preferences. The correct decision is smoke, and EDT outputs it if you condition on the preferences.
In another scenario, an evil Omega probes you before you are born. If and only if it predicts that you will be a smoker, it puts a cancer lesion in your DNA (Omega is a good, though not necessarily perfect predictor). The cancer lesion doesn’t directly “cause” smoking, or, in the language of probability theory, it doesn’t correlate with smoking conditioned on Omega’s prediction. The correct decision is don’t smoke, and EDT outputs it since the problem is exactly isomorphic to Newcomb’s standard problem. CDT gets it wrong.
Smoking lesion problems are generally underspecified. If you can fill in additional detail, the “correct” decision changes. And I argue that a properly applied EDT outputs it.
Consider the scenario where the lesion affects your probabilty of smoking by affecting your conscious preferences.
The correct decision is smoke, and EDT outputs it if you condition on the preferences.
In another scenario, an evil Omega probes you before you are born. If and only if it predicts that you will be a smoker, it puts a cancer lesion in your DNA (Omega is a good, though not necessarily perfect predictor).
The cancer lesion doesn’t directly “cause” smoking, or, in the language of probability theory, it doesn’t correlate with smoking conditioned on Omega’s prediction.
The correct decision is don’t smoke, and EDT outputs it since the problem is exactly isomorphic to Newcomb’s standard problem. CDT gets it wrong.