Even in the original Newcomb’s problem there is presumably some causal pathway from your brain to your decision. Otherwise Omega wouldn’t have a way to predict what you are going to do. And there is no difference here between “your brain” and the “gene” in the two versions.
In neither case does Omega cause your decision, your brain causes it in both cases.
The general mistake that many people are making here is to think that determinism makes a difference. It does not.
Let’s say I am Omega. The things that are playing are AIs. They are all 100% deterministic programs, and they take no input except an understanding of the game. They are not allowed to look at their source code.
I play my part as Omega in this way. I examine the source code of the program. If I see that it is a program that will one-box, I put the million. If I see that it is a program that will two-box, I do not put the million.
Note that determinism is irrelevant. If a program couldn’t use a decision theory or couldn’t make a choice, just because it is a determinate program, then no AI will ever work in the real world, and there is no reason that people should work in the real world either.
Also note that the only good decision in these cases is to one-box, even though the programs are 100% determinate.
In the original Newcomb’s problem, am I allowed to say “in the world with the million, I am more likely to one-box than in the world without, so I’m going to one-box”? If I thought this worked, then I would do it no matter what world I was in, and it would no longer be true...
Except that it is still true. I can definitely reason this way, and if I do, then of course I had the disposition to one-box, and of course Omega put the million there; because the disposition to one-box was the reason I wanted to reason this way.
And likewise, in the genetic variant, I can reason this way, and it will still work, because the one-boxing gene is responsible for me reasoning this way rather than another way.
This is no different from responding to the original Newcomb’s by saying “I would one-box if Omega put the million, and two-box if he didn’t.”
Both in the original Newcomb’s problem and in this one you can use any decision theory you like.
This is confusing the issue. I would guess that the OP wrote “most” because Newcomb’s problem sometimes is put in such a way that the predictor is only right most of the time.
And in such cases, it is perfectly possible to remove the correlation in the same way that you say. If I know how Omega is deciding who is likely to one-box and who is likely to two-box, I can purposely do the opposite of what he expects me to do.
But if you want to solve the real problem, you have to solve it in the case of 100% correlation, both in the original Newcomb’s problem and in this case.
Sure there is a link. The gene causes you to make the choice, just like in the standard Newcomb your disposition causes your choices.
In the standard Newcomb, if you one-box, then you had the disposition to one-box, and Omega put the million.
In the genetic Newcomb, if you one-box, then you had the gene to one-box, and Omega put the million.
Yes, all of this is basically correct. However, it is also basically the same in the original Newcomb although somewhat more intuitive. In the original problem Omega decides to put the one million or not depending on its estimate of what you will do, which likely depends on “what kind of person” you are, in some sense. And being this sort of person is also going to determine what kind of decision theory you use, just as the gene does in the genetic version. The original Newcomb is more intuitive, though, because we can more easily accept that “being such and such a kind of person” could make us use a certain decision theory, than that a gene could do the same thing.
Even the point about other people knowing the results or using certain reasoning is the same. If you find an Omega in real life, but find out that all the people being tested so far are not using any decision theory, but just choosing impulsively, and Omega is just judging how they would choose impulsively, then you should take both boxes. It is only if you know that Omega tends to be right no matter what decision theory people are using, that you should choose the one box.
Why? They one-box because they have the gene. So no reversal. Just as in the original Newcomb problem they choose to one-box because they were the sort of person who would do that.
What are you talking about? In the original Newcomb problem both boxes contain a reward whenever Omega predicts that you are going to choose only one box.
Under any normal understanding of logical influence, your decision can indeed “logically influence” whether you have the gene or not. Let’s say there is a 100% correlation between having the gene and the act of choosing—everyone who chooses the one box has the one boxing gene, and everyone who chooses both boxes has the two boxing gene. Then if you choose to one box, this logically implies that you have the one boxing gene.
Or do you mean something else by “logically influence” besides logical implication?
I have never agreed that there is a difference between the smoking lesion and Newcomb’s problem. I would one-box, and I would not smoke. Long discussion in the comments here.
If you want to establish intelligent life on Mars, the best way to do that is by establishing a human colony. Obviously this is unlikely to succeed but trying to evolve microbes into intelligent life is less likely by far.
If I understand correctly how these images are constructed, it would be something like this: take some random image. The program can already make some estimate of whether it is a baseball, say 0.01% or whatever. Then you go through the image pixel by pixel and ask, “If I make this pixel slightly brighter, will your estimate go up? if not, will it go up if I make it slightly dimmer?” (This is just an example, you could change the color or whatever as well.) Thus you modify each pixel such that you increase the program’s estimate that it is a baseball. By the time you have gone through all the pixels, the probability of being a baseball is very high. But to us, the image looks more or less just the way it did at first. Each pixel has been modified too slightly to be noticed by us.
But this means that in principle the program can indeed explain why it looks like a baseball—it is a question of a very slight tendency in each pixel in the entire image.
No, even if you classify these false positives as “no image”, this will not prevent someone from constructing new false positives.
Basically the amount of training data is always extremely small compared to the theoretically possible number of distinct images, so it is always possible to construct such adversarial positives. These are not random images which were accidentally misidentified in this way. They have been very carefully designed based on the current data set.
Something similar is probably theoretically possible with human vision recognition as well. The only difference would be that we would be inclined to say “but it really does look like a baseball!”
Yes, I get the same impression. In fact, Eliezer basically said that for a long time he didn’t sign up because he had better things to spend his money on, but finally he did because he thought that not signing up gave off bad signals to others.
Of course, this means that his present attitude of “if you don’t sign up for cryonics you’re an idiot and if you don’t sign up your children you’re wicked” is total hypocrisy.
It’s going to depend on your particular translation. You might try searching for “refute”, “refuted”, “curing”, “being cured”. This is what it says in my version:
And what is my sort? you will ask. I am one of those who are very willing to be refuted if I say anything which is not true, and very willing to refute any one else who says what is not true, and quite as ready to be refuted as to refute; for I hold that this is the greater gain of the two, just as the gain is greater of being cured of a very great evil than of curing another.
“Only humans are conscious” should indeed have a lower prior probability than “Only physical systems specified in some way are conscious”, since the latter must be true for the former to be true but not the other way around.
However, whether or not only humans are conscious is not the issue. Most people think that many or all animals are conscious, but they do not think that “all physical systems are conscious.” And this is not because of the prior probabilities, but is a conclusion drawn from evidence. The reason people think this way is that they see that they themselves appear to do certain things because they are conscious, and other people and animals do similar things, so it is reasonable to suppose that the reason they do these things is that they are conscious as well. There is no corresponding reason to believe that rocks are conscious. It is not even clear what it would mean to say that they are, since it would take away the ordinary meaning of the word (e.g. you yourself are sometimes conscious and sometimes not, so it cannot be universal).
This article is part of Eliezer’s anti-religion series, and all of these articles have the pre-written bottom line that religion is horribly evil and cannot possibly have any good effects whatsoever.
In reality, of course, being false does not prevent a religion from doing some good. It should be clear to everyone that when you have more and stronger reasons for doing the right thing, you will be more likely to do the right thing, and when you have less and weaker reasons, you will be less likely to do it. This is just how motivation works, whether it is motivation to do the right thing or to do anything else.
If a person believes “God wants me to do the right thing,” and cares about God, then this will provide some motivation to do the right thing. If the person then ceases to believe in God, he will stop believing that God wants this, and will consequently have less motives for doing the right thing. He will therefore be less likely to do it than before, unless he then comes up with new motivations.
If a person believes “If I do the right thing I’ll go to heaven and if I do the wrong thing I’ll go to hell,” this will provide some motivation to do the right thing and avoid the wrong thing. If he then ceases to believe in heaven and hell, this will take away some of those motivations, and therefore will make it more likely that he will fail to do the right thing, unless he comes up with new motivations.
All this does not mean that without religion a person has no motive to do the right thing and avoid the wrong thing. It simply points out the obvious fact that religions do provide motives for doing these things, and taking away religion is taking away these particular motives.
No, you are misinterpreting the conjunction fallacy. If someone assigns a greater probability to the claim that “humans are conscious and rocks are not” than to the claim that “humans are conscious”, then this will be the conjunction fallacy. But it will also be the conjunction fallacy to believe that it is more likely that “physical systems in general are conscious” than that “humans are conscious.”
The conjunction fallacy is basically not relevant to comparing “humans are conscious and rocks are not” to “both humans and rocks are conscious.”
Re: the edit. Two boxing is strictly better from a causal decision theorist point of view, but that is the same here and in Newcomb.
But from a sensible point of view, rather than the causal theorist point of view, one boxing is better, because you get the million, both here and in the original Newcomb, just as in the AI case I posted in another comment.