felipec
unbelief
Freedom of speech maximalist who is anti-woke, anti-orthodoxy, anti-establishment, and anti-capitalist.
User ID: 1796
felipec
unbelief
7d ago
Building your strategy on causal understanding is better than building it on correlation.
If causation is available, which in this case it's not. Even then I would argue that all the causation you think you know are nothing more than hypotheses directly reliant on observed correlation.
No, the conclusion you stated is incorrect.
It is demonstrably the case that one-boxing leads the better outcomes. It can be demonstrated mathematically and empirically.
I can write a computer simulation and compare the outcomes of one-boxers with the outcomes of two-boxers. The outcomes of one-boxers are always superior.
You "argument" against that is ipse dixit. "Nuh uh, it does not". That's not serious.
But your choice isn't information you can use to affect your choice.
Another ipse dixit. Yes it is.
Did you even read my essay? It starts with an example that shows the correct choice depends on your choice. I already proved you wrong.
Your ice cream example, as artificial as it is, works, because you can observe how much ice cream you ate and use that as a proxy for the time of year.
No, it works because all anyone needs is correlation, which is evidence of causation.
That's true, but neither stated rigorously (which you'd need for actual mathematical argument) nor very interesting, and it's not the claim that needed defending.
Probability theory is stated rigorously. I don't need to prove what has already been proven.
felipec
unbelief
9d ago
It's what invalidates your argument, because it means you don't need to rely on correlation.
No it doesn't. That's an inverse error fallacy. a ⇒ b. ¬a ∴ ¬b I didn't say correlation was necessary, I said correlation was sufficient. If you have correlation, you can conclude b, that doesn't mean if you don't have correlation you cannot conclude b.
The point is that that doesn't allow for the conclusion you want,
I does allow the conclusion I stated.
The correlation between what?
Choice and prediction.
Mathematics is not a field where you just get to make claims without supporting them.
Yes it does. If x is more likely than y, that means a rational agent should expect x more than y. That's what mathematics tells you.
felipec
unbelief
10d ago
In any case, if I know the causal effects, I can just derive the outcome.
That is irrelevant.
You should replace "b leads to better outcomes" with "b affects the optimal strategy" for this to be meaningful.
No wrote it "leads to better outcomes" because it does lead to better outcomes.
Because in Newcomb there's no information A
The correlation is the information.
Better outcomes than random, on average, not necessarily better than a different strategy that takes advantage of a causal understanding of the problem.
It is demonstrably better than all the other strategies.
You haven't done any work to establish I get worse outcomes.
I don't need to. It's a mathematical fact.
What needs to be available is knowledge about causation.
Otherwise you are going to ignore the causation. Which is precisely what I said.
felipec
unbelief
10d ago
If you claim to be conditioning on Y and it's time 1 then that's a contradiction.
No it is not.
You are either lying, or have invented a brand new version of Game Theory and decision-making theory, which requires literal books to establish, not a couple of sentences at the beginning of a problem.
You didn't bother reading my essay, did you?
All this is explained very clearly in it.
When you say "Omega leaves and then you make your decision afterwards" you are saying "you are special."
Wrong.
felipec
unbelief
10d ago
I just think a lot of 1-boxers do.
I don't think so. I haven't seen a single one-boxer make that claim.
I'm just trying to explain why I think 2-boxers are 2-boxers. They think "backwards causation is wrong so 1-boxing is wrong".
Yes, that is certainly one of the rationales of two-boxers. But that doesn't mean many one-boxers do actually believe that.
felipec
unbelief
11d ago
Corporate want's you to find the difference between these two pictures and they are the same picture.
That's precisely the reason why the actual formulation of the problem avoided 100% accuracy: the prediction is almost certain, not perfect.
This whole thread is a red herring.
felipec
unbelief
11d ago
But "there is no reasonable way for you to deduce how you would trick the oracle" is usually not explicitly spelled out in the original problem. It's just left unmentioned, and left as an exercise to the reader as to how or whether it might be tricked.
That is false, the original formulation of the problem says very explicitly: "all this leads you to believe that almost certainly this being's prediction about your choice in the situation to be discussed will be correct".
If the prediction "will be correct", then you cannot trick it. Furthermore, Robert Nozcik goes on to say "You have no reason to believe that you are any different, vis-a-vis predictability, than they are.".
This thinking precisely aligns with my hypothesis: two-boxers think they are special, they have free will, they have the ability to choose otherwise, they somehow exist outside the system, thy can be the exception regardless of how unlikely that is.
felipec
unbelief
11d ago
I gave two examples where my strategy of analyzing the causation yields better results than yours.
No you did not. You assumed the better results given that you were right. This is circular reasoning.
It's definitely not as simple as just claiming your interlocutor is irrational without doing any work to establish that.
It is a mathematical fact that if a is correlated with b and b leads to better outcomes, using a as information tends to lead to better outcomes.
I use a and I get better outcomes, you don't use a and you get worse outcomes. I'm being rational. You are being irrational.
Saying "it's not that simple" is just false.
I haven't actually made a claim on what you should choose, only that you should reason from causation if available.
No, you are not only saying that, you are also saying that if causation is not available, correlation should be ignored.
felipec
unbelief
11d ago
In my experience most 1-boxers are 1-boxers because they implicitly believe in backwards causation.
That is not not true. Two-boxers make that claim with zero evidence. I've been told I must believe in backwards causation because I'm a one-boxer.
Let me be clear: I do not believe in backwards causation, and I'm a one-boxer.
To be honest I don't really see that recursion had to do with it.
Then why do you insist in backwards causation? If a and b are correlated, that's all you need to know to make an informed decision, no backwards causation needed.
felipec
unbelief
11d ago
Understanding the causality allows for a more successful strategy than just knowing a correlation.
No it doesn't. The answer is the same regardless.
For most purposes I could think of, I am indeed going to discount the correlation, because it's unlikely there's a direct causal effect between a and b.
Then you are an irrational person. It's that simple.
What? How so?
a⇒b,¬a∴¬b a) find causation, b) choose X.
If you find causation, then you choose X; you didn't find causation, you don't choose X. That's an obvious inverse error fallacy.
Correlation, meanwhile, tells us little if we already know the causation.
It's precisely the other way around. In the real world causation is merely a hypothesis, it's a tentative story you tell yourself. And the only reason you worked out a potential causation is because of the correlation.
Correlation is the only real information.
I'm not even sure how Newcomb is supposed to be analogous to the ice cream example.
There is a high correlation between the choice and the prediction. Ignoring that correlation is irrational.
felipec
unbelief
12d ago
You have a 25% chance of winning $1,001,000...but a 25% chance of winning $0, and 25% chance of winning $1,000.
No. You are forgetting the correlation. The problem very clearly states that the predictor "almost certainly" will predict your choice. That means that for the 50% that you choose one-box, the predictor won't be filling the mystery box 99.99% of the time. And for the 50% that you chose one-box, the predictor will be filling the mystery box 99.99% of the time.
So the breakdown is: $1,001,000 (0.005%), $1,000,000 (49.995%), $1,000 (49.995%), $0 (0.005%).
Formally, if you with probability p pick both boxes, the alien with probability 1 - p fills the opaque box.
That isn't quire right because the predictor is not 100% accurate. If we assume the accuracy is 99.99% (q), then the probability that the predictor will fill the mystery box is (q)(1 - q). Close, but not quite the same.
The statistically optimal strategy is to always pick one box.
Correct.
But the real question my essay is trying to explore is why some people do not see that's the case. In my experience the reason why people choose two-boxes is that they completely ignore the accuracy of the predictor, and instead of assuming that q is close to 100%, they simply treat it as a completely unknown variable that could take any value, including 0.01, despite the formulation of the problem.
Why do they do that?
felipec
unbelief
12d ago
It behooves you to use more sunscreen because it's summer, not because you're eating ice cream.
You know that because I gave you the background of how I constructed my synthetic problem, but in the real world all you have is the correlation.
If you spend your summer holiday at the beach then you should use sunscreen, even if you eat little ice cream because the ice cream stand at the beach has been closed.
But to assume otherwise would be an inverse error fallacy. My question was in the form of a⇒b, I didn't ask anything if ¬a.
If you don't understand the causalities, or if you have no other information, ice cream is a proxy that lets you do better than random.
Which is all that matters.
Consider another study that finds a correlation between a) "the number of nesting storks in European countries" and b) "human birth rates". Are you just going to discount that correlation just because the causal network is not immediately available?
If you present a variant of Newcomb as "Omega is giving you a choice between two options, "two-boxing" and "one-boxing". People who picked "two-boxing" on average gain $1000, "one-boxing" pickers gain on average $1,000,000", then, sure, obviously B is the optimal choice.
That is literally what the original formulation of Newcomb's problem tells you is going to happen.
But if you add information about what the choices are, and the causal mechanisms behind the payout, then it becomes reasonable to analyze that, and the disagreement about actual Newcomb is pretty much about causality.
You are once again committing an inverse error fallacy.
The fact that you do not immediately see a direct causal link between the choice and the prediction doesn't mean that there isn't a causal network between the two. But more importantly: it doesn't negate the very real and undeniable correlation.
felipec
unbelief
12d ago
If omega can be wrong then the entirety of the problem hinges on when/how/why it can be wrong.
No it doesn't. The entirety of intelligent agency relies partial knowledge, and you want to simplify Newcomb's problem to a problem of simply not having enough knowledge: "if only we knew how the system works then we could cheat the system".
The original formulation of the problem tells you explicitly that you have no reason to believe you will be any different, that is: you will not cheat the system.
It tells you explicitly your choice will be predicted almost certainly.
flip a very slightly weighted coin
The problem states that if you do that, Omega will put nothing in the mystery box.
Literally none of this is explained in the premise.
Yes it is.
It's not that I can't see a way for this to happen, it's that I can imagine a dozen hypothetical ways it could try to do this, and half of them let me two box anyway while half of them don't.
And these hypothetical ways violate what is very explicitly stated in the problem.
felipec
unbelief
12d ago
I think the problem is just that people strongly dislike the idea that freewill doesn't exist, so much that they are recalcitrant to even accept it as a premise to a thought experiment.
Yes, but the issue is why. I contend there is a common cause why they don't believe in free will, and also why they are two-boxers.
They are committed to see themselves as outside the system they inhabit, in other words the opposite of embedded agency. And I think the reason why they have so much trouble understanding they are part of a system in which their decisions affect their decisions is lack of recursivity fluency.
Ask any two-boxer if they are able to imagine their choice to be causally linked all the way back to the beginning of the universe. I don't think they can.
felipec
unbelief
12d ago
As others pointed out: Yudkowsky is a one-boxer. Can you provide a single two-boxer that doesn't believe in libertarian free will? I doubt there's any.
felipec
unbelief
12d ago
Two-boxers fundamentally disbelieve the premise - refuse to engage the actual hypothetical.
Of course, that was my conclusion as well. But the question is why.
I've discussed the problem with many two-boxers and all of them dismiss the high accuracy of the predictor on the basis that your choice doesn't affect the prediction. But they never bother to explain why that's relevant.
Even Robert Nozick in the original paper says if the decision doesn't affect the final state, then one should ignore the accuracy of the predictor. Why? Because that's what he was "lead to believe".
There is no reason to discount the correlation just because two-boxers don't see a direct causal link. That's why I devised the sunscreen problem: to show why it's irrational to discount a correlation on the basis of no apparent direct causal link.
felipec
unbelief
12d ago
From this perspective, the blue/red debate is a misunderstanding:
But that's not true in my personal case. I truly would push the blue button, even that means I die. I would still do it out of principle. It's not rhetoric.
Could Newcombe's problem just be a misunderstanding?
It's not true in my case. I choose one-box because I truly believe that's what most likely to maximize my reward.
felipec
unbelief
12d ago
The problem with Newcomb's problem is that it basically involves time travel
No it doesn't. That's what two-boxers claim in order to fit the problem into their view of reality, but that commits an appeal to incredulity fallacy.
Actual Newcomb's problem is basically the same as this in that decisions you make in the future affect things in the past, and the being making the boxes has to have time travel powers in order to guarantee a 100% success rate
That's not the Newcomb's problem: 100% success rate is never specified, it's "almost certainly". That means close to 100%, not 100%.
You are saying it's not possible for Omega to have such accuracy unless the future affects the past, but you don't provide any justification for that. You are basically saying: "I don't see how X is possible, therefore X is not possible". That is not a valid argument, that's an appeal to incredulity fallacy.
That is precisely why I devised my sunscreen problem. Your argument is the same as saying: "I don't see how efficacy against skin cancer and eating ice cream could be causally related, therefore they are not causally related".
Just because you don't see how Omega could predict your choice almost certainly without backwards causality doesn't mean that it can't.
That causation is irrelevant.
That's like saying saying two-boxing leads to better outcomes if we assume two-boxing leads to better outcomes. It's circular reasoning.
You assume we have to ignore the probability of the predictor. There's zero justification for that, other than the fact that you want the result to be two-box.
Yes I can. It is trivial.
No. Each example is standalone.
That example is not a paradox, and the answer depends on the choice.
My claims follow directly from probability theory.
If
p=0.99, then it follows that:(1/n) Σᵢ₌₁ⁿ Xᵢ → 0.99This is pretty much a tautology in probability theory.
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