First off, if there’s a better place to ask this, I’d appreciate a nudge in that direction.

I’ve seen a lot of chatter on YouTube with Newcomb’s paradox lately (MinutePhysics Veritasium Wikipedia) and I’ve been dwelling on it more than I probably should.

To explain the problem briefly for the uninitiated: there is a super intelligent being that knows you to the core and can accurately (with 99.99+% accuracy) predict your actions/decisions. It has 2 boxes. You have the option to take either just the first box, or both boxes. In the first it always puts $1,000. In the second it will put either $1 million if it thinks you’ll take just the first box; or $0 if it thinks you’ll take both.

The apparent contradiction is explained in the videos.

So the solution to the problem I’ve come to is that you should remove your own ability to decide from your “decision” on whether to take the second box.

That is, you walk in the room, you flip a coin (or some similar random chooser) and on heads take both; on tails just take the first.

I think I’m failing to imagine all the consequences of this, but I can’t decide on what this would imply about the super intelligence’s choose of wether to put the $1 million into the box.

Any thoughts on this?

  • SanguinePar@lemmy.world
    5·
    20 hours ago

    You have the option to take either just the first box, or both boxes. In the first it always puts $1,000. In the second it will put either $1 million if it thinks you’ll take just the first box; or $0 if it thinks you’ll take both.

    I think that’s slightly wrong. IIRC, the machine will put the million in box 2 if it thinks you’ll only choose box 2.

    There has to be a way to get the million for this to work, and the way you laid it out would make it impossible to get the million.

    Also, I’m not sure that we, as the chooser, know for sure exactly how accurate the machine is - if we did, and it was 99.99% accurate then it’d be a pretty easy choice to only pick box 2 and thus get the million 99.99% of the time.

    I think there has to be some doubt about the machine’s predictive accuracy to make the choice of box 2 only, a risky one.

    However I’ve only watched the MinutePhysics video, and I was getting quite confused tbh! 😁

    • monotremata@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      19 hours ago

      Yeah. OP’s alternate scenario, where there’s not supposed to be a way to get the million, is a lot more fragile, since then there’s a huge incentive to get the intelligence to screw up its prediction.

      In the original setup, where you can choose either the jackpot box or both the jackpot and $1000 boxes, that incentive basically goes away. Like, maybe you successfully change the odds to 25% $1M, 25% $1.001M, 25% $1000, and 25% $0 (assuming the intelligence’s ability to predict the coin flip is no better than chance). But in the original problem, depending on your analysis, you’ve either got a 99.999% chance of $1M (based on the one-box camp’s analysis of taking one box), or you’ve got a 100% chance of getting $1000 more than you would by taking one box (based on the two-box camp’s analysis of taking two boxes). It doesn’t seem to me that a 25% chance of getting $0 would seem like an improvement to either of those camps.

      So yeah. The scenario OP describes would be a lot more broken, because people’s behavior would be much more chaotic.

    • DahGangalang@infosec.pubOP
      1·
      17 hours ago

      So the way to get the $1,000,000 is to be the kind of person who would pick only the first box, but then at the last minute change.

      That’s what makes it a paradox.