Oldcomb’s Paradox

This post made me think a bit about the Newcomb paradox. Newcomb’s paradox is basically a prisoner’s dilemma with a sci fi twist. The neat version:

You’re in a room with two boxes. Box A contains $1,000, box B could either contain $1,000,000 or nothing. The person who put the money in the boxes is a near infallible predictor. You are given the choice of either choosing box B (thus possibly getting $1,000,000) or both box A and B (thus either getting $1,001,000 or $1,000). The twist is that the predictor only placed the $1,000,000 in box B if he thought you would choose that one alone.

Therefore there are four possible outcomes:

This is a paradox in that both choices are seemingly irrational. If the predictor is usually right, then being the kind of person that would choose one box is beneficial and so it is rational to one box. On the other hand, since he’s already put the money in the box, there’s no sense in not taking the extra $1,000.

It ends up being that this paradox brings up the problems of rational choice, free will and reverse causation. But for me, the problem is much greater: all of the choices are positive. I have thus decided to come up with a much worse paradox. I call it Oldcomb’s Paradox.

Continue reading Oldcomb’s Paradox…

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One•a•day

While you’re waiting for me to figure out how MySQL databases work, I’ve decided to devote a half-hour daily to blog posting.

The reason I’d refrained from doing as such is that 1. you’re the only person reading this (this is true even if I read it to myself later. After all: how can I prove otherwise?) and 2. these posts are probably all going to be lost once I fix my database issues.

Update (June 7): Remember when I had to limit my posts to one a day?

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