Asklemmy

53554 readers

788 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS

What's your choice in Newcomb's problem? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 21 hours ago by Objection@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

33 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Newcomb's problem is a thought experiment where you're presented with two boxes, and the option to take one or both. One box is transparent and always contains $1000. The second is a mystery box.

Before making the choice, a supercomputer (or team of psychologists, etc) predicted whether you would take one box or both. If it predicted you would take both, the mystery box is empty. If it predicted you'd take just the mystery box, then it contains $1,000,000. The predictor rarely makes mistakes.

This problem tends to split people 50-50 with each side thinking the answer is obvious.

An argument for two-boxing is that, once the prediction has been made, your choice no longer influences the outcome. The mystery box already has whatever it has, so there's no reason to leave the $1000 sitting there.

An argument for one-boxing is that, statistically, one-boxers tend to walk away with more money than two-boxers. It's unlikely that the computer guessed wrong, so rather than hoping that you can be the rare case where it did, you should assume that whatever you choose is what it predicted.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] felsiq@piefed.zip 9 points 20 hours ago

I think the numbers are a little off for this to be tempting, if I’m getting $1,000,000 then a K is a rounding error and I see no reason to make the mil any less likely for it. Like if I wanted that extra grand throwing 10% of the mil into a short GIC would be how I’d get it personally, for a risk free $1,001,000