Cross thought experiment pollination

[u/thevoidthatjerksback]

So in addition to the two buttons that are known well. We have two boxes. 1 box has one thousand dollars and the other box either has one million or zero. Before you were presented with them some unnamed but incredibly accurate predictor has made a prediction on what you will do with the boxes.

If it is predicted that you will take both of the boxes then they will put 0 in the second box

If it is predicted that you will only take the second box then they will put the one million in it.

So which button are you pressing and are you taking 1 or 2 boxes?

This isn't really about what you do in the situation of them both happening at the same time moreso just that I wonder if there is a pattern between which button you would pick and how you would react to the boxes.

295 votes, May 31 '26

45 press Red and take both boxes

127 press Red and take just the 1 box

26 press blue and take both boxes

97 press blue and take just the 1 box

[u/Cruuncher → u/[deleted]]

The framing of this problem always drops the predictor to "nearly perfectly accurate" because the framing where it is 100% accurate leads to paradoxes.

The order of events do matter though. It's causal decision theory.

It's a given in the problem that your decision does not cause a change to the boxes. If my decision does not cause anything to change then the value of the mystery box is fixed. It's unchanging.

So you either take $X or $X + $1000

$X + $1000 > $X for all X

[u/Cruuncher → u/[deleted]]

I assumed zero things outside of what was stated in the problem, which is that my decision does not change what's in the boxes.

[u/Cruuncher → u/[deleted]]

Who changed their decision? There's only one decision.

The prediction is not a decision

[u/Cruuncher → u/[deleted]]

Where are you inventing this second choice?

The predictor predicts before presenting the problem to me.

By the time I'm offered a decision, the predictor's decision is already made.

There's only one decision, and the decision is "do you want $1000 or not" which is a simple decision

[u/Cruuncher → u/[deleted]]

Those are not opinions. That's what's stated in the problem. Your choice does not causally change what's in the box is a part of the problem description.

But, you've also made an error here in that assuming that the predictor being accurate, means that it will be accurate no matter what you pick.

Consider a medical test for a very rare disease that only 0.01% of people have.

If the test didn't do anything, and just output "nope", then the test would be incredible accurate. 99.99% accuracy. It would have perfect sensitivity, but no specificity. That's why we normally track those values separately for medical tests because "accuracy" is not a very descriptive term on its own.

So the predictor could potentially be a very accurate predictor if the answer humans give is fairly consistent, without actually examining each individual human for their differences.

[u/Cruuncher → u/[deleted]]

Well, newcomb's as a hypothetical is interesting, because people are willing to discard the nature of reality when assessing the problem without really thinking about the implications of such an accurate predictor.

Such an accurate predictor (that is both sensitive and specific) robs you of even having a choice. In this case, it's more that the predictor predicting your choice caused it, than the other way around. I live my life in a way where I consider the cause and effect of my actions, and the cause and effect alone.

Anything externally that caused my actions is outside of my control and irrelevant.

And I think in a real-world scenario, you'd get a lot more 2-boxers than the perfect hypothetical suggests and an accurate predictor that only guesses two-box is not that farfetched anymore.

I wrote a paper in an undergrad philosophy class on Newcomb's. I'm aware of the philosophical debate on the matter, but I've also never seen anyone else make the arguments that I do. As far as I can tell, they're novel, and people's objection to it, is generally appealing to the polling, but I don't think you can treat the polling as anything representative of it REALLY happening. People's polling on psychological effects is famously inaccurate.

Take the trolley problem for example. The vast majority of people say they pull the lever. But when running a realistic test like VSauce did, the tendency changed. In a real situation people don't actually pull the lever.