Does Evidential Decision Theory really fail Solomon's Problem?

I believe I have seen this mentioned in a few places, including the paper on TDT where it is referred to as the tickle theory. It does help get EDT out of a number of holes.

Unfortunately, I think it ends up being isomorphic to causal decision theory, or at any rate very similar, to the point of two-boxing on Newcomb's problem. I don't know why it isn't more widely known though.

I'm not sure what Solomon's Problem means. If I make up a really convincing argument that the king should (or shouldn't) send for another man's wife, and communicate it to the king, am I thus forcing him to "always have been" charismatic or otherwise? How is this conditioning on actions supposed to work? Does adopting a certain decision theory make you retroactively charismatic?

Also I don't understand why the problem is named this way. In the prototypical example from the Bible, king David sends for Uriah's wife Bathsheba, and Solomon is their son. What.

Wanting to sleep with another man's wife is not necessarily evidentially equivalent to sleeping with another man's wife, as the reaction to Jimmy Carter's famous Playboy interview demonstrates. If Solomon updates his model of himself based on the latter but given only the former, he's already made a mistake.

On the other hand, your analysis would hold true if Solomon's desire for adultery implies a willingness to commit adultery given no causal disincentives, which isn't the same thing in the general sense but might be in this restricted motivational space. If that's true, Solomon's model of himself has already been updated based on his propensity for adultery, and conditioning on it would be double-counting the evidence.

Have you read EY's TDT paper? What you're arguing sounds like the "tickle" defense of EDT (Solomon should update on the tickle), and is addressed, with references to those who have argued it, starting on page 67. One author has used this analysis of EDT to claim that it should two-box on Newcomb's problem.

Edit: Apologies to benelliot, who beat me to saying the saying the same thing by a few hours. I'll leave it up for the link and page cite though.

I would like to say that I agree with the arguments presented in this post, even though the OP eventually retracted them. I think the arguments for why EDT leads to the wrong decision are themselves wrong.

As mentioned by others, EY referred to this argument as the 'tickle defense' in section 9.1 of his TDT paper. I am not defending the advocates which EY attacked, since (assuming EY hasn't misrepresented them) they have made some mistakes of their own. In particular they argue for two-boxing.

I will start by talking about the ability to introspect. Imagine God promised Solomon that Solomon won't be overthrown. Then the decision of weather or not to sleep with other men's wives is easy, and Solomon can just act on his preferences. Yet if Solomon can't introspect then in the original situation he doesn't know weather he prefers sleeping with others' wives or not. So Solomon not being able to introspect means that there is information that he can rationally react to in some situations and not in others. While a problems like that can occur in real people, I don't expect a theory of rational behavior to have to deal with them. So I assume an agent knows what its preferences are, or if not fails to act on them in consistently.

In fact, the meta-tickle defense doesn't really deal with lack of introspection either. It assumes an agent can think about an issue and 'decide' on it, only to not act on that decision but rather to use that 'decision' as information. An agent that really couldn't introspect wouldn't be able to do that.

The tickle defense has been used to defend two-boxing. While this argument isn't mentioned in the paper, it is described in one of the comments here. This argument has been rebutted by the original poster AlexMennen. I would like to add to that something: For an agent to find out for sure weather it is a one-boxer or a two-boxer, the agent must make a complete simulation of itself in Newcomb's problem. If they try to find this out as part of their strategy for Newcomb's problem, they will get into an infinite loop.

benelliott raised a final argument here. He postulated that charisma is not related to preference for screwing wives, but rather to weather a king's reasoning would lead them to actually do it. Here I have to question weather the hypothetical situation makes sense. For real people an intrinsic personality trait might change their bottom line conclusion, but this behavior is irrational. A ideal rational agent cannot have a trait of the form charisma is postulated to have. benelliott also left the possibility the populace have Omega-like abilities, but then situation is really just another form of Newcomb's problem, and the rational choice is to not screw wives.

Overall I think that EDT actually does lead to rational behavior in these sorts of situations. In fact I think it is better than TDT, because TDT relies on computations with one right answer to not only have probabilities and correlations, but also on there being causality between them. I am unconvinced of this and unsatisfied with the various attempts to deal with it.

Not sure about all the abstract issues involved, but I read a blog where a more practical version of similar issues came up with startups. This might be a more interesting test case because you can do more research and be surprised by data and so on?

In any case, Rolf Nelson writes:

Having a co-founder right away might be a "bozo filter" for an investor: it helps convince an early investor that you're not a bozo who nobody sane will work with. However, if you are such a bozo, somehow getting a co-founder won't change that fact that you're a bozo; and conversely, if you're not bozish (bozonic?), deciding to initially forgo having a co-founder will not turn you into an innate bozo. Therefore, I speculate it may be vitally important for an investor to insist on co-founders, but it may be less important from the founder's point-of-view for a pre-funding founder to immediately acquire co-founders.