The Dick Kick'em Paradox

The setup violates a fairness condition that has been talked about previously.

From https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.05060.pdf, section 9:

We grant that it is possible to punish agents for using a specific decision proce- dure, or to design one decision problem that punishes an agent for rational behavior in a different decision problem. In those cases, no decision theory is safe. CDT per- forms worse that FDT in the decision problem where agents are punished for using CDT, but that hardly tells us which theory is better for making decisions. [...]

Yet FDT does appear to be superior to CDT and EDT in all dilemmas where the agent’s beliefs are accurate and the outcome depends only on the agent’s behavior in the dilemma at hand. Informally, we call these sorts of problems “fair problems.” By this standard, Newcomb’s problem is fair; Newcomb’s predictor punishes and rewards agents only based on their actions. [...]

There is no perfect decision theory for all possible scenarios, but there may be a general-purpose decision theory that matches or outperforms all rivals in fair dilem- mas, if a satisfactory notion of “fairness” can be formalized

In Newcomb's paradox, the predictor only cares about what you do when presented with the boxes. It doesn't care about whether that's because you use ADT, BDT, or anything else. Whereas Dick Kick'em has to actually look at your source code and base his decision on that. He might as well be deciding based on any arbitrary property of the code, like whether it uses tabs or spaces, rather than what decision theory it implements. (Actually, the tabs and spaces thing sounds more plausible! Determining what kind of decision theory a given piece of code implements seems like it could be equivalent to solving the halting problem.) Agents that care about what you'll do in various situations seem much more common and relevant than agents that arbitrarily reward you for being designed a certain way.

Newcomb's problem is analogous to many real world situations. (For example: I want to trade with a person, but not if they're going to rip me off. But as soon as I agree to trade with them, that grants them the opportunity to rip me off with no consequences. Thus, unless they're predictably not going to do that, I had better not trade with them.) It's not clear what real world situations (if any) Dick Kick'em is analogous to. Religious wars?

What if you believe in DKRUDT, the "Dick Kick'em rewards you" decision theory?

Seriously though, Newcomb's setup is not adversarial in the same way, the predictor rewards or punishes you for actions, not beliefs. Your internal reasoning does not matter, as long as you end up one-boxing you walk away with more money.

 Either that, or the idea of mind reading agents is flawed.

We shouldn't conclude that, since to various degrees mindreading agents already happen in real life.

If we tighten our standard to "games where the mindreading agent is only allowed to predict actions you'd choose in the game, which is played with you already knowing about the mindreading agent", then many decision theories that are different in other situations might all choose to respond to "pick B or I'll kick you in the dick" by picking B.