"You know your kid is going to take a cookie if you leave them on the counter to cool, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t your kid’s free choice to take a cookie. Your prediction is not causative of him taking the cookie.
"You can immediately see that conclusion has application in theology. So it seems to follow that because God is omniscient, it does not follow that we do not have free will."
This explanation is both simply brilliant and brilliantly simple.
Perfect guesser: omniscient God: will not judge imperfectly, will not guess wrong? Always choose eternal life.
More importantly... is Santa a bad guesser? How good of a guesser is he? Christmas is less than a week away and children across this great land of ours would like to take this into account.
Steve Kirsch is offering a 100K (USD) finder's fee for anyone who can procure a taker of his 1 million USD bet that vaccines cause autism. I offered to take the bet and lose, assuming I still get the 100K finder's fee. Is that like picking box A?
I don't see why this is a tough choice. I would pick B for the reason you gave that if I got a million then getting an extra thousand wouldn't be important. A more interesting version would be if you changed the amounts in the two boxes, say putting $75,000 in A, and either $100,000 or nothing in B. Then you could choose B, and get $100,00 if you choice was predicted and Zero if it wasn't. You could also choice both and get either $75,000 in your choice is predicted or $175,000 in it wasn't. Then the correct play is harder to determine, especially if you know that the Guesser is very good but not perfect.
>Speaking for myself, if I could get the million I wouldn’t care about the extra thousand.
And this is why you get to Utility Functions rather than merely Expected Value in Economics.
So rather than Expected Value, you want your Expected Utility to be greater. What's your Utility Function? That is very subjective, unquantifiable, let alone reduced to a single equation, and the best you can do is deduce it by what you want to do given certain positions.
Often, utility functions are risk averse. This is why you have insurance, for instance. The more risk-averse, the less incentive there is to pick A+B.
Risk-neutral utility is simply expected value.
The more risk-taking, the more incentive there is to pick A+B.
Good point, re: free will. At some point along the line, many people decided to forgert that the will is an intellective appetite, not an unlimited faculty reliant on total unpredictability.
All that's necessary for the will to be free is for it to be at least partly undetermined, not unpredictable.
My original comment (2020) was along the lines of the prisoner's dilemma: just tell the guesser (in advance?) that you will pick B and then do that. - and that, I think, holds.
However..
1 - the utility argument governs, I think, the actual response a real person would offer. In theory risking the loss of $1000 on the chance of getting $1E6+ makes sense every time - but, in the real world, that $1000 could make a significant difference to someone's short term future and so be worth (in the utility sense) far more than even a high liklihood bet on getting $1E6+. Maybe the NSF would give you a $1E9 grant to try this on street people? (just tell them that giving it to you will keep the money out of Trump's hands.)
2 - you write " So it seems to follow that because God is omniscient, it does not follow that we do not have free will." and this reflects, I think, your general view of determinism - but it's wrong, or, at least, unnecessary because the illusion of free will in a fully deterministic universe is made indistinguishable from the real thing by our lack of information. I am not omniscient (obvious evidence to the contrary not withstanding) and so have to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty, while an omniscient being would, of course, already know what mistakes I am going to make. etc. etc.
Read it, don’t understand it, but proud for having read it.
"You know your kid is going to take a cookie if you leave them on the counter to cool, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t your kid’s free choice to take a cookie. Your prediction is not causative of him taking the cookie.
"You can immediately see that conclusion has application in theology. So it seems to follow that because God is omniscient, it does not follow that we do not have free will."
This explanation is both simply brilliant and brilliantly simple.
Perfect guesser: omniscient God: will not judge imperfectly, will not guess wrong? Always choose eternal life.
More importantly... is Santa a bad guesser? How good of a guesser is he? Christmas is less than a week away and children across this great land of ours would like to take this into account.
Santa arrived here already on 6th of December.
There must be laws against using the word paradox when choice or preference is somewhere in the middle.
Steve Kirsch is offering a 100K (USD) finder's fee for anyone who can procure a taker of his 1 million USD bet that vaccines cause autism. I offered to take the bet and lose, assuming I still get the 100K finder's fee. Is that like picking box A?
I don't see why this is a tough choice. I would pick B for the reason you gave that if I got a million then getting an extra thousand wouldn't be important. A more interesting version would be if you changed the amounts in the two boxes, say putting $75,000 in A, and either $100,000 or nothing in B. Then you could choose B, and get $100,00 if you choice was predicted and Zero if it wasn't. You could also choice both and get either $75,000 in your choice is predicted or $175,000 in it wasn't. Then the correct play is harder to determine, especially if you know that the Guesser is very good but not perfect.
>Speaking for myself, if I could get the million I wouldn’t care about the extra thousand.
And this is why you get to Utility Functions rather than merely Expected Value in Economics.
So rather than Expected Value, you want your Expected Utility to be greater. What's your Utility Function? That is very subjective, unquantifiable, let alone reduced to a single equation, and the best you can do is deduce it by what you want to do given certain positions.
Often, utility functions are risk averse. This is why you have insurance, for instance. The more risk-averse, the less incentive there is to pick A+B.
Risk-neutral utility is simply expected value.
The more risk-taking, the more incentive there is to pick A+B.
Good point, re: free will. At some point along the line, many people decided to forgert that the will is an intellective appetite, not an unlimited faculty reliant on total unpredictability.
All that's necessary for the will to be free is for it to be at least partly undetermined, not unpredictable.
0 - still blocked on your site
---
My original comment (2020) was along the lines of the prisoner's dilemma: just tell the guesser (in advance?) that you will pick B and then do that. - and that, I think, holds.
However..
1 - the utility argument governs, I think, the actual response a real person would offer. In theory risking the loss of $1000 on the chance of getting $1E6+ makes sense every time - but, in the real world, that $1000 could make a significant difference to someone's short term future and so be worth (in the utility sense) far more than even a high liklihood bet on getting $1E6+. Maybe the NSF would give you a $1E9 grant to try this on street people? (just tell them that giving it to you will keep the money out of Trump's hands.)
2 - you write " So it seems to follow that because God is omniscient, it does not follow that we do not have free will." and this reflects, I think, your general view of determinism - but it's wrong, or, at least, unnecessary because the illusion of free will in a fully deterministic universe is made indistinguishable from the real thing by our lack of information. I am not omniscient (obvious evidence to the contrary not withstanding) and so have to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty, while an omniscient being would, of course, already know what mistakes I am going to make. etc. etc.