Inspired by a thread where Emmett Shear very patiently argues with someone about Newcomb's problem, here's two variations. I'm sure they've been done before but that's OK. I'll assume familiarity with the problem; if you haven't read about it, go do that first! It's a fun thought experiment.

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Relativistic Newcomb

You and Omega shake hands, synchronize watches, and get into spaceships traveling at the same speed at opposite directions. When you get to a light-hour apart, a timer goes off on each of your watches: at this point Omega makes its prediction and either does or does not put money in the opaque box, and you commit (and write down your commitment) to taking or not taking the opaque box. Then you both turn around. Once you meet in the middle, you get the contents of the box or boxes you've chosen.

From your perspective you're chosing before the money is actually placed in the boxes, but from Omega's perspective it's putting the money in the boxes before you make your choice. So Omega is truly making a prediction, but nevertheless at the time you make the decision you can't say that you're "already in" the world where the opaque box contains or doesn't contain money.

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Sleeping Beauty Newcomb

Instead of Omega you are confronted with Morpheus, god of dreams and prophecy. He is going to put you to sleep, then wake you up and offer you the two boxes. Whichever choice you make, he'll immediately put you back to sleep and steal your memory of the past few minutes. He'll then place the $1m in the opaque box if and only if you chose just the opaque box upon first being woken.

Then he wakes you up again, with no memory of the first awakening, and offer you the boxes again. From your perspective, there's no way to know whether this is the first time you've been awoken or the second. Which boxes do you take now?

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Unfortunately neither of these really adds much if you already 1-box. I'd love to get variations which probe similar edges of the experiment but for 1-boxers.

In the last 6 months, I've come to the conclusion that I am really strongly against people being mean (particularly in intellectual contexts).

There's an obvious cost to being mean -- it causes unnecessary suffering. But that's not my focus. I've realized that, when I see people being mean on the internet, I trust their epistemics way less.

I've seen all sorts of uncharitable, generalizing takes. e.g. "Polyamorous people aren't capable of falling in love." Polyamorous people feel hurt reading it, but more importantly, it's just a dumb claim with no basis. (Or, at best, it's underspecified.) Reading it and believing it will make you understand reality less accurately.

e.g. "Trans women are actually men" is a statement that makes a lot of people feel hurt. But also: what is it even claiming? The actual meaning is so unclear.

Furthermore, emotionally-activating statements make people struggle to think clearly. If you call your conversational partner an idiot, that makes it harder for them to think straight and take your best points seriously. It makes other people afraid to speak up, because *they* don't want to be called idiots. You reduce your persuasive power, and you reduce the dissenting arguments you'll get in the future -- both are issues if you support truth-seeking.

When I see people being mean on Twitter, I unfollow, mute, and/or block. Even if they have interesting ideas, I just don't trust their reasoning skills after I see them behave really uncharitably. (I don't wanna get Gell-Mann amnesia'd.) TBD whether this limits what I read too much.

I think I have dyscalculia. It was never a noticeable problem in school, and I've never gotten a diagnosis, but it does seem like maybe a reasonable way to model my problems. (Maybe?? I'm unsure how many of my problems count as "dyscalculia" considering I feel pretty not-central-example.)

1. When I got extensive cognitive testing, one test required me to count letters/numbers in an audio recording. I found it overwhelmingly difficult and scored 2nd percentile

2. By far, the hardest part of cooking is remembering more than 1/2 of a recipe-instruction at a time. (e.g. Recipe calls for 3 Tbsp sugar, so I grab the tablespoon, and then I need to re-check how many Tbsp I have to measure out, and then I dump 2 Tbsp into the bowl, and then sometimes I lose count at this point and forget how many Tbsp I've put in so far.)

3. Counting reps during exercise is absurdly difficult for me

4. Learning step patterns in dance also seems way more difficult to me than it is for anyone else -- even though I've been doing a form of partner dancing for years. (I chose one without precise step patterns due to my troubles, and it never got easier.) Relatedly: It feels near-impossible to grok rhythmic patterns in music

5. When someone spells something out loud, my brain reacts to this almost as if I am hearing meaningless gibberish. I have to listen really closely and carefully to actually get a spelling out of this. (I know this isn't about numbers but it feels related.) When I spell things out loud for other people, I feel like I can't keep track of what I'm saying, and I'm super-not-confident I actually said it right.

6. I embarrassingly forget a lot of numbers that I feel like I am expected to remember (e.g. approximate populations of countries, numbers relevant to CS when I was a software engineer, rough timelines of earth/humanity, birthdays)

7. CURRENT PROBLEM: Ugh I wanna knit but even the most basic patterns seem so hard for me!! Even when I avoid patterns that require counting! I'm doing a pattern where the odd rows are very slightly different from the even rows. Apparently I cannot keep track of whether I am on an odd row or an even row. Might sew a temporary sign onto the "right side" of the work.