NEWCOMB POTTERY

Newcomb ’ s Problem

Newcomb’s problem is a decision puzzle whose difficulty and interest stem from the fact that the possible outcomes are probabilistically dependent on, yet causally independent of, the agent’s options. The problem is named for its inventor, the physicist William Newcomb, but first appeared in print in a 1969 paper by Robert Nozick [12]. Closely related to, though less well-known than, the Prison...

Newcomb-Benford Law

The literature for Benford's law is quite large and growing [1]; we avoid interesting foundational issues [2, 3] and turn attention instead to a speci…c scenario [4, 5, 6, 7]. Let fa n g

Newcomb ' s Problem

The 1998 Simon Newcomb Award

“... machine decision making is running our household finances to a scary degree. ...Most of us have decided to change our habits so as to appeal to these machines [that calculate our credit ratings.] Our demonstrated willingness to accommodate machines in this way is ample reason to adopt a standing bias against the idea of AI. ...Artificial Intelligence has been one of the most heavily funded...

Are Newcomb problems really decisions?

Richard Jeffrey long held that decision theory should be formulated without recourse to explicitly causal notions. Newcomb problems stand out as putative counterexamples to this ‘evidential’ decision theory. Jeffrey initially sought to defuse Newcomb problems via recourse to the doctrine of ratificationism, but later came to see this as problematic. We will see that Jeffrey’s worries about rati...