Rationally Speaking #140 - Kenny Easwaran on "Newcomb's Paradox and the tragedy of rationality"

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2015

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode of Rationally Speaking features philosopher Kenny Easwaran, who delves into the notorious "Newcomb's Paradox" -- the puzzle about which it was once said, "To almost everyone it is perfectly clear and obvious what should be done. The difficulty is that these people seem to divide almost evenly on the problem, with large numbers thinking that the opposing half is just being silly." Kenny and Julia explore how Newcomb's Paradox is related to other puzzles in decision theory, like the Prisoners' Dilemma; what its implications are for free will; and what Kenny calls the "deep tragedy" at the heart of rationality.

Kenny Easwaran is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at Texas A&M University. He works on several topics relating to epistemology and decision theory, and the role of probability in helping to understand these and related concepts.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.
0:22.6	For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org.
0:36.0	Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.
0:41.3	I'm your host, Julia Galef, and with me today is our guest, Professor Kenny Iswaran, who is a professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University, where he specializes in subfields of philosophy, including epistemology and
0:56.4	mathematical logic and the philosophy of math. Kenny, welcome to the show. Hi, welcome. How are you?
1:01.8	Good. Thank you. Thanks so much for joining us. And before we begin the episode, I just want to remind
1:06.2	our listeners that there are full transcripts of every episode now posted on our website, rationally speaking
1:11.4	podcast.org. So if you prefer to consume your information and insight dense podcasts by reading
1:19.2	instead of listening, then just go download the transcript there. So today I want to talk about
1:24.6	a controversial paradox in philosophy called Newcomb's problem or Newcomb's
1:30.1	paradox. And we'll discuss why it's important and how it's shaped the field of decision theory
1:34.9	and maybe what it has to say about other philosophical topics like free will. So, Kenny, to start
1:41.2	things off, why don't you just give some context for this paradox?
1:46.1	You can explain it in your own words and you can relate it to the work that you do.
1:51.5	Yeah.
1:52.1	So traditionally, decision theory is based on an assumption that there are some parts of the
1:57.9	world that you control, which we might call your actions, and there are some parts of the world that you control, which we might call your actions,
2:02.2	and there are some parts of the world that you don't control, which we might call the state of the
2:05.7	world. And traditional decision theory is developed by Leonard Savage and other statisticians
2:11.3	in the middle of the 20th century, assumes that these two things are independent, and that
2:16.3	the outcome is the product of your action plus the state of the world.
2:19.3	And the way, and suggests that the way you should decide what to do is by figuring out what's the probability of any given outcome, given each of your actions,
	...

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