alt Hacker News> Which also renders the entire paradox somewhat moot because there is no choice for you to be made.
Not quite. You did choose your decision making methods at some point in your life, and you could change them multiple times till you came to the setup of Newcomb's paradox. If we look at your past life as a variable in the problem, then changing this variable changes the outcome, it changes the prediction made by the predictor.
> The existence of a flawless predictor means that you do not have a choice after the predictor made its prediction
I believe, that if your definition of a choice stop working if we assume a deterministic Universe, then you need a better definition of a choice. In a deterministic Universe becomes glaringly obvious that all the framework of free will and choice is just an abstraction, that abstract away things that are not really needed to make a decision.
Moreover I think I can hint how to deal with it: relativity. Different observers cannot agree if an observed agent has free will or not. Accept it fundamentally, like relativity accepts that the universal time doesn't exist, and all the logical paradoxes will go away.
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> I believe, that if your definition of a choice stop working if we assume a deterministic Universe, then you need a better definition of a choice. In a deterministic Universe becomes glaringly obvious that all the framework of free will and choice is just an abstraction, that abstract away things that are not really needed to make a decision.
Indeed, I think of concepts like "agency", "choice", "free will", etc. as aspects of a particular sort of scientific model. That sort of model can make good predictions about people, organisations, etc. which would be intractable to many other approaches. It can also be useful in situations that we have more sophisticated models for, e.g. treating a physical system as "wanting" to minimise its energy can give a reasonable prediction of its behaviour very quickly.
That sort of model has also been applied to systems where its predictive powers aren't very good; e.g. modelling weather, agriculture, etc. as being determined by some "will of the gods", and attempting to infer the desires of those gods based on their observed "choices".
It baffles me that some people might think a model of this sort might have any relevance at a fundamental level.
This is a compatibilist view. However, we can tell that most people don't adhere to a compatibilist view of free will because it tends to make people very upset if you suggest they have no "genuine" free will or agency, and the moral implications behind the assumption of genuine agency are e.g. baked into everything from our welfare systems to our justice systems, that assumes people have an actual choice in what they do.
For that reason I strongly disagree with the compatibilist view - language is defined by use, and most people act in ways that clearly signal a non-compatibilist view of free will.