Hell

The belief in hell, which is an afterlife where much of the population will be tortured eternally, is older, and more widespread, than everything which you, dear reader, have ever loved and cherished or will ever love and cherish. This means that it is better: if we had to erase the belief in hell, or everything that you love and cherish, then we should choose to erase everything that you love and cherish, every time. Something which is as new, and as local, as everything that you love and cherish, cannot possibly be even up for consideration.

Tradition means caring about the transmission of culture from generation to generation. The belief in hell is part of our tradition. It has motivated a lot of literature and philosophy and theology. Together with the religion to which it is attached, it is a bridge through time, allowing people from today to relate to people from the distant past. It is our heritage to preserve. Can anything like this be said for the collection of everything which you, dear reader, love and cherish? Of course not. Everything which you love and cherish may be very good, but it is not as good as the belief in hell, since it is not as old, and not as widespread. If that comparison is to be made, then the side of those things you love and cherish should get no sympathy at all.

There is really no contest.

Some people, who are philistines and hate culture and want to destroy our tradition and squander our heritage, have objections to the belief in hell. They want our children to have beliefs which are entirely new and cannot connect them to old and distant literature and culture and people and intellectuals. They do not care, at all in the slightest, for the value of what they are destroying. How can they be so heartless, and so evil? I have no grand psychological theory of this, but I can address their stated objections.

Torture

First, regardless of how little I can understand the deep psychology of how they can possibly have so little regard for tradition, it is nevertheless evident from their own statements that these people are profoundly mentally ill. They regard the belief in hell as horrifying and scary, something that keeps them worried and concerned through sleepless nights. The reasoning for this is, that they are scared that they themselves, and their loved ones, will be sent to hell and be tortured forever; since the prospect of being tortured in the current life is scary, then it must also be scary in the afterlife.

To this I say that their particular mental illness cannot be made to stand against our tradition. How can it possibly matter whether you’re tortured in the afterlife? It’s the afterlife: you’re already dead. You can’t affect the world anymore. You have no family or business to take care of. Nothing you do matters, and hence, nothing that is done to you matters. It’s nonsense to be concerned what happens in the afterlife.

It’s not nonsense to be concerned whether there is an afterlife at all, since human imagination makes it hard to conceive of ceasing to exist: whenever you’re imagining a world where you don’t exist, you’re imagining it seen through a perspective which is, despite all your efforts, still to some extent your perspective, still existing in that world, and hence you have failed to imagine your own nonexistence. It makes sense to be concerned about possibly having to face the unknown.

It does not make sense to be concerned about a well-understood situation which merely hurts. There is no parallel with torture in this life, where it may affect your future decisions and problem-solving. There is no problem-solving anymore, when you’re in hell. Like, grow up? I’m glad the fear of hell motivates some people to act morally, but the theologians have always agreed that being motivated by fear of hell is not really the most proper motive to act morally, since acting morally is to be desired for its own sake. A situation where fear of hell prevents someone from sinning must be regarded as two bad attitudes cancelling each other out.

People who are strongly afraid of hell often take their own mental illness to be somehow rational given the belief in eternal torture, and hence they blame their whole attitude on the belief itself in hell, which is our beautiful tradition and heritage. I wish they would get some kind of psychiatric help, instead of voicing their outraged objections. The belief in hell is responsible for culture and literature and history, and if it has some bad effects on some mentally ill people, that is really their problem, and none of these mentally ill people’s entire lives and thoughts and hearts and hopes and fears can ever possibly count in the slightest against the weight of the value of tradition.

Many separate concerns are raised about the belief in hell which are related to this mental illness, such as the idea that it’s a form of child abuse to teach children about hell, or the idea that it makes it difficult to rationally evaluate a religion if there’s a threat of torture for culpably failing to believe it. I think any rational concerns about these things are perfectly addressed by clarifying emphatically that hell is supposed to take place in the afterlife, that is, after you’re already dead, and if someone is still having lots of fear and dread about it when that is made clear, then, again, that is really their problem.

Goodness

Second, the belief in hell is also made to count as a variant of the so-called problem of evil; this variant is called the problem of hell. Here, it is argued that torturing people eternally seems somehow bad, or unjust, or unloving, and hence unfitting, or improper, to the all-good and all-perfect God of tradition; hence, at least one, or both, of the two beliefs (the belief in God, or the belief in hell) must be false.

To be charitable to these people and their intelligence, I will believe that they do not really believe such a nonsensical idea, and are instead being dishonest. It obviously does not count against the goodness of the God of tradition if he puts some people in hell, because, as I mentioned before, tradition has always accepted both God’s goodness and the belief in hell, which, since these entire cultures and many intellectuals weren’t stupid, means that, whatever the sense was in which our tradition claimed that God was good, and just, and loving, etc, must not have been a sense which excludes putting people in hell. So there cannot possibly be a logical conflict in whatever was meant by the words in their traditional sense.

The objectors may then bring up the fact that this has nothing to do with ordinary language, so that it becomes confusing to say God is good, and just, and loving, etc, in the ordinary sense. But we can easily grant this. Obviously, religious language is different from ordinary language, and many examples can be raised to this effect, such as when Catholics in a religious context talk about “marriage”, by which they mean a metaphysical reality which can’t be divorced, rather than the normal way of talking about marriage, which is a legal status that can indeed be divorced. There is no surprise to be had, there.

Don’t be linguistically prejudiced against Catholic English (RCCE).

The entire broader “problem of evil” must itself be dishonest, for this same reasoning: obviously, the tradition did not mean to call God good in a way that excludes creating the world as it currently exists, since exponents of the tradition always clearly regarded God as the perfectly-good creator of the actual world. If God isn’t good in some current sense, so what? God is good in whatever sense the traditional theologians meant the word, and that’s enough, and there’s no reason to care about newfangled senses of goodness and justice that aren’t really part of our tradition.

Conclusion

There is no good reason not to uphold our tradition, and our cultural heritage, of the belief in hell; wanting to eschew it amounts to nothing more than rank hatred of culture, and philistinism.

There are no bad laws

There are different ideas about jurisprudence, and legal interpretation. The following is what I personally believe to be the true principle of legal interpretation, which is an extension of the popular idea that “an unjust law is no law at all”.

The principle

The principle is that there are no bad laws. Any bad judicial decision was an illegal decision; any good decision is legal. The blame for all bad actions ever performed by all legal systems falls squarely on the judges, and in no circumstance can the judges be excused as being the mere executors of a bad law. The law was good, although the legislators may be blamed for writing it in an unclear way.

Suppose, for instance, that the text of a law is simply, “Eating ice cream is hereby a crime, and shall incur the death penalty.” Whatever this means when said in the text of a law, it is not what a normal person would mean when saying this sentence in an ordinary context. For certainly it is unjust to criminalize, and give the death penalty to, eating ice cream. Therefore, this is not what the law says. We must interpret it charitably. The intent of the legislator is certainly to advance the common good, and it is inconsistent with that intent to give the death penalty to eating ice cream; hence, this is not what this law does.

Objections and replies

Some people will have objections, such as those that follow.

“But the law literally says such-and-such. You can’t say it doesn’t say it.”

Actually researchers can’t agree on what “literal meaning” even means. It’s not a well-defined notion at all. You shouldn’t rest any arguments on it.

Even conceding it, though, we can grant that the letter of a law says such-and-such, and claim instead that nevertheless it is against the spirit of the law to do such-and-such, and hence illegal in that sense. Nothing really hinges on what the law “literally” says.

“Laws won’t be changed if they always get interpreted as a good thing.”

They could be changed for clarification, and besides, it seems much more important that the legal system never does anything bad in effective practice, regardless what the laws say. Laws are just pieces of paper.

“In many cases, there is no death-of-the-author for laws. We can talk to the legislator and hear further clarifications of his intent. This is less feasible when the law was written by a collective, but for the sake of argument we can consider a single legislator who answers questions consistently with having meant to enact something bad by the law.”

For the sake of argument, we can consider this. Although normally we accept it when individuals give us clarifications of their meaning, there is a difference here: when enacting the law, the legislator was acting as a legislator, whereas his additional clarifications are mere answers from an individual who has some opinions about what the legislator meant. When acting as a legislator, what someone always really means is to further the common good, regardless what he thinks he means.

“This is unfalsifiable.”

Yes, all theories of jurisprudence are normative, not descriptive.

“Ordinarily it seems helpful to distinguish law and morality, and this theory prevents us from doing that.”

It does seem helpful in ordinary contexts, but this seeming helpfulness is entirely borrowed from the distinction between de jure and de facto. In ordinary contexts, we usually do not apply a theory of jurisprudence to talk about laws: by “law” we commonly mean de facto law, what we expect will actually be enforced regardless of what’s jurisprudentially correct. As soon as we begin to think of what is de jure the case, even if all judges may be wrong about it, that’s when we’re applying a theory of jurisprudence, and then a theory that doesn’t allow for bad laws is at least as good as, if not better than, a theory that does allow for bad laws.

“If laws are just what’s morally right, then no one can agree on what the laws mean, since no one can agree on what’s morally right.”

Even people who accept the concept of bad laws can’t agree on what the laws mean. Why expect hermeneutics to be more reliable than morality? If judges required consensus on what the laws mean, they would never make any decisions.

“Why write laws at all, then?”

They are reminders of what’s correct in various circumstances, although often they are confusingly written.

“But why have complex democratic legislatures, and regulatory bodies, etc.? Legislative and regulatory institutions seem to be constituted in a way that is at odds with this theory.”

Yes, that is a problem with the institutions. It should be no surprise that we live under unjust institutions.

“Language collapses if the correct interpretation of a statement does not depend on what it says, and on clarifications from the author.”

It does collapse in the specific case of laws. This is because a law, properly understood, is “an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated”. (ST I-II.90.4)

“That’s not what a law means, though. Like, that’s just not how the word is used. No one talks like this, you’re inventing a new meaning for a word and pretending that’s what it always was.”

No, I understand that people don’t normally understand laws this way. But it would obviously be wrong to enforce laws if laws ever diverged even slightly from what’s morally good. And a judge is acting in the business of enforcing laws. Hence, to a judge who is doing the right thing, laws can’t be anything else; a judge who interprets the concept of laws differently is morally blameworthy. When I talked about the meaning of the word “law”, I was talking about its jurisprudentially normative meaning, not any of its linguistic meanings.

“It seems dishonest to interpret laws as always being a good thing, such as in your example about the ice cream.”

It can seem that way, but that’s due to unfamiliarity with legal contexts. Words mean different things in legal contexts and in ordinary contexts. We should always be aware of context when deciding whether a given communication was honest.

“Can’t a malicious judge claim he was earnestly acting for what he thought was right, and hence shouldn’t be blamed?”

Yes, but judges can also claim this if you believe in the concept of bad laws, this is no difference between the theories. Again, in an objection, you should focus on problems that are unique to the theory at hand.

“If this theory is right, don’t legislators seem to be always blameless for (what are ordinarily called) bad laws?”

No, they can be blamed for writing misleading or confusing laws, possibly guided by malicious intentions held by themselves as individuals or as citizens – but they can’t have held such bad intentions as legislators. As legislators, their intentions were good, or else they weren’t legislators and their apparent writing of laws was illegal. If we are used to saying that an unjust law is not a law at all, then we must get used to saying that a bad legislator is no legislator at all.

“In law, there is the principle of ‘fair notice’, which means that citizens must have fair warning of what is criminal and what is required of them. But if laws are just what’s morally right, then a citizen may be punishable who did not violate any ordinary understanding of the written text of a law, and then it seems he wasn’t given fair notice, at least not by the text.”

I think the idea of “fair notice” can seem correct because of the reasonable idea that “you can’t be blamed for failing to obey an order that you didn’t know was given”, and it seems like you shouldn’t be punished unless you can be blamed.

But if laws are just what’s morally right, then you obviously can be blamed for failing to obey a law, since you can always be blamed for doing morally wrong things, anyhow.

Besides, “fair notice” is already applied far short of the intuitive appeal of this idea, given how ordinary citizens do not really know about every law that may affect them. At least with true moral rules, we really can blame people for failing to know them.

“Doesn’t this give judges unlimited power?”

Judges have unlimited power either way, regardless of the truth of this theory. Judicial review is already a thing, even for people who believe in bad laws. Again, objections should focus on problems unique to the theory.

“Some laws seem to be morally neutral; their role seems to be to establish a convention, in the Lewisian sense of a solution to a coordination problem.”

I think in any concrete case, moral reasoning can determine what a good judicial decision is, and that’s what’s legal in that case, even if sometimes this does involve applying local arbitrary conventions. Although moral laws are universal, universal laws may require following relevant local conventions.

Sometimes these conventions are settled largely by ordinary readings of the legal text, and that’s fine; this just means that the true legal meaning depends on a common, non-legal reading of the text. In other words: the legal text, read in its proper legal meaning, cannot establish a convention, although it can rely on an established convention, and this convention may have been established partly by the non-legal meaning of the text.

These cases inherit the usual problems about how written texts by dead authors (or by authors who are otherwise unavailable) can’t actually have determinate meanings when pressed very hard about edge cases, although living authors can be consulted, and in these cases (unlike in cases about the legal meaning) consulting the living authors is relevant.

All your beliefs are true

If you’re mentally healthy, you believe that all your beliefs are true, and nothing can shake you from this belief except very momentarily, in a specific circumstance: in order for someone to convince you that you have any false beliefs, they must tell you which of your beliefs is false, and why it’s false. But once they’ve convinced you that your belief was false, you won’t believe it anymore, and you can go on believing that all your beliefs (in your updated set of beliefs) are true. No one can get you down, and you suffer from no self-doubt; you wake up every day with a clean conscience, having been kept up by no fears at night.

Some people will try to manipulate you and try to get you to be mentally unhealthy, so you’ll suffer from self-doubt, and can’t trust yourself anymore, and must depend on them completely. These people are called fallibilists. They will argue that since you’re not perfect, and you’re a fallible human, then certainly you hold some false beliefs, although you don’t know which ones.

When you see one of these people, you can keep them at bay by reminding yourself of how being mentally healthy provides you with the most satisfying solution to what is called the Preface Paradox. If you believe that each of your beliefs is true (which is just what it means to believe each of your beliefs), then by the logical principle of “conjunction introduction”, you can infer that the conjunction of your beliefs is itself true, which means that all your beliefs are true. This is perfectly sound logic which is used in many fields and should certainly not be abandoned.

The fallibilist, who is trying to manipulate you and get you to be mentally unhealthy and live with self-doubt and be kept awake at night by crippling fears, because he hates you and wants to destroy you and ruin your life, will say that it’s just so damn plausible that you have false beliefs that you should abandon this sound principle of classical logic as a general unrestricted rule, and instead, you should:

• believe that conjunction-introduction only holds in some special circumstances, or
• ditch logic altogether in favor of probability theory (a theory which has no workable semantics in most contexts, by the way), where a very high confidence in each of your beliefs can consistently coexist with a high probability of at least one being false; or
• keep conjunction-introduction but restrict other parts of logic to allow yourself to have a nontrivial set of inconsistent beliefs; or
• just embrace trivialism, the view that all propositions are true.

But the fact that the fallibilist gaslighter is outright asking you to abandon logic can now serve as your red flag. You can now take notice of how you’ll obviously be irrational, in the sense that you won’t be truth-seeking, if you abandon this principle of logic merely because of a deductive consequence, namely “all my beliefs are true”, which the fallibilist dislikes – but which he certainly cannot prove is wrong without disproving a specific belief that you have. For in general, it is not truth-seeking to abandon a model of reasoning (or of anything else) merely because of a consequence which is disliked but not disproven.

Once you realize that the fallibilist is asking you to be irrational, and non-truth-seeking, and to restrict the use of logic merely because of a consequence that some people find distasteful, you can make yourself immune to being persuaded by him. You can make it as clear as possible to yourself that he only wants you to stop pursuing the truth, which is always a bad thing and certainly not a good thing, and hence you should stop listening to the fallibilist gaslighter, who is trying to make you become mentally unhealthy and to get you to irrationally hate yourself.

(I’m not sure why, very reliably, people misinterpret this position as arguing that you shouldn’t ever change your mind. If you’re one of those, reread the first paragraph.)

Published writings

This blog post is a list of my published writings at places other than my blogs and social media (and not counting Wikipedia contributions). As of now, most of those have been for mises.org, so this blog post is largely redundant with respect to my author page at mises.org, but it will be kept up-to-date, as I have been keeping my personal page up-to-date.

I have gotten some opinion pieces published by the Mises Wire. Some of those have been translated to Portuguese by Instituto Mises Brasil, and I have linked the translation here.

• A Rothbardian Critique of Effective Altruism
• How the Farmland Protection Policy Act Has Socialized Farm Land
• Unmasking Academia: The State’s Ministry of Opinion
• The Bureaucratization of Science Is a Feature, Not a Bug
• Reading Against the State: A Libertarian Guide to Critical Discourse Analysis
• Why Taxpayers Are Right to Reject Immoral Research
• The State’s Favorite Fallacy: The Cudgel in a Suit – this one was translated to Portuguese by Instituto Mises Brasil
• The “Right to Roam” Is Not a Right. It’s a State-Issued Trespass Permit
• Who Owns the Bus?
• Why the Post Office and Non-Profits Share a Socialist Calculation Problem
• The Next Food Pyramid: Lab-Grown Meat and the New Moral Orthodoxy
• If Science Is a Public Good, Let China Pay for It
• Fukuyama Was Wrong; History Did Not End
• Marx Was Wrong About the “Necessary” Ruin of Small Landed Property
• Who Owns the Airwaves and the Sea?
• Moloch in the Regulatory State
• How Adam Smith Helped Create Modern Unionism – this one was translated to Portuguese by Instituto Mises Brasil

I also got an opinion piece published by the Mises Institute’s other publication, Power & Market:

• Non-Intervention Without the Fairy Tale of Sovereignty

I have gotten one opinion piece published exclusively by Instituto Mises Brasil, a Misesian institute which is unaffiliated with the Mises Institute. This does not exist in English as of yet:

• Salvar os jogos sem estatizar o código: o mérito e o erro do PL 3612/2026

Red and blue buttons

On 2026-04-24, Tim Urban came up with a version of Lisatomic’s son’s old question (from 2023-08-13) about the red and blue pills. The question was, basically: there’s a red and a blue pill, everyone picks exactly one, and if more than 50% choose the red pill then whoever picks the blue pill dies (if anyone). In Tim Urban’s version, it’s buttons to press instead of pills to take, and it’s everyone on earth instead of only the X/Twitter poll-takers.

I did not see it immediately because I have Tim Urban muted, but it eventually went so viral that I had to take notice of it. The question quickly became known as “the button test”. I don’t like this, because I dislike that Lisatomic’s young son’s creativity got overshadowed by Tim Urban’s ripoff. A version involving account bans was run on Glosso, of which I’m a member. (I chose blue on Glosso, for reasons which I posted to the site, which are different from my reasons regarding the original problem.)

Recapitulating my reasoning

None of my moral reasoning about the question has changed since my 2024-11-26 post about the original variant with the pills. To summarize it: If you’re good and not evil, your only concern is to be as little culpable as possible in outcomes with deaths (outcomes with no deaths can be disregarded). Deaths only happen if we have both RW (Red Win) and FRU (Failure of Red Unanimity), where RW means Reds are majority (a moral problem for Reds) and FRU means the population is not unanimously Red (a moral problem for Blues). Since both are required, neither side is uniquely to blame. But each Blue only contributes to FRU in that he adds himself to the death count (culpable for 0 or 1 deaths), while Reds are each partly responsible for the whole death count via the RW (and this must work like conspiracies to commit murder, where each conspirator gets convicted of as many counts of homicide as the conspiracy as a whole committed). Since the total death count, if nonzero, is necessarily ≥1 and likely >1, the correct answer is Blue regardless, since that option is culpable for fewer deaths. (See the 2024 post for comparison of these assumptions about culpability with alternative ones, which I found implausible.)

It is worth highlighting that my reasoning was threshold-independent. I do not choose Blue because it is likely to work for saving everyone. I do not care whether anyone is saved. I want to minimize my culpability if deaths happen, and I do not care whether they do actually happen; it is wrong to choose Red even if the threshold for Blue “winning” is 80% or 99% rather than 50%.

To emphasize this, I have sometimes compared the problem to this: “Everyone in group A will kill everyone in group B tomorrow. Which group do you want to join?” Here it is clear that no one dies if everyone joins only A or if everyone joins only B; but it is extreme to hope for either kind of unanimity, especially with large populations. In this, it is like the pills/buttons problem, but with the threshold raised to 100% (which accurately conveys my disregard for thresholds) and the action of killing made explicit (since I have indeed reasoned that the original does involve homicide by the participants). Here my assumptions about culpability can be made perfectly clear:

1. it does not seem plausible to take away culpability from participants just because none of them set up the “A will kill B” situation, and
2. it is very clear that joining B is morally better, since “it is better to suffer an injustice than to commit one”.

Reds are evil

All this time since my 2024 post, I already thought Reds were morally worse due to the reasoning indicated. (I was already pro-Blue before I made the 2024 post, but with somewhat less explicit reasoning.) But this has not been very important in my mind. Most people are pro-murder in one way or another; it is a wretched world.

Observing the conversations since Tim Urban’s viral variant has made me more alert, however, to independent reasons why Reds are morally worse, due to different kinds of dishonesty that showed up often during the Red-Blue arguments, and only ever on the Red side.

1. Analogies that introduce uncertainty that wasn’t in the original. Already on 2023-08-14, we had seen Roko’s blender variant, but these dishonest analogies, designed to instill doubt that reaching the threshold will even truly work to prevent the deaths (which doubt is not allowed by the original statement), have only become more prevalent since the Tim Urban variant (see thread on this). I have seen analogies to drinking poison so that an antidote is administered, jumping in front of train tracks to ensure the train will be stopped, etc.
2. Self-centered framings of the question. Framings such as, “Red: you live, Blue: you maybe live”. (Here is a popular one.) This presupposes that your own survival is somehow privileged, which is an assumption which it is always extremely wrong to even slightly consider.
3. Dismissing the entire concept of morality, and/or of valuing it more than life. It is one thing to defend that Reds are somehow less culpable than Blues for whatever reason. But something only Reds ever did, and Blues never did, was to dismiss the entire concept of morality, and mock persons who valued being moral for holding moral values, and/or for holding these values above their own survival.

For these reasons, which are only indirectly connected to their choice, I am very willing to have a lower opinion of the character of Red-choosers as a generality. Empirically, and not a priori, I have determined that there is something terribly wrong with the kind of mind that chooses Red, which makes Red-choosers much less pleasant persons to be around; as usual with empirical so-called knowledge, I have no idea why.

This was part of my reason for choosing Blue on Glosso; I don’t really want to be on a social media website where I mostly have to talk to these vicious Red-choosing people. I truly do not appreciate their existence, and I doubt anyone else does.

Newcomb’s problem is incoherent

It was in August–September 2025 that I first got curious enough to really think about Newcomb’s problem, and I really nerded out. I went through a lot of relevant literature. I extensively revised the Wikipedia article “Newcomb’s problem” (which had been titled “Newcomb’s paradox” before I retitled it) and added several illustrations, of which the main one seems to have been shared severally on social media and become instantly canonical. I was already convinced that the problem can’t happen in real life, and I wrote a blog post insisting on this at length while citing several academics (in retrospect, not very clearly for all that).

In conversation with a British girl named Rowan, I thought a little harder about how to explain why I think Newcomb’s problem can’t happen as a decision problem (regardless whether predictors are possible in general). The things I said in the conversation were also somewhat confused, but here is the best explanation I have as of now.

Let’s say choices are sets of boxes, so the possible sets are $\{\}, \{A\}, \{B\}, \{A, B\}$. Your choice is called $C$, the optimal choice is $O$, and the predictor is a function $\text{predicted}(C)$.

The problem is about coherence between these four assumptions:

1. We know that the predictor is accurate: $\text{predicted}(C) = C$
2. We know that we will do whatever choice we think is best: $C = O$
3. We know what choice $O$ we think is best.
4. We don’t know what the predicted choice, $\text{predicted}(C)$, is.

Suppose by our reasoning we think that one-boxing is optimal, i.e., $A ∉ O$, and we know this and also know we will do the optimal thing, i.e., $O = C$. Then by the axiom of extensionality, we know that $A ∉ C$. But if we know that $A ∉ C$ and also know that $\text{predicted}(C) = C$, then we know that $A ∉ \text{predicted}(C)$. But this means we know that the predictor has predicted one-boxing.

If we know this, it seems two-boxing is again optimal, i.e., $A ∈ O$. But if we had started out by thinking two-boxing is optimal, then we also, by parallel reasoning, know that $A ∈ \text{predicted}(C)$, i.e., we know the prediction (so it’s no wonder we think two-boxing is optimal). It seems, then, that we can’t be a situation where all four assumptions are true. To spell this out:

1. If we know that the predictor is accurate, then either we can’t know that we will do what we think is best, or at any rate we can’t know what it is that we think is best, or we can know what the predictor predicted and can act accordingly.
2. If we know that we will do what we think is best, then either we can’t know what it is that we think is best (and will do), or we know that the predictor isn’t accurate, or we can know what it predicted and can act accordingly.
3. If we know what choice it is that we think is best, then either we can’t know that we will actually carry it out, or we know that the predictor isn’t accurate, or we can know what it predicted and can act accordingly.
4. If we can’t know what the predictor predicted, then either we know that the predictor isn’t accurate, or we can’t know that we will do what we think is best, or we can’t know what it is that we think is best.

I personally think none of these four coherent situations are truly Newcomb’s problem. So it seems that a situation, to be truly Newcomb’s problem, must be incoherent: it has to realize conditions that cannot be realized at the same time.

On the Profit of Believing, as a Trump speech

On the Profit of Believing, folks. Tremendous profit.

On the Profit of Believing, by Saint Augustine, is my favorite text, but I worry that the archaic language in any accurate translation turns most readers off. And I care more about popularity than about accuracy, so I wanted a translation that sacrificed accuracy for ease of reading. I achieved this in a funny way by converting it to a Donald Trump speech using Kagi. The base text was the English one from NPNF. Footnotes were suppressed, and so was the paragraph numbering, although I might reintroduce either at some point. I made some vocabulary changes, changing “Donald” to “Augustine”, “curious” to “nosy”, and “opinion” to “conceit”.

Illustration for this blog post, made with Nano Banana.