The changes I’ve made for this version may seem trivial
Well, in one version you are being extorted for money, whereas in the other version you are merely being bribed. If you buy Eliezer's theory that you should pay up for bribes but not for extortions (because paying up for bribes increases the probability that people will try to bribe you, which is good, but paying up for extortion increases the probability that people will try to extort you, which is bad), then the difference matters.
Good point.
Assume no-one will ever know, that you can't disincentivise the actor and that they won't ever do anything like this again.
I was inspired to revise my formulation of this thought experiment by Ihor Kendiukhov's post On The Independence Axiom.
Kendiukhov quotes Scott Garrabrant:
Apparently "stopping caring about the possible worlds where that observation went differently" is known as (decision-theoretic) consequentialism.
I was thinking this through and I realised that (potential) disadvantage of not caring about worlds where the observation went differently can be cleanly illustrated by the following thought experiment:
This attempts to explode the consequentialism by constructing a situation where you can symmetrically burn a lot of value in other counterfactual case by refusing to give up a trivial amount of value. If you don't care about the other world, you'd press such a button if it could exist and because you'd press it in both counterfactuals you end up worse off regardless of which way the coin ends up.
Now you might be skeptical about the existence of such a button because you're doubtful about the possibility of perfect predictors, but if your doubt was assuaged then this thought experiment would bite. In fact, I would argue that it would be quite surprising if a proposed decision theory were to fail for perfect predictors without having deeper issues.
Additional information: This is an improved version of a thought experiment that was independently discovered by Cousin_It and me:
The changes I've made for this version may seem trivial, but if you want a thought experiment to spread, small details like this matter. The original version was just a symmetric version of counterfactual-mugging, but this was less helpful in explaining it than I originally hoped.