Why is the benefit of nuking to generals larger than the cost of nuking to the other side’s generals?
It is possible with precommitments under the current scheme for the two sides’ generals to agree to flip a coin, have the winning side nuke the losing side, and have the losing side not retaliate. In expectation, this gives the generals each (1000-300)/2 = +350 karma.
The generals have bunkers and lots of stockpiles, they’ll be fine. They might also find nuclear war somewhat exciting. How bad is a life lived as a king of the wasteland really compared to the glory of world domination?
I very good point. Especially after reading your other comment I wonder if this is deliberate.
The payoff matrix for the generals suggests that in a one-way attack the winning generals win more than the losers loose. Hence your coin toss plan. But, for the civilians it is the other way around. (+25 for winning, but −50 for loosing).
I suspect it may be some kind of message about how the generals launching the nuclear war have different incentives to the civilians, as the generals may place a higher value on victory, and are more likely to access bunkers and so on.
The best LW Petrov Day morals are the inadvertent ones. My favorite was 2022, when we learned that there is more to fear from poorly written code launching nukes by accident than from villains launching nukes deliberately. Perhaps this year we will learn something about the importance of designing reasonable prosocial incentives.
Technically it makes sense for the nuked side to lose everything and for the nuking side to gain little. But you want to model a scenario where the sides might actually want to nuke the other side, which you have naturally between enemies, but don’t have between LessWrongers unless you incentivize them somehow. So giving rewards for nuking makes sense, because people want to increase their own Karma but don’t want to decrease the Karma of others.
And I think the incentives are deliberately designed such that no nukes aren’t the obvious optimal equilibrium. That’s what makes it an exercise in not destroying the world. If it were easy it wouldn’t be much of an exercise.
Seems like defection towards the participants overall, compared to no nukes fired:
in the no nukes scenario, the 10 generals get +100 each, the two Petrovs get +1000(?) each, and citizens get nothing (+3000 karma in total);
in the coin flip scenario, the 10 generals get +350 in expectation each, the two Petrovs get +200..1000(?) each (depending on when in the game the button is pressed), and the 300 citizens get −12.5 in expectation each (-50..+750 karma in total).
Why is the benefit of nuking to generals larger than the cost of nuking to the other side’s generals?
It is possible with precommitments under the current scheme for the two sides’ generals to agree to flip a coin, have the winning side nuke the losing side, and have the losing side not retaliate. In expectation, this gives the generals each (1000-300)/2 = +350 karma.
I don’t think that’s a realistic payoff matrix.
The generals have bunkers and lots of stockpiles, they’ll be fine. They might also find nuclear war somewhat exciting. How bad is a life lived as a king of the wasteland really compared to the glory of world domination?
See also:
I very good point. Especially after reading your other comment I wonder if this is deliberate.
The payoff matrix for the generals suggests that in a one-way attack the winning generals win more than the losers loose. Hence your coin toss plan. But, for the civilians it is the other way around. (+25 for winning, but −50 for loosing).
I suspect it may be some kind of message about how the generals launching the nuclear war have different incentives to the civilians, as the generals may place a higher value on victory, and are more likely to access bunkers and so on.
It does, if anything, seem almost backwards—getting nuked means losing everything, and successfully nuking means gaining much but not all.
However, that makes the game theory super easy to solve, and doesn’t capture the opposing team dynamics very well for gaming purposes.
The best LW Petrov Day morals are the inadvertent ones. My favorite was 2022, when we learned that there is more to fear from poorly written code launching nukes by accident than from villains launching nukes deliberately. Perhaps this year we will learn something about the importance of designing reasonable prosocial incentives.
Technically it makes sense for the nuked side to lose everything and for the nuking side to gain little. But you want to model a scenario where the sides might actually want to nuke the other side, which you have naturally between enemies, but don’t have between LessWrongers unless you incentivize them somehow. So giving rewards for nuking makes sense, because people want to increase their own Karma but don’t want to decrease the Karma of others.
And I think the incentives are deliberately designed such that no nukes aren’t the obvious optimal equilibrium. That’s what makes it an exercise in not destroying the world. If it were easy it wouldn’t be much of an exercise.
Seems like defection towards the participants overall, compared to no nukes fired:
in the no nukes scenario, the 10 generals get +100 each, the two Petrovs get +1000(?) each, and citizens get nothing (+3000 karma in total);
in the coin flip scenario, the 10 generals get +350 in expectation each, the two Petrovs get +200..1000(?) each (depending on when in the game the button is pressed), and the 300 citizens get −12.5 in expectation each (-50..+750 karma in total).
Yes, we’re working on aligning incentives upthread, but for some silly reason the admins don’t want us starting a reign of terror.