This can turn into a very long discussion. I’m okay with that, but let me know if you’re not so I can probe only the points that are likely to resolve. I’ll raise the contentious points regardless, but I don’t want to draw focus on them if there’s little motivation to discuss them in depth.
I agree that a split in terminology is warranted, and that “defect” and “cooperate” are poor choices. How about this:
Coalition members may form consensus on the coalition strategy. Members of a coalition may follow the consensus coalition strategy or violate the consensus coalition strategy.
Members of a coalition may benefit the coalition or hurt the coalition.
Benefiting the coalition means raising its payoff regardless of consensus. Hurting the coalition means reducing its payoff regardless of consensus. A coalition may form consensus on the coalition strategy regardless of the optimality of that strategy.
Contentious points:
I expect that treating utility so generally will lead to paradoxes, particularly when utility functions are defined in terms of other utility functions. I think this is an extremely important case, particularly when strategies take trust into account. As a result, I expect that such a general notion of utility will lead to paradoxes when using it to reason about trust.
“Utility is not a resource.” I think this is a useful distinction when trying to clarify goals, but not a useful distinction when trying to make decisions given a set of goals. In particular, once the payoff tables are defined for a game, the goals must already have been defined, and so utility can be treated as a resource in that game.
I’m not sure a long discussion with me is helpful—I mostly wanted to point out that there’s a danger of being misunderstood and talking past each other, and “use more words” is often a better approach than “argue about the words”.
I am especially the wrong person to argue about fundamental utility-aggregation problems. I don’t think ANYONE has a workable theory about how Utilitarianism really works without an appeal to moral realism that I don’t think is justified.
Understood. I do think it’s significant though (and worth pointing out) that a much simpler definition yields all of the same interesting consequences. I didn’t intend to just disagree for the sake of getting clearer terminology. I wanted to point out that there seems to be a simpler path to the same answers, and that simpler path provides a new concept that seems to be quite useful.
This can turn into a very long discussion. I’m okay with that, but let me know if you’re not so I can probe only the points that are likely to resolve. I’ll raise the contentious points regardless, but I don’t want to draw focus on them if there’s little motivation to discuss them in depth.
I agree that a split in terminology is warranted, and that “defect” and “cooperate” are poor choices. How about this:
Coalition members may form consensus on the coalition strategy. Members of a coalition may follow the consensus coalition strategy or violate the consensus coalition strategy.
Members of a coalition may benefit the coalition or hurt the coalition.
Benefiting the coalition means raising its payoff regardless of consensus. Hurting the coalition means reducing its payoff regardless of consensus. A coalition may form consensus on the coalition strategy regardless of the optimality of that strategy.
Contentious points:
I expect that treating utility so generally will lead to paradoxes, particularly when utility functions are defined in terms of other utility functions. I think this is an extremely important case, particularly when strategies take trust into account. As a result, I expect that such a general notion of utility will lead to paradoxes when using it to reason about trust.
“Utility is not a resource.” I think this is a useful distinction when trying to clarify goals, but not a useful distinction when trying to make decisions given a set of goals. In particular, once the payoff tables are defined for a game, the goals must already have been defined, and so utility can be treated as a resource in that game.
I’m not sure a long discussion with me is helpful—I mostly wanted to point out that there’s a danger of being misunderstood and talking past each other, and “use more words” is often a better approach than “argue about the words”.
I am especially the wrong person to argue about fundamental utility-aggregation problems. I don’t think ANYONE has a workable theory about how Utilitarianism really works without an appeal to moral realism that I don’t think is justified.
Understood. I do think it’s significant though (and worth pointing out) that a much simpler definition yields all of the same interesting consequences. I didn’t intend to just disagree for the sake of getting clearer terminology. I wanted to point out that there seems to be a simpler path to the same answers, and that simpler path provides a new concept that seems to be quite useful.