I don’t want to claim there’s a best way, but I do think there are certain desirable properties which it makes sense to shoot for. But this still sort of points at the wrong problem.
A “naturalistic” approach to game theory is one in which game theory is an application of decision theory (not an extension) -- there should be no special reasoning which applies only to other agents. (I don’t know a better term for this, so let’s use naturalistic for now.)
Standard approaches to game theory lack this (to varying degrees). So, one frame is that we would like to come up with an approach to game theory which is naturalistic. Coming from the other side, we can attempt to apply existing decision theory to games. This ends up being more confusing and unsatisfying than one might hope. So, we can think of game theory as an especially difficult stress-test for decision theory.
So it isn’t that there should be some best strategy in multiplayer games, or even that I’m interested in a “better” player despite the lack of a notion of “best” (although I am interested in that). It’s more that UDT doesn’t give me a way to think about games. I’d like to have a way to think about games which makes sense to me, and which preserves as much as possible what seems good about UDT.
Desirable properties such as coordination are important in themselves, but are also playing an illustrative role—pointing at the problem. (It could be that coordination just shouldn’t be expected, and so, is a bad way of pointing at the problem of making game theory “make sense”—but I currently think better coordination should be possible, so, think it is a good way to point at the problem.)
A “naturalistic” approach to game theory is one in which game theory is an application of decision theory (not an extension) -- there should be no special reasoning which applies only to other agents.
But game theory doesn’t require such special reasoning! It doesn’t care how players reason. They might not reason at all, like the three mating variants of the side-blotched lizard. And when they do reason, game theory still shows they can’t reason their way out of a situation unilaterally, no matter if their decision theory is “naturalistic” or not. So I think of game theory as an upper bound on all possible decision theories, not an application of some future decision theory.
I don’t want to claim there’s a best way, but I do think there are certain desirable properties which it makes sense to shoot for. But this still sort of points at the wrong problem.
A “naturalistic” approach to game theory is one in which game theory is an application of decision theory (not an extension) -- there should be no special reasoning which applies only to other agents. (I don’t know a better term for this, so let’s use naturalistic for now.)
Standard approaches to game theory lack this (to varying degrees). So, one frame is that we would like to come up with an approach to game theory which is naturalistic. Coming from the other side, we can attempt to apply existing decision theory to games. This ends up being more confusing and unsatisfying than one might hope. So, we can think of game theory as an especially difficult stress-test for decision theory.
So it isn’t that there should be some best strategy in multiplayer games, or even that I’m interested in a “better” player despite the lack of a notion of “best” (although I am interested in that). It’s more that UDT doesn’t give me a way to think about games. I’d like to have a way to think about games which makes sense to me, and which preserves as much as possible what seems good about UDT.
Desirable properties such as coordination are important in themselves, but are also playing an illustrative role—pointing at the problem. (It could be that coordination just shouldn’t be expected, and so, is a bad way of pointing at the problem of making game theory “make sense”—but I currently think better coordination should be possible, so, think it is a good way to point at the problem.)
But game theory doesn’t require such special reasoning! It doesn’t care how players reason. They might not reason at all, like the three mating variants of the side-blotched lizard. And when they do reason, game theory still shows they can’t reason their way out of a situation unilaterally, no matter if their decision theory is “naturalistic” or not. So I think of game theory as an upper bound on all possible decision theories, not an application of some future decision theory.