I am among those who fear… that the U.S. response to 9/11 was not nearly as violent and brutal as it needed to be. To prevent future acts of this kind, it is probably necessary that those who consider them should shit their pants with fear at the mere thought of the U.S.’s reaction.
… the correct response to a person who says “You do not own yourself, but are owned by society (or the state), and I am society (or the state) speaking.” is to injure him as gravely as you think you can get away with … In fact, I think if you do not do violence in that situation you are failing in a significant ethical duty.
A precommitment to retribution is effective when dealing with “rational” agents or CDT agents. In fact a self-interested TDT agent in a world of CDT agents would do well by retaliating against all injuries with disproportionate force. (And also issuing extortionate threats; to be fair, ESR doesn’t advocate this.) If you buy Gary Drescher’s reduction of morality to decision theory, this is where the moral duty of revenge comes from. But a superrational agent in a world of superrational agents will rarely need to exercise retribution at all.
Human beings might be thought of as superrational agents who make mistakes (moral errors). I don’t know of a good technical model for this, but I feel like one recommendation that would come out of it is to not punish people disproportionately, because what if others did that to you when you make a mistake?
I think the utility-maximizing reasons to avoid disproportionate punishment in such cases among humans have more to do with likely perpetrators being somewhat blind to such disincentives (remember, these are people who attack others by killing themselves,) and the fact that nations operate in a reputation system where acts of disproportionality which are too large tend to attract negative reputation.
Since humans tend to operate under friendship/anger/fairness formulations rather than utility maximizing ones, a sultan who honors a precommitment to cut off the head of a man who elopes with his daughter is seen as reasonable in circumstances (including a historically common degree of protectiveness of one’s offspring) where one who massacred the man’s entire village to be even more sure of deterring other attempts to cross him would be viewed as cruel and tyrannical.
I’d be curious to see what the results of a tournament of iterated PD with noise (i.e., each move is flipped with probability 5% -- and the opponent will never know the pre-noise move) would be.
Human beings might be thought of as superrational agents who make mistakes (moral errors). I don’t know of a good technical model for this, but I feel like one recommendation that would come out of it is to not punish people disproportionately, because what if others did that to you when you make a mistake?
Tangentially, I now understand exactly what I don’t like about Eric S. Raymond’s morality:
A precommitment to retribution is effective when dealing with “rational” agents or CDT agents. In fact a self-interested TDT agent in a world of CDT agents would do well by retaliating against all injuries with disproportionate force. (And also issuing extortionate threats; to be fair, ESR doesn’t advocate this.) If you buy Gary Drescher’s reduction of morality to decision theory, this is where the moral duty of revenge comes from. But a superrational agent in a world of superrational agents will rarely need to exercise retribution at all.
Human beings might be thought of as superrational agents who make mistakes (moral errors). I don’t know of a good technical model for this, but I feel like one recommendation that would come out of it is to not punish people disproportionately, because what if others did that to you when you make a mistake?
I think the utility-maximizing reasons to avoid disproportionate punishment in such cases among humans have more to do with likely perpetrators being somewhat blind to such disincentives (remember, these are people who attack others by killing themselves,) and the fact that nations operate in a reputation system where acts of disproportionality which are too large tend to attract negative reputation.
Since humans tend to operate under friendship/anger/fairness formulations rather than utility maximizing ones, a sultan who honors a precommitment to cut off the head of a man who elopes with his daughter is seen as reasonable in circumstances (including a historically common degree of protectiveness of one’s offspring) where one who massacred the man’s entire village to be even more sure of deterring other attempts to cross him would be viewed as cruel and tyrannical.
I’d be curious to see what the results of a tournament of iterated PD with noise (i.e., each move is flipped with probability 5% -- and the opponent will never know the pre-noise move) would be.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trembling_hand_perfect_equilibrium may be a useful starting point.
The link doesn’t go to where I think it was supposed to.
Thanks!
Not exactly about the same thing, but see this.