I read that under a subtext where we were talking about the same blackmail scenario, but, okay, others are possible.
In cases where the blackmail truly seems not to be contingent on its policy, (and in many current real-world cases) the FDT agent will pay.
The only cases when an FDT agent actually will get blackmailed and refuse to pay are cases where being committed to not paying shifts the probabilities enough to make that profitable on average.
It is possible to construct obstinate kinds of agents that aren’t sensitive to FDT’s acausal dealmaking faculties. Evolution might produce them often. They will not be seen as friends. As an LDT-like human, my feelings towards those sorts of blackmailers is that we should destroy all of them as quickly as we can, because their existence is a blight to ours. In light of that, I’m not sure they have a winning strategy. When you start to imagine the directed ocean of coordinated violence that an LDT-aligned faction (so, literally any real-world state with laws against blackmail) points in your direction as soon as they can tell what you are, you may start to wonder if pretending you can’t understand their source code is really a good idea.
I imagine a time when the distinction between CDT and LDT is widely essentially understood, by this time, the very idea of blackmailing will come to seem very strange, we will wonder how there was this era when a person could just say “If you don’t do X, then I will do the fairly self-destructive action Y which I gain nothing from doing” and have everyone just believe them unconditionally, just believe this unqualified statement about their mechanism. Wasn’t that stupid? To lie like that? And even stupider for their victims to pretend that they believe the lie? We will not be able to understand it any more.
Imagine that you see an agnostic community head walking through the park at night. You know it’s a long shot, but you amble towards him, point your gun at him and say “give me your wallet.” He looks back at you and says, “I don’t understand the deal. You’ll shoot me? How does that help you? Because you want my wallet? I don’t understand the logic there, why are those two things related? That doesn’t get you my wallet.”
Only it does, because when you shoot someone you can loot their corpse, so it occurs to me that muggers are a bad example of blackmail. I imagine they’ve got to have a certain amount of comfort with actually killing people, to do that. It’s not really threatening to do something self-destructive, in their view, they still benefit a little from killing you. They still get to empty your pockets. To an extent, mugging is often just a display of a power imbalance and consequent negotiation of a mutually beneficial alternative to violence.
The gang can profit from robbing your store at gunpoint, but you and them both will profit more if you just pay them protection money. LDT only refuses to pay protection money if it realises that having all of the other entangled LDT store owners paying protection money as well would make the gang profitable enough to grow, and that having a grown gang around would have been, on the whole, worse than the amortised risk of being robbed.
I read that under a subtext where we were talking about the same blackmail scenario, but, okay, others are possible.
In cases where the blackmail truly seems not to be contingent on its policy, (and in many current real-world cases) the FDT agent will pay.
The only cases when an FDT agent actually will get blackmailed and refuse to pay are cases where being committed to not paying shifts the probabilities enough to make that profitable on average.
It is possible to construct obstinate kinds of agents that aren’t sensitive to FDT’s acausal dealmaking faculties. Evolution might produce them often. They will not be seen as friends. As an LDT-like human, my feelings towards those sorts of blackmailers is that we should destroy all of them as quickly as we can, because their existence is a blight to ours. In light of that, I’m not sure they have a winning strategy. When you start to imagine the directed ocean of coordinated violence that an LDT-aligned faction (so, literally any real-world state with laws against blackmail) points in your direction as soon as they can tell what you are, you may start to wonder if pretending you can’t understand their source code is really a good idea.
I imagine a time when the distinction between CDT and LDT is widely essentially understood, by this time, the very idea of blackmailing will come to seem very strange, we will wonder how there was this era when a person could just say “If you don’t do X, then I will do the fairly self-destructive action Y which I gain nothing from doing” and have everyone just believe them unconditionally, just believe this unqualified statement about their mechanism. Wasn’t that stupid? To lie like that? And even stupider for their victims to pretend that they believe the lie? We will not be able to understand it any more.
Imagine that you see an agnostic community head walking through the park at night. You know it’s a long shot, but you amble towards him, point your gun at him and say “give me your wallet.” He looks back at you and says, “I don’t understand the deal. You’ll shoot me? How does that help you? Because you want my wallet? I don’t understand the logic there, why are those two things related? That doesn’t get you my wallet.”
Only it does, because when you shoot someone you can loot their corpse, so it occurs to me that muggers are a bad example of blackmail. I imagine they’ve got to have a certain amount of comfort with actually killing people, to do that. It’s not really threatening to do something self-destructive, in their view, they still benefit a little from killing you. They still get to empty your pockets. To an extent, mugging is often just a display of a power imbalance and consequent negotiation of a mutually beneficial alternative to violence.
The gang can profit from robbing your store at gunpoint, but you and them both will profit more if you just pay them protection money. LDT only refuses to pay protection money if it realises that having all of the other entangled LDT store owners paying protection money as well would make the gang profitable enough to grow, and that having a grown gang around would have been, on the whole, worse than the amortised risk of being robbed.