Actually, I’m not sure this does fall squarely under blackmail.
Consider the case where someone has a tape I don’t want shown to the press, and sells that tape to the press for money + prestige, and never gives me any choice in the matter. That’s clearly not blackmail. I’m not sure it becomes blackmail when they give me a choice to pay them instead, though the case could be made.
Or consider the case where it turns out I don’t mind having the tape shown (I want the publicity, say), and so the person sells the tape to the press, and everyone gets what they want. Also not blackmail. Not even clearly attempted blackmail, though the case could be made.
My point being that it seems to me that for me to legitimately call something “blackmail” it needs to be something the blackmailer threatens to do only because it makes me suffer more than paying them, not something that the blackmailer wants to do anyway for his own reasons that just happens to make me suffer.
I disagree that the essential element to blackmail is it must be done only to make me suffer. To this end I offer a scenario. (I’ve made it a little more like a story just for giggles).
You’ve just won the lottery, and the TV people interviewed you and your wife. Hurray! Shortly after, Angela your mistress calls you up. ”Congratulations. I saw on TV that you won the lottery… I also saw you had a wife. Things are over between us!” “Angela. I’m sorry for lying baby, but you’ve got a husband.” ”Irrelevant. But, you know, you’re rich now. How about you give me $4,000 a week for the next ten years, and I don’t tell your wife.” “Oh come on, you’ve got a husband!” ”Yeah, and you’re rich. I expect the money in a week.” click Well that’s what you get for cheating. Suddenly, Julia, your other mistress calls you up. ”Congratulations. I saw on TV that you won the lottery… I also saw you had a wife. Things are over between us!” “Julia. I’m sorry for lying baby.” ”Fuck you. I should tell her right now. But, you know, you’re rich now. How about you give me $4,000 a week for the next ten years, and I don’t tell your wife.” “Oh come on, not again” ”What’s that mean? Besides, you’re rich. I expect the money in a week.” click Way to go, two timer. However, unfortunately for you, the TV show calls you up and lets you know that there was a printing error and you did NOT in fact win the lottery. You quickly call your mistresses back. ”Angela, baby, turns out I didn’t win the lottery. I can’t possibly pay you.” “Don’t baby me. Well, I guess I won’t tell your wife then as long as you don’t tell my husband. I don’t want anyone to know this.” ”Thanks Angela, you’re the best.” Hurray, bullet dodged! ”Julia, baby, turns out I didn’t win the lottery. I can’t possibly pay you.” “Don’t baby me. Well, I guess I’ll tell your wife then asshole. Since you won’t pay me I’m gonna go post on facebook now!” ”But, I can’t pay you because the money never belonged to me.” ″Irrelevant. Sucks to be you!”
I argue that both of them were attempting to blackmail and Julia’s desire to follow through with it anyways doesn’t change anything. The actions would both feel like blackmail to me if I were on the receiving end, and the police would treat both of them as blackmail as well. Blackmail is just an attempt to get money in exchange for not releasing information; the mindset of the blackmailer does not affect it. This is why I agree with Vladimir Nesov, that blackmail exists in a blurry spot on the continuum of trade.
If you don’t classify Julia’s actions as blackmail, I would be curious what you do call it.
I classify Julia’s actions as inconsistent, mostly.
At time T1, Julia prefers to date me rather than end our relationship and tell my wife. At time T2, Julia prefers to end our relationship and tell my wife. The transition between T1 and T2 evidently has something to do with the transient belief that her silence was worth $4k/week, but what exactly it has to do with that belief is unclear, since by Julia’s own account the truth or falsehood of that belief is irrelevant.
If I take her account as definitive, I’m pretty clear that what Julia is doing is not blackmail… it reduces to “Hey, I’ve decided to tell your wife about us, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.” It isn’t even a threat, it’s just early warning of the intent to harm me.
If I assume she’s lying about her motives, either consciously or with some degree of self-delusion, it might be blackmail. For example, if she believes I really can afford to pay her, and am just claiming poverty as a negotiating tactic, which she is countering by claiming not to care about the money, then it follows that she’s blackmailing me.
If I assume that she doesn’t really have relevant motives anymore, she just precommitted to reveal the information if I don’t pay her and now she’s following through on her previous precommitment, and the fact that the precommitment was made based on one set of beliefs about the world and she now knows those beliefs were false at the time doesn’t change the fact that the precommitment was made (“often wrong, never uncertain”), then she clearly blackmailed me once, and I guess it follows that she’s still blackmailing me… maybe? It seems that if she set up a mechanical device that posts the secret to Facebook unless fed $4k in quarters once a week, and then changed her mind and decided she’d rather just keep dating me, but was unable to turn the device off, we could in the same sense say she was still blackmailing me, albeit against her own will. That is at best a problematic sense of blackmail, but not clearly an incorrect one.
So it seems pretty clear that the blackmailer’s intentions play some role in my intuitions about what is or isn’t blackmail, albeit a murky one.
Of course, I could choose to ignore my linguistic intuitions and adopt a simpler definition which I apply formally. Nothing wrong with that, but it makes questions about what is and isn’t blackmail sort of silly.
For example, if I say any attempt to get money in exchange for not revealing information, regardless of my state of mind, is blackmail, then the following scenario is clearly blackmail:
I develop a practical, cheap, unlimited energy source in my basement. Julia says “Honey, I work for the oil company, and we will pay you $N/week for the rest of your life if you keep your mouth shut about that energy source.” I agree and take the money.
My native speaker’s intuitions are very clear that this is not blackmail, but I’m happy to use the term “blackmail” as a term of art to describe it if that makes communication with you (and perhaps Vladimir Nesov) easier.
The transition between T1 and T2 evidently has something to do with the transient belief that her silence was worth $4k/week
Sorry. I think I communicated unclearly, which is the danger of using stories instead of examples and is my fault entirely. At the very start of the story, Julia learns about your wife at the same time she learns about the lottery. She had previously thought you were single and the new information shifted her preference ordering.
Regarding the example you used (oil company & energy), I also hold it is not blackmail. If I use the previous definition of Blackmail being the act of making an attempt to get money in exchange for not revealing information, then the attempt is the crucial part in this case (whether it succeeds or not). The oil company offering me money is okay; me trying to get money out of the oil company is blackmail.
(nods) As noted elsewhere, I missed this and was entirely mistaken about Julia’s motives. I stand corrected. You were perfectly clear, I just wasn’t reading attentively enough.
Re: blackmail… OK. So, if I develop the technology and I approach the oil company and say “I have this technology, I’ll guarantee you exclusive rights to it for $N/week,” that’s blackmail?
At time T1, Julia prefers to date me rather than end our relationship and tell my wife.
I think in Xachariah’s story Julia did not know prior to seeing you on TV that you have a wife. So there was no time at which she had the preference you describe here.
Ah! Good point, I forgot about that. You’re absolutely right… throughout, she presumably prefers to break up with me than date me if I’m married. My error.
Not sure if this is what confused you or not, but it has since been pointed out to me that I was wrong; Julia does not necessarily (and ought not be understood to) have this preference, as she did not know about my wife at T1.
If we avoid the overloaded term “blackmail” and talk of threats vs. trade, Angela is threatening you whereas Julia is offering a trade. I agree that this example shows that “makes you suffer” is not the distinguishing element. It’s also interesting that you may not now if the situation is threat or trade (you may not know whether the mistress wants to tell your wife anyway).
I’m not sure how threats and trade are a real dichotomy rather than two fuzzy categories. Suppose I buy food. That’s basic trade. But at the same time a monopoly could raise the price of food a lot, and I would still have to buy it, and now it is the threat of starvation.
I can go fancy(N), and say, I won’t pay more than X for food, I would rather starve to death and then they get no more of my money, and if I can make it credible, and if the monopoly reasons in fancy(N-1) manner, they won’t raise the price above X because I won’t pay, but if monopoly reasons in the fancy(N) manner, it does exact same reasoning and concludes that it should ignore my threat to starve myself to death and not pay.
Most human agents seem to be tit for tat and mirror what ever you are doing, so if you are reasoning “i’ll just starve myself to death not to pay” they reason like “i’ll just raise the price regardless and the hell with what he does not pay”. The blackmail resistant agent is also blackmail resistance resistant.
I’m not sure how threats and trade are a real dichotomy rather than two fuzzy categories.
This is my position as well, blackmail probably doesn’t need to be considered as a separate case, reasonable behavior in such cases will probably just fall out from a sufficiently savvy bargaining algorithm.
Good point; haggling is a good example of a fuzzy boundary between threats and trade.
If A is willing to sell a widget for any price above $10, and B is willing to buy a widget for any price below $20, and there are no other buyers or sellers, then for any price X strictly between $10 and $20, A saying “I won’t sell for less than X” and B saying “I won’t sell for more than X” are both threats under my model.
Which means that agents that “naively” precommit to never respond to any threats (the way I understand them) will not reach an agreement when haggling. They’ll also fail at the Ultimatum game.
So there needs to be a better model for threats, possibly one that takes shelling points into account; or maybe there should be a special category for “the kind of threats it’s beneficial to precommit to ignore”.
Hmm the pre-commitment to ignore would depend on other agents and their pre-pre-commitment to ignore pre-commitments. It just goes recursive like Sherlock Holmes vs Moriarty, and when you go meta and try to look for ‘limit’ of recursion, it goes recursive again… i have a feeling that it is inherently a rock-paper-skissors situation where you can’t cheat like this robot. (I.e. I would suggest, at that point, to try to make a bunch of proofs of impossibility to narrow expectations down somewhat).
It’s not possible to coordinate in general against arbitrary opponents, like it’s impossible to predict what an arbitrary program does, but it’s advantageous for players to eventually coordinate their decisions (on some meta-level of precommitment). On one hand, players want to set prices their way, but on the other they want to close the trade eventually, and this tradeoff keeps the outcome from both extremes (“unfair” prices and impossibility of trade). Players have an incentive to setup some kind of Loebian cooperation (as in theseposts), which stops the go-meta regress, although each will try to set the point where cooperation happens in their favor.
I was thinking rather of Halting Problem—like impossibility, along with rock-paper-skissors situation that prevents declaring any one strategy, even the cooperative, as the ‘best’.
If difficulty of selecting and implementing a strategy is part of the tradeoff (so that more complicated strategies count as “worse” because of their difficulty, even if they promise an otherwise superior outcome), maybe there are “best” strategies in some sense, like there is a biggest natural number that you can actually write down in 30 seconds. (Such things would of course have the character of particular decisions, not of decision theory.)
Huh? Just start writing. The rule wasn’t “the number you can define in 30 seconds”, but simply “the number you can write down in 30 seconds”. Like the number of strawberries you can eat in 30 seconds, no paradox there!
Given a fixed state of knowledge about possible opponents and finite number of feasible options for your decision, there will be maximal decisions, even if in an iterated contest the players could cycle their decisions against updated opponents indefinitely.
Actually, I’m not sure this does fall squarely under blackmail.
Consider the case where someone has a tape I don’t want shown to the press, and sells that tape to the press for money + prestige, and never gives me any choice in the matter. That’s clearly not blackmail. I’m not sure it becomes blackmail when they give me a choice to pay them instead, though the case could be made.
Or consider the case where it turns out I don’t mind having the tape shown (I want the publicity, say), and so the person sells the tape to the press, and everyone gets what they want. Also not blackmail. Not even clearly attempted blackmail, though the case could be made.
My point being that it seems to me that for me to legitimately call something “blackmail” it needs to be something the blackmailer threatens to do only because it makes me suffer more than paying them, not something that the blackmailer wants to do anyway for his own reasons that just happens to make me suffer.
I disagree that the essential element to blackmail is it must be done only to make me suffer. To this end I offer a scenario. (I’ve made it a little more like a story just for giggles).
I argue that both of them were attempting to blackmail and Julia’s desire to follow through with it anyways doesn’t change anything. The actions would both feel like blackmail to me if I were on the receiving end, and the police would treat both of them as blackmail as well. Blackmail is just an attempt to get money in exchange for not releasing information; the mindset of the blackmailer does not affect it. This is why I agree with Vladimir Nesov, that blackmail exists in a blurry spot on the continuum of trade.
If you don’t classify Julia’s actions as blackmail, I would be curious what you do call it.
I classify Julia’s actions as inconsistent, mostly.
At time T1, Julia prefers to date me rather than end our relationship and tell my wife.
At time T2, Julia prefers to end our relationship and tell my wife.
The transition between T1 and T2 evidently has something to do with the transient belief that her silence was worth $4k/week, but what exactly it has to do with that belief is unclear, since by Julia’s own account the truth or falsehood of that belief is irrelevant.
If I take her account as definitive, I’m pretty clear that what Julia is doing is not blackmail… it reduces to “Hey, I’ve decided to tell your wife about us, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.” It isn’t even a threat, it’s just early warning of the intent to harm me.
If I assume she’s lying about her motives, either consciously or with some degree of self-delusion, it might be blackmail. For example, if she believes I really can afford to pay her, and am just claiming poverty as a negotiating tactic, which she is countering by claiming not to care about the money, then it follows that she’s blackmailing me.
If I assume that she doesn’t really have relevant motives anymore, she just precommitted to reveal the information if I don’t pay her and now she’s following through on her previous precommitment, and the fact that the precommitment was made based on one set of beliefs about the world and she now knows those beliefs were false at the time doesn’t change the fact that the precommitment was made (“often wrong, never uncertain”), then she clearly blackmailed me once, and I guess it follows that she’s still blackmailing me… maybe? It seems that if she set up a mechanical device that posts the secret to Facebook unless fed $4k in quarters once a week, and then changed her mind and decided she’d rather just keep dating me, but was unable to turn the device off, we could in the same sense say she was still blackmailing me, albeit against her own will. That is at best a problematic sense of blackmail, but not clearly an incorrect one.
So it seems pretty clear that the blackmailer’s intentions play some role in my intuitions about what is or isn’t blackmail, albeit a murky one.
Of course, I could choose to ignore my linguistic intuitions and adopt a simpler definition which I apply formally. Nothing wrong with that, but it makes questions about what is and isn’t blackmail sort of silly.
For example, if I say any attempt to get money in exchange for not revealing information, regardless of my state of mind, is blackmail, then the following scenario is clearly blackmail:
My native speaker’s intuitions are very clear that this is not blackmail, but I’m happy to use the term “blackmail” as a term of art to describe it if that makes communication with you (and perhaps Vladimir Nesov) easier.
Sorry. I think I communicated unclearly, which is the danger of using stories instead of examples and is my fault entirely. At the very start of the story, Julia learns about your wife at the same time she learns about the lottery. She had previously thought you were single and the new information shifted her preference ordering.
Regarding the example you used (oil company & energy), I also hold it is not blackmail. If I use the previous definition of Blackmail being the act of making an attempt to get money in exchange for not revealing information, then the attempt is the crucial part in this case (whether it succeeds or not). The oil company offering me money is okay; me trying to get money out of the oil company is blackmail.
And also sometimes okay. The distinction isn’t “okay” vs blackmail. It is blackmail vs not-blackmail and “okay” vs not-okay.
(nods) As noted elsewhere, I missed this and was entirely mistaken about Julia’s motives. I stand corrected. You were perfectly clear, I just wasn’t reading attentively enough.
Re: blackmail… OK. So, if I develop the technology and I approach the oil company and say “I have this technology, I’ll guarantee you exclusive rights to it for $N/week,” that’s blackmail?
I’d say it’s much closer to blackmail than the original oil company scenario.
I suppose I agree with that, but I wouldn’t call either of them blackmail. Would you?
I think in Xachariah’s story Julia did not know prior to seeing you on TV that you have a wife. So there was no time at which she had the preference you describe here.
Ah! Good point, I forgot about that. You’re absolutely right… throughout, she presumably prefers to break up with me than date me if I’m married. My error.
Something about this confused me.
Not sure if this is what confused you or not, but it has since been pointed out to me that I was wrong; Julia does not necessarily (and ought not be understood to) have this preference, as she did not know about my wife at T1.
No, it was just you talking about your wife in first person! :)
Ah. Well, my husband had one once, I suppose I might feel left out.
If we avoid the overloaded term “blackmail” and talk of threats vs. trade, Angela is threatening you whereas Julia is offering a trade. I agree that this example shows that “makes you suffer” is not the distinguishing element. It’s also interesting that you may not now if the situation is threat or trade (you may not know whether the mistress wants to tell your wife anyway).
I’m not sure how threats and trade are a real dichotomy rather than two fuzzy categories. Suppose I buy food. That’s basic trade. But at the same time a monopoly could raise the price of food a lot, and I would still have to buy it, and now it is the threat of starvation.
I can go fancy(N), and say, I won’t pay more than X for food, I would rather starve to death and then they get no more of my money, and if I can make it credible, and if the monopoly reasons in fancy(N-1) manner, they won’t raise the price above X because I won’t pay, but if monopoly reasons in the fancy(N) manner, it does exact same reasoning and concludes that it should ignore my threat to starve myself to death and not pay.
Most human agents seem to be tit for tat and mirror what ever you are doing, so if you are reasoning “i’ll just starve myself to death not to pay” they reason like “i’ll just raise the price regardless and the hell with what he does not pay”. The blackmail resistant agent is also blackmail resistance resistant.
This is my position as well, blackmail probably doesn’t need to be considered as a separate case, reasonable behavior in such cases will probably just fall out from a sufficiently savvy bargaining algorithm.
I agree with this, incidentally.
Good point; haggling is a good example of a fuzzy boundary between threats and trade.
If A is willing to sell a widget for any price above $10, and B is willing to buy a widget for any price below $20, and there are no other buyers or sellers, then for any price X strictly between $10 and $20, A saying “I won’t sell for less than X” and B saying “I won’t sell for more than X” are both threats under my model.
Which means that agents that “naively” precommit to never respond to any threats (the way I understand them) will not reach an agreement when haggling. They’ll also fail at the Ultimatum game.
So there needs to be a better model for threats, possibly one that takes shelling points into account; or maybe there should be a special category for “the kind of threats it’s beneficial to precommit to ignore”.
Hmm the pre-commitment to ignore would depend on other agents and their pre-pre-commitment to ignore pre-commitments. It just goes recursive like Sherlock Holmes vs Moriarty, and when you go meta and try to look for ‘limit’ of recursion, it goes recursive again… i have a feeling that it is inherently a rock-paper-skissors situation where you can’t cheat like this robot. (I.e. I would suggest, at that point, to try to make a bunch of proofs of impossibility to narrow expectations down somewhat).
It’s not possible to coordinate in general against arbitrary opponents, like it’s impossible to predict what an arbitrary program does, but it’s advantageous for players to eventually coordinate their decisions (on some meta-level of precommitment). On one hand, players want to set prices their way, but on the other they want to close the trade eventually, and this tradeoff keeps the outcome from both extremes (“unfair” prices and impossibility of trade). Players have an incentive to setup some kind of Loebian cooperation (as in these posts), which stops the go-meta regress, although each will try to set the point where cooperation happens in their favor.
I was thinking rather of Halting Problem—like impossibility, along with rock-paper-skissors situation that prevents declaring any one strategy, even the cooperative, as the ‘best’.
If difficulty of selecting and implementing a strategy is part of the tradeoff (so that more complicated strategies count as “worse” because of their difficulty, even if they promise an otherwise superior outcome), maybe there are “best” strategies in some sense, like there is a biggest natural number that you can actually write down in 30 seconds. (Such things would of course have the character of particular decisions, not of decision theory.)
There is not a biggest natural number that you can actually write down in thirty seconds—that’s equivalent to Berry’s paradox.
Huh? Just start writing. The rule wasn’t “the number you can define in 30 seconds”, but simply “the number you can write down in 30 seconds”. Like the number of strawberries you can eat in 30 seconds, no paradox there!
I was reading “write down” more generally than “write down each digit of in base ten,” but I guess that’s not how you meant it.
Hmm if it was a programming contest I would expect non-transitive ‘betterness’.
Given a fixed state of knowledge about possible opponents and finite number of feasible options for your decision, there will be maximal decisions, even if in an iterated contest the players could cycle their decisions against updated opponents indefinitely.