It’s sometimes useful for agents to be able to make agreements which place some restrictions on their ability to later opt out of the agreement. And it’s sometimes useful for a collection of agents to be able to act as if it was a single agent.
So, depending on how you apply those sometimeses, it might make sense for Catalonia to act as a single agent (even though it is a collection of 7.5 million agents) and for “Catalonia” to pay attention to the procedures within its existing agreements with the other parts of Spain (the Constitution of Spain) when deciding whether to opt out of those agreements.
And if, like most people, you implement many decision theoretic and game theoretic considerations by getting upset about rule violations, then you can throw in some all caps and exclamation points and be like, “But the secession referendum is ILLEGAL! According to the CONSTITUTION OF SPAIN!”
That leaves the question: how is Catalonia’s position within Spain different from Spain’s position within the hypothetical US+SPAIN?
Spain / the people of Spain never agreed to any US+SPAIN deal. But Catalonia / the people of Catalonia at least arguably did make an agreement with the rest of Spain − 95% of Catalan voters approved the referendum in favor of the 1978 Spanish Constitution, and Catalonia has acted as part of Spain for many years.
This is a reasonable argument that might be close to what some people are thinking (and as a “sketch” seems fine), but I think when you’re trying to pass an ITT with the sort of person literally saying “But the secession referendum is ILLEGAL!”, phrasings like this: ”It’s sometimes useful for agents to be able to make agreements which place some restrictions on their ability to later opt out of the agreement.”
Feel like they’re fundamentally missing the mindset of the person. (i.e. they might be implementing the game theory as you describe, but are almost certainly doing so so subconsciously, and I doubt that describing their position in terms of game theory probably wouldn’t lead them nodding and saying “yes, this guy gets it!”
(This is part of a general concern I have about steelmanning and ITTs that focus on translating the argument into “something that makes sense to you” instead of on actually presenting the argument the way the speaker really intended)
There is a broad set of practices involving is something like “understanding other people’s reasons”. We currently don’t have good terminology for carving up that space. The two terms that have caught on, ITT and steelmanning, refer to pretty specific activities within that space and the thing-to-do often isn’t either of those.
In this case, I read OP as saying that he didn’t see any overlap between a) the set of relevant considerations for deciding whether to support or oppose Catalan secession and b) the set of things that might cause a person to emphasize that the referendum was illegal according to the Constitution of Spain. My comment was an attempt to gesture at something that seemed like it might be in the intersection of those two sets. It was intentionally left relatively vague—the point is to see if there’s something there, not to flesh out precisely what it is or to capture what exactly is going on in the person’s head.
This seemed like a useful move to make within “understanding other people’s reasons” space, in this context. It is not an attempt at the ITT, and as far as I know doesn’t have a concise label. The OP framed his post in the context of the ITT (saying something like: I don’t even see how I could get started with constructing an ITT entry), so I did too (saying something like: well here’s a sketch of an argument which you can use to get started on constructing an ITT entry).
A sketch of an argument towards ITT-passing:
It’s sometimes useful for agents to be able to make agreements which place some restrictions on their ability to later opt out of the agreement. And it’s sometimes useful for a collection of agents to be able to act as if it was a single agent.
So, depending on how you apply those sometimeses, it might make sense for Catalonia to act as a single agent (even though it is a collection of 7.5 million agents) and for “Catalonia” to pay attention to the procedures within its existing agreements with the other parts of Spain (the Constitution of Spain) when deciding whether to opt out of those agreements.
And if, like most people, you implement many decision theoretic and game theoretic considerations by getting upset about rule violations, then you can throw in some all caps and exclamation points and be like, “But the secession referendum is ILLEGAL! According to the CONSTITUTION OF SPAIN!”
That leaves the question: how is Catalonia’s position within Spain different from Spain’s position within the hypothetical US+SPAIN?
Spain / the people of Spain never agreed to any US+SPAIN deal. But Catalonia / the people of Catalonia at least arguably did make an agreement with the rest of Spain − 95% of Catalan voters approved the referendum in favor of the 1978 Spanish Constitution, and Catalonia has acted as part of Spain for many years.
This is a reasonable argument that might be close to what some people are thinking (and as a “sketch” seems fine), but I think when you’re trying to pass an ITT with the sort of person literally saying “But the secession referendum is ILLEGAL!”, phrasings like this:
”It’s sometimes useful for agents to be able to make agreements which place some restrictions on their ability to later opt out of the agreement.”
Feel like they’re fundamentally missing the mindset of the person. (i.e. they might be implementing the game theory as you describe, but are almost certainly doing so so subconsciously, and I doubt that describing their position in terms of game theory probably wouldn’t lead them nodding and saying “yes, this guy gets it!”
(This is part of a general concern I have about steelmanning and ITTs that focus on translating the argument into “something that makes sense to you” instead of on actually presenting the argument the way the speaker really intended)
There is a broad set of practices involving is something like “understanding other people’s reasons”. We currently don’t have good terminology for carving up that space. The two terms that have caught on, ITT and steelmanning, refer to pretty specific activities within that space and the thing-to-do often isn’t either of those.
In this case, I read OP as saying that he didn’t see any overlap between a) the set of relevant considerations for deciding whether to support or oppose Catalan secession and b) the set of things that might cause a person to emphasize that the referendum was illegal according to the Constitution of Spain. My comment was an attempt to gesture at something that seemed like it might be in the intersection of those two sets. It was intentionally left relatively vague—the point is to see if there’s something there, not to flesh out precisely what it is or to capture what exactly is going on in the person’s head.
This seemed like a useful move to make within “understanding other people’s reasons” space, in this context. It is not an attempt at the ITT, and as far as I know doesn’t have a concise label. The OP framed his post in the context of the ITT (saying something like: I don’t even see how I could get started with constructing an ITT entry), so I did too (saying something like: well here’s a sketch of an argument which you can use to get started on constructing an ITT entry).