I’m not sure I understand exactly what you’re saying, so I’m just gonna write some vaguely related things to classic acausal trade + ECL:
I’m actually really confused about the exact relationship between “classic” prediction-based acausal trade and ECL. And I think I tend to think about them as less crisply different than others. I’ve tried to unconfuse myself about that for a few hours some months ago and just ended up with a mess of a document. Some intuitive way to differentiate them:
ECL leverages the correlation between you and the other agent “directly.”
“Classic” prediction-based acausal trade leverages the correlation between you and the other agent’s prediction of you. (Which, intuitively, they are less in control of than their decision-making.
--> This doesn’t look like a fundamental difference between the mechanisms (and maybe there are in-betweeners? But I don’t know of any set-ups) but like...it makes a difference in practice or something?
On the recursion question:
I agree that ECL has this whole “I cooperate if I think that makes it more likely that they cooperate”, so there’s definitely also some prediction flavoured thing going on and often, the deliberation about whether they’ll be more likely to cooperate when you do will include “they think that I’m more likely to cooperate if they cooperate”. So it’s kind of recursive.
Note that ECL at least doesn’t strictly require that. You can in principle do ECL with rocks “My world model says that conditioning on me taking action X, the likelihood of this rock falling down is higher than if I condition on taking action Y.” Tbc, if action X isn’t “throw the rock” or something similar, that’s a pretty weird world model. You probably can’t do “classic” acausal trade with rocks?
Some more not well-in-order not thought-out somewhat incoherent thinking-out-loud random thoughts and intuitions:
More random and less coherent: Something something about how when you think of an agent using some meta-policy to answer the question “What object-level policy should I follow?”, there’s some intuitive sense in which ECL is recursive in the meta-policy while “classic” acausal trade is recursive in the object-level policy. I’m highly skeptical of this meta-policy object-level policy thing making sense though and also not confident in what I said about which type of trade is recursive in what.
Another intuitive difference is that with classic acausal trade, you usually want to verify whether the other agent is cooperating. In ECL you don’t. Also, something something about how it’s great to learn a lot about your trade partner for classic acausal trade and it’s bad for ECL? (I suspect that there’s nothing actually weird going on here and that this is because it’s about learning different kinds of things. But I haven’t thought about it enough to articulate the difference confidently and clearly.)
The concept of commitment race doesn’t seem to make much sense when thinking just about ECL and maybe nailing down where the difference comes from is interesting?
I’m not sure I understand exactly what you’re saying, so I’m just gonna write some vaguely related things to classic acausal trade + ECL:
I’m actually really confused about the exact relationship between “classic” prediction-based acausal trade and ECL. And I think I tend to think about them as less crisply different than others. I’ve tried to unconfuse myself about that for a few hours some months ago and just ended up with a mess of a document. Some intuitive way to differentiate them:
ECL leverages the correlation between you and the other agent “directly.”
“Classic” prediction-based acausal trade leverages the correlation between you and the other agent’s prediction of you. (Which, intuitively, they are less in control of than their decision-making.
--> This doesn’t look like a fundamental difference between the mechanisms (and maybe there are in-betweeners? But I don’t know of any set-ups) but like...it makes a difference in practice or something?
On the recursion question:
I agree that ECL has this whole “I cooperate if I think that makes it more likely that they cooperate”, so there’s definitely also some prediction flavoured thing going on and often, the deliberation about whether they’ll be more likely to cooperate when you do will include “they think that I’m more likely to cooperate if they cooperate”. So it’s kind of recursive.
Note that ECL at least doesn’t strictly require that. You can in principle do ECL with rocks “My world model says that conditioning on me taking action X, the likelihood of this rock falling down is higher than if I condition on taking action Y.” Tbc, if action X isn’t “throw the rock” or something similar, that’s a pretty weird world model. You probably can’t do “classic” acausal trade with rocks?
Some more not well-in-order not thought-out somewhat incoherent thinking-out-loud random thoughts and intuitions:
More random and less coherent: Something something about how when you think of an agent using some meta-policy to answer the question “What object-level policy should I follow?”, there’s some intuitive sense in which ECL is recursive in the meta-policy while “classic” acausal trade is recursive in the object-level policy. I’m highly skeptical of this meta-policy object-level policy thing making sense though and also not confident in what I said about which type of trade is recursive in what.
Another intuitive difference is that with classic acausal trade, you usually want to verify whether the other agent is cooperating. In ECL you don’t. Also, something something about how it’s great to learn a lot about your trade partner for classic acausal trade and it’s bad for ECL? (I suspect that there’s nothing actually weird going on here and that this is because it’s about learning different kinds of things. But I haven’t thought about it enough to articulate the difference confidently and clearly.)
The concept of commitment race doesn’t seem to make much sense when thinking just about ECL and maybe nailing down where the difference comes from is interesting?