A few thoughts: It strikes me that the first vow will sometimes conflict with the second. If your idea is that any conflict with the second vow would be a (mild) information hazard, then ok—but I’m not sure what the first vow adds in this case.
Have you considered going meta?: ”I make the set of vows determined by the Kalai-Smorodinski solution to the bargaining problem...” ″...I expect these vows to be something like [original vows go here] but the former description is definitive.”
This has the nice upside of automatically catching problems you haven’t considered, but not requiring you to be super-human. Specifically, the “Everything I do will be according to the policy...” clause just isn’t achievable. Committing to the set of vows such a policy would have you make is achievable (you might not follow them perfectly, but there’d automatically be a balance between achievability and other desiderata).
It strikes me that the first vow will sometimes conflict with the second.
Well, yes, the intent it is that the Vow of Honest takes precedence over the Vow of Concord.
Have you considered going meta? “I make the set of vows determined by the Kalai-Smorodinski solution to the bargaining problem...”
I’m not sure what’s the difference between “set of vows” and “policy”? When I say “policy” I refer to the set of behaviors we are actually capable of choosing from, including computational and other constraints.
Ah ok, if the honesty vow takes precedence. I still think it’s a difficult one in edge cases, but I don’t see effective resolutions that do better than using vows 2 and 3 to decide on those.
I’m not sure what’s the difference between “set of vows” and “policy”?
The point isn’t in choosing “set of vows” over “policy”, but rather in choosing “I make the set of vows...” over “Everything I do will be according to...”. You’re able to make the set of vows (albeit implicitly), and the vows themselves will have the optimal amount of wiggle-room, achievability, flexibility, emphasis on good faith… built in.
To say “Everything I do will be according to...” seems to set the bar unachievably high, since it just won’t be true. You can aim in that direction, but your actions won’t even usually be optimal w.r.t. that policy. (thoughts on trying-to-try notwithstanding, I do think vows that are taken seriously should at least be realistically possible to achieve)
To put it another way, to get the “Everything I do...” formulation to be equivalent to the “I make the set of vows...” formulation, I think the former would need to be self-referential—i.e. something like ”… according to the policy which is the KS solution… given its inclusion in this vow”. That self-reference will insert the optimal degree of wiggle-room etc.
I think you need either the extra indirection or the self-reference (or I’m confused, which is always possible :)).
One way to interpret this is “I will do my best effort to follow the optimal policy”. On the other hand, when you’re optimizing for just your own utility function, one could argue that the “best effort” is exactly equal to the optimal policy once you take constraints and computational/logical uncertainty into account. On the third hand, perhaps for bargaining the case for identifying “best effort” and “optimal” is weaker. In practice, what’s important is that even if you followed a suboptimal policy for a while, there’s a well-defined way to return to optimal behavior. This is true for Nash bargaining (because of independence of irrelevant alternatives), less so for KS! Which is why I’m leaning towards switching to Nash. And if I fail to even make the best effort, there’s the clause about how to amend.
Very interesting—and congratulations!
A few thoughts:
It strikes me that the first vow will sometimes conflict with the second. If your idea is that any conflict with the second vow would be a (mild) information hazard, then ok—but I’m not sure what the first vow adds in this case.
Have you considered going meta?:
”I make the set of vows determined by the Kalai-Smorodinski solution to the bargaining problem...”
″...I expect these vows to be something like [original vows go here] but the former description is definitive.”
This has the nice upside of automatically catching problems you haven’t considered, but not requiring you to be super-human. Specifically, the “Everything I do will be according to the policy...” clause just isn’t achievable. Committing to the set of vows such a policy would have you make is achievable (you might not follow them perfectly, but there’d automatically be a balance between achievability and other desiderata).
Thank you :)
Well, yes, the intent it is that the Vow of Honest takes precedence over the Vow of Concord.
I’m not sure what’s the difference between “set of vows” and “policy”? When I say “policy” I refer to the set of behaviors we are actually capable of choosing from, including computational and other constraints.
Ah ok, if the honesty vow takes precedence. I still think it’s a difficult one in edge cases, but I don’t see effective resolutions that do better than using vows 2 and 3 to decide on those.
The point isn’t in choosing “set of vows” over “policy”, but rather in choosing “I make the set of vows...” over “Everything I do will be according to...”. You’re able to make the set of vows (albeit implicitly), and the vows themselves will have the optimal amount of wiggle-room, achievability, flexibility, emphasis on good faith… built in.
To say “Everything I do will be according to...” seems to set the bar unachievably high, since it just won’t be true. You can aim in that direction, but your actions won’t even usually be optimal w.r.t. that policy. (thoughts on trying-to-try notwithstanding, I do think vows that are taken seriously should at least be realistically possible to achieve)
To put it another way, to get the “Everything I do...” formulation to be equivalent to the “I make the set of vows...” formulation, I think the former would need to be self-referential—i.e. something like ”… according to the policy which is the KS solution… given its inclusion in this vow”. That self-reference will insert the optimal degree of wiggle-room etc.
I think you need either the extra indirection or the self-reference (or I’m confused, which is always possible :)).
One way to interpret this is “I will do my best effort to follow the optimal policy”. On the other hand, when you’re optimizing for just your own utility function, one could argue that the “best effort” is exactly equal to the optimal policy once you take constraints and computational/logical uncertainty into account. On the third hand, perhaps for bargaining the case for identifying “best effort” and “optimal” is weaker. In practice, what’s important is that even if you followed a suboptimal policy for a while, there’s a well-defined way to return to optimal behavior. This is true for Nash bargaining (because of independence of irrelevant alternatives), less so for KS! Which is why I’m leaning towards switching to Nash. And if I fail to even make the best effort, there’s the clause about how to amend.