Methinks we have gone well past the deep-end of barely-relevant hypotheticals, and are currently swimming somewhere in the concrete under the bleachers.
I disagree. I think all these problems have real-world analogues.
As for the problem in this post, forget parallel, skewed payoffs is enough. If players could coordinate in skewed prisoner’s dilemmas to let the player who stands to lose/gain the most defect while the other player cooperates, they would expect huge gains. And skewed prisoner’s dilemmas happen, they’re not “barely-relevant hypotheticals”.
It’s not that they don’t happen. The issue is where you need some ability to credibly precommit, and to bind other people in similar situations to credibly precommit, except you don’t know that there are other people who you need to work with.
In the vast majority of cases, we have an incredibly elegant solution to the prisoner’s dilemma: contract law. Once you create sufficiently odd hypotheticals—such as skewed payoffs, single-shot, no knowledge of positive-sum exchanges, no ability to discuss or agree to positive-sum exchanges—the issue is irrelevant enough to be absurd.
If you were offered a bad-for-humans deal, would you defect, or would you simply assume that there are many other deals out there that are skewed the other way and that the paperclip maximizers who are receiving them are cooperative conditioned on your cooperation?
Haven’t you noticed that people are working on decision theories that do not need to precommit in these situations to achieve the optimal outcome?
That’s what’s interesting. Decision theories are being explored that output the correct action without need for the crutches of precommitment and negotiation.
Also, I simply disagree that skewed payoffs, single-shot, no knowledge of positive-sum exchanges(?), no ability to discuss make a problem “irrelevant enough to be absurd”.
If you were offered a bad-for-humans deal, would you defect, or would you simply assume that there are many other deals out there that are skewed the other way and that the paperclip maximizers who are receiving them are cooperative conditioned on your cooperation?
If I had time to work out the decison theory I might very well come to expect that the paperclipper would submit to cooperating while I defect, in the bad-for-humans case, if I would similarly submit in the bad-for-paperclipper case.
Haven’t you noticed that people are working on decision theories that do not need to precommit in these situations to achieve the optimal outcome?
If someone on the street approaches me and tells me he is counterfactually mugging me, I don’t give him a dime. The odds that he is actually capable of counterfactually mugging me and is telling me the truth are virtually zero compared to the chance that he’s trying to scam me out of my money. It is an essential element of every one of those weird-situation decision theories that you know you are in a weird world with certainty.
Your hypothetical removes this certainty. If you are unaware that other people face similarly skewed bargains, your decision theory cannot possibly adjust for their behaviour. If you are in a situation of full awareness of other such bargains existing, then the case seems relatively indistinguishable from the basic prisoner’s dilemma with hyper-rationality.
(And “no knowledge of positive-sum exchange” means that you are ignorant of the fact that there are other PDs skewed in the opposite direction.)
Maybe I don’t have to know that other skewed dilemmas are in fact happening. Maybe I just have to know that they could be happening. Or that they could have happened. Maybe it’s enough to know a coin was flipped to determine in whose favor the dilemma is skewed, for example.
Here’s another perpective. If I’m a UDT agent and my priors assign a roughly equal probability to ending up on either side of the skew in a skewed prisoner’s dilemma against another UDT agent, the straightforward UDT answer is for the advantaged player to submit to the disadvantaged player, even if only one dilemma is “in fact” ever run.
Or if precommitment is your thing: it’s in your interests to precommit to submit to a disadvantaged player in future skewed prisoner’s dilemmas if the other player has similarly precommited, because you don’t yet know what kinds of skewed dilemmas you’re going to encounter in the future.
About counterfactual mugging:
I’d probably pay Yvain and wouldn’t think I’m in a weird world.
Actually, I’m writing up more real-world versions of many popular decision problems, and I have a particularly clever one for counterfactual mugging called “Counterfactual Insurance Co.”. When I write it up properly I’ll post it on LW...
Maybe I don’t have to know that other skewed dilemmas are in fact happening. Maybe I just have to know that they could be happening. Or that they could have happened. Maybe it’s enough to know a coin was flipped to determine in whose favor the dilemma is skewed, for example.
What evidence do you have to believe things are balanced? All you know is that one skewed situation exists. What evidence leads you to believe that other situations exist that are skewed relatively equally in the opposite direction? It’s irrational to end up with the worst possible outcome for a PD because there might, in theory, be other PDs in which if you opponent did what you did you would benefit.
For what I think is an completely unexaggerated analogy: It is theoretically possible that every time I eat a banana, some entity horribly tortures an innocent person. It could happen. Absent any actual evidence that it does, my banana consumption will not change. You should not change your behaviour in a PD because it’s theoretically possible that other PDs exist with oppositely skewed outcomes.
As for the counterfactual mugging, Yvain will never do it, unless he’s an eccentric millionaire, because he’d lose a fortune. For any other individual, you would need substantial evidence before you would trust them.
As for precommitment, the lack of an ability to credibly precommit is one of the essential elements of a prisoner’s dilemma. If the prisoners could make an enforceable contract not to snitch, it’d be easy to end up at the optimal outcome.
What evidence do you have to believe things are balanced?
What evidence do you have to believe that things are 1) unbalanced 2) in your favor?
You don’t know what kinds of PD’s you’re going to encounter, so you prepare for all of them by setting up the appropriate precommitments, if your decision theory requires precommitments. If it doesn’t, you’ll just figure out and do the thing that you would have wanted to precommit to doing, “on the fly”.
Credibility is indeed assumed in these problems. If you can’t verify that the other player really has made the precommitment or really is a UDT kind of guy, you can’t take advantage of this kind of coordination.
I disagree. I think all these problems have real-world analogues.
Omega bothering you? Replace him with Paul Ekman
As for the problem in this post, forget parallel, skewed payoffs is enough. If players could coordinate in skewed prisoner’s dilemmas to let the player who stands to lose/gain the most defect while the other player cooperates, they would expect huge gains. And skewed prisoner’s dilemmas happen, they’re not “barely-relevant hypotheticals”.
It’s not that they don’t happen. The issue is where you need some ability to credibly precommit, and to bind other people in similar situations to credibly precommit, except you don’t know that there are other people who you need to work with.
In the vast majority of cases, we have an incredibly elegant solution to the prisoner’s dilemma: contract law. Once you create sufficiently odd hypotheticals—such as skewed payoffs, single-shot, no knowledge of positive-sum exchanges, no ability to discuss or agree to positive-sum exchanges—the issue is irrelevant enough to be absurd.
If you were offered a bad-for-humans deal, would you defect, or would you simply assume that there are many other deals out there that are skewed the other way and that the paperclip maximizers who are receiving them are cooperative conditioned on your cooperation?
Haven’t you noticed that people are working on decision theories that do not need to precommit in these situations to achieve the optimal outcome?
That’s what’s interesting. Decision theories are being explored that output the correct action without need for the crutches of precommitment and negotiation.
Also, I simply disagree that skewed payoffs, single-shot, no knowledge of positive-sum exchanges(?), no ability to discuss make a problem “irrelevant enough to be absurd”.
If I had time to work out the decison theory I might very well come to expect that the paperclipper would submit to cooperating while I defect, in the bad-for-humans case, if I would similarly submit in the bad-for-paperclipper case.
If someone on the street approaches me and tells me he is counterfactually mugging me, I don’t give him a dime. The odds that he is actually capable of counterfactually mugging me and is telling me the truth are virtually zero compared to the chance that he’s trying to scam me out of my money. It is an essential element of every one of those weird-situation decision theories that you know you are in a weird world with certainty.
Your hypothetical removes this certainty. If you are unaware that other people face similarly skewed bargains, your decision theory cannot possibly adjust for their behaviour. If you are in a situation of full awareness of other such bargains existing, then the case seems relatively indistinguishable from the basic prisoner’s dilemma with hyper-rationality.
(And “no knowledge of positive-sum exchange” means that you are ignorant of the fact that there are other PDs skewed in the opposite direction.)
About skewed PD:
Maybe I don’t have to know that other skewed dilemmas are in fact happening. Maybe I just have to know that they could be happening. Or that they could have happened. Maybe it’s enough to know a coin was flipped to determine in whose favor the dilemma is skewed, for example.
Here’s another perpective. If I’m a UDT agent and my priors assign a roughly equal probability to ending up on either side of the skew in a skewed prisoner’s dilemma against another UDT agent, the straightforward UDT answer is for the advantaged player to submit to the disadvantaged player, even if only one dilemma is “in fact” ever run.
Or if precommitment is your thing: it’s in your interests to precommit to submit to a disadvantaged player in future skewed prisoner’s dilemmas if the other player has similarly precommited, because you don’t yet know what kinds of skewed dilemmas you’re going to encounter in the future.
About counterfactual mugging:
I’d probably pay Yvain and wouldn’t think I’m in a weird world.
Actually, I’m writing up more real-world versions of many popular decision problems, and I have a particularly clever one for counterfactual mugging called “Counterfactual Insurance Co.”. When I write it up properly I’ll post it on LW...
What evidence do you have to believe things are balanced? All you know is that one skewed situation exists. What evidence leads you to believe that other situations exist that are skewed relatively equally in the opposite direction? It’s irrational to end up with the worst possible outcome for a PD because there might, in theory, be other PDs in which if you opponent did what you did you would benefit.
For what I think is an completely unexaggerated analogy: It is theoretically possible that every time I eat a banana, some entity horribly tortures an innocent person. It could happen. Absent any actual evidence that it does, my banana consumption will not change. You should not change your behaviour in a PD because it’s theoretically possible that other PDs exist with oppositely skewed outcomes.
As for the counterfactual mugging, Yvain will never do it, unless he’s an eccentric millionaire, because he’d lose a fortune. For any other individual, you would need substantial evidence before you would trust them.
As for precommitment, the lack of an ability to credibly precommit is one of the essential elements of a prisoner’s dilemma. If the prisoners could make an enforceable contract not to snitch, it’d be easy to end up at the optimal outcome.
What evidence do you have to believe that things are 1) unbalanced 2) in your favor?
You don’t know what kinds of PD’s you’re going to encounter, so you prepare for all of them by setting up the appropriate precommitments, if your decision theory requires precommitments. If it doesn’t, you’ll just figure out and do the thing that you would have wanted to precommit to doing, “on the fly”.
Credibility is indeed assumed in these problems. If you can’t verify that the other player really has made the precommitment or really is a UDT kind of guy, you can’t take advantage of this kind of coordination.