If you don’t honor implicit agreements on the few occasions when you really need to win, it’s a pretty different strategy from whether you honor implicit agreements all of the time.
Right. I strongly agree.
I think this is the at least part of the core bit of law that underlies sacredness. Having some things that are sacred to you is a way to implement this kind of reliable-across-all-worlds kind of policy, even when the local incentives might tempt you to violate that policy for local benefit.
Eh, I prefer to understand why the rules exist rather than blindly commit to them. Similarly, the Naskapi hunters used divination as a method of ensuring they’d randomize their hunting spots, and I think it’s better to understand why you’re doing it, rather than doing it because you falsely believe divination actually works.
Minor point: the Naskapi hunters didn’t actually do that. That was speculation which was never verified, runs counter to a lot of facts, and in fact, may not have been about aboriginal hunters at all but actually inspired by the author’s then-highly-classified experiences in submarine warfare in WWII in the Battle of the Atlantic. (If you ever thought to yourself, ‘wow, that Eskimo story sounds like an amazingly clear example of mixed-strategies from game theory’...) See some anthropologist criticism & my commentary on the WWII part at https://gwern.net/doc/sociology/index#vollweiler-sanchez-1983-section
Right. I strongly agree.
I think this is the at least part of the core bit of law that underlies sacredness. Having some things that are sacred to you is a way to implement this kind of reliable-across-all-worlds kind of policy, even when the local incentives might tempt you to violate that policy for local benefit.
Eh, I prefer to understand why the rules exist rather than blindly commit to them. Similarly, the Naskapi hunters used divination as a method of ensuring they’d randomize their hunting spots, and I think it’s better to understand why you’re doing it, rather than doing it because you falsely believe divination actually works.
Minor point: the Naskapi hunters didn’t actually do that. That was speculation which was never verified, runs counter to a lot of facts, and in fact, may not have been about aboriginal hunters at all but actually inspired by the author’s then-highly-classified experiences in submarine warfare in WWII in the Battle of the Atlantic. (If you ever thought to yourself, ‘wow, that Eskimo story sounds like an amazingly clear example of mixed-strategies from game theory’...) See some anthropologist criticism & my commentary on the WWII part at https://gwern.net/doc/sociology/index#vollweiler-sanchez-1983-section
I certainly don’t disagree with understanding the structure of good strategies!