Slightly tangential: I have a semi-worked-out notion of a “fair” class of problems which includes Newcomb’s Problem because the predictor makes a decision based only on your action, not the “ritual of cognition” that preceded it (to borrow Eliezer’s phrase). But the one-shot PD doesn’t reside in this “fair” class because you don’t cooperate by just predicting the opponent’s action. You need to somehow tie the knot of infinite recursion, e.g. with quining or Löbian reasoning, and all such approaches seem to inevitably require inspecting the other guy’s “ritual of cognition”. This direction of research leads to all sorts of clever tricks, but ultimately it might be a dead end.
As for your main point, I completely agree. Any model that cannot accommodate limited information is bound to be useless in practice. I’m just trying to solve simple problems first, see what works and what doesn’t in very idealized conditions. Don’t worry, I’ll never neglect game theory—it was accidentally getting my hands on Ken Binmore’s “Fun and Games” that brought me back to math in the first place :-)
Slightly tangential: I have a semi-worked-out notion of a “fair” class of problems which includes Newcomb’s Problem because the predictor makes a decision based only on your action, not the “ritual of cognition” that preceded it (to borrow Eliezer’s phrase). But the one-shot PD doesn’t reside in this “fair” class because you don’t cooperate by just predicting the opponent’s action. You need to somehow tie the knot of infinite recursion, e.g. with quining or Löbian reasoning, and all such approaches seem to inevitably require inspecting the other guy’s “ritual of cognition”. This direction of research leads to all sorts of clever tricks, but ultimately it might be a dead end.
As for your main point, I completely agree. Any model that cannot accommodate limited information is bound to be useless in practice. I’m just trying to solve simple problems first, see what works and what doesn’t in very idealized conditions. Don’t worry, I’ll never neglect game theory—it was accidentally getting my hands on Ken Binmore’s “Fun and Games” that brought me back to math in the first place :-)