Is this consistent with the way you’re describing decision-making procedures as updateful and updateless?
Absolutely. A good implementation of UDT can, from its prior, decide on an updateful strategy. It’s just it won’t be able to change its mind about which updateful strategy seems best. See this comment for more.
“flinching away from true information”
As mentioned also in that comment, correct implementations of UDT don’t actually flinch away from information: they just decide ex ante (when still not having access to that information) whether or not they will let their future actions depend on it.
The problem remains though: you make the ex ante call about which information to “decision-relevantly update on”, and this can be a wrong call, and this creates commitment races, etc.
The problem remains though: you make the ex ante call about which information to “decision-relevantly update on”, and this can be a wrong call, and this creates commitment races, etc.
My understanding is that commitment races only occur in cases where “information about the commitments made by other agents” has negative value for all relevant agents. (All agents are racing to commit before learning more, which might scare them away from making such a commitment.)
It seems like updateless agents should not find themselves in commitment races.
My impression is that we don’t have a satisfactory extension of UDT to multi-agent interactions. But I suspect that the updateless response to observing “your counterpart has committed to going Straight” will look less like “Swerve, since that’s the best response” and more like “go Straight with enough probability that your counterpart wishes they’d coordinated with you rather than trying to bully you.”
Offering to coordinate on socially optimal outcomes, and being willing to pay costs to discourage bullying, seems like a generalizable way for smart agents to achieve good outcomes.
Absolutely. A good implementation of UDT can, from its prior, decide on an updateful strategy. It’s just it won’t be able to change its mind about which updateful strategy seems best. See this comment for more.
As mentioned also in that comment, correct implementations of UDT don’t actually flinch away from information: they just decide ex ante (when still not having access to that information) whether or not they will let their future actions depend on it.
The problem remains though: you make the ex ante call about which information to “decision-relevantly update on”, and this can be a wrong call, and this creates commitment races, etc.
My understanding is that commitment races only occur in cases where “information about the commitments made by other agents” has negative value for all relevant agents. (All agents are racing to commit before learning more, which might scare them away from making such a commitment.)
It seems like updateless agents should not find themselves in commitment races.
My impression is that we don’t have a satisfactory extension of UDT to multi-agent interactions. But I suspect that the updateless response to observing “your counterpart has committed to going Straight” will look less like “Swerve, since that’s the best response” and more like “go Straight with enough probability that your counterpart wishes they’d coordinated with you rather than trying to bully you.”
Offering to coordinate on socially optimal outcomes, and being willing to pay costs to discourage bullying, seems like a generalizable way for smart agents to achieve good outcomes.