You’re trying to bake your personal values (like happy humans) into the rules.
My point is that this has already happened. The underlying assumptions bake in human values. The discussion so far did not convince me that an alien would share these values. I list instances where a human might object to these values. If a human may object to “a player which contributes absolutely nothing … gets nothing,” an alien may object too; if a human may object to “the only inputs are the set of players and a function from player subsets to utility,” an alien may object too; and so forth. These are assumptions baked into the rules of how to divide the resources. So, I am not convinced that these rules allow all agents with conflicting goals to reach a compromise because I am not convinced all agents will accept these rules.[1]
I brought up the “happy humans term” as a way to point out that maybe aliens wouldn’t object to the rule of “contribute nothing … get nothing” because they could always define the value functions so that the set of participants who contribute nothing is empty.
This sets up a meta-bargaining situation where we have to agree on which rules to accept to do bargaining before we can start bargaining. This situation seems to be a basic “Bargaining Game.” I think we might derive the utilities of each rule set from the utilities the participants receive from a bargain made under those rules + a term for how much they like using that rule set[2]. Unfortunately, except for “Choose options on the Pareto frontier whose utilities exceed the BATNA,” this game seems underdetermined, so we’ll have trouble reaching a consensus.
To understand why I think there should be a term for how much they like using the rule set, imagine aliens who value self-determination and cooperative decision-making for all sentient beings and can wipe us out militarily. Imagine we want to split the resources in an asteroid both of us landed on. Consider the rule set of “might makes right.” Under this set, they can unilaterally dictate how the asteroid is divided. So they get maximum utility from the asteroid’s resources. However, they recognize that this is the opposite of self-determination and cooperative decision making; so getting all of the resources this way is of less utility to them than getting all the resources under another set of rules.
While an alien (or a human) could in principle object to literally any rule (No Universally Compelling Arguments), I think “players who contribute nothing get nothing” is very reasonable on purely pragmatic grounds, because those players have nothing to bargain with. They are effectively non-players.
If you give free resources to “players” who contribute nothing, then what stops me from demanding additional shares for my pet rock, my dead grandparents, and my imaginary friends? The chaa division of resources shouldn’t change based on whether I claim to be 1 person or a conglomerate of 37 trillion cells that each want a share of the pie, if the real-world actions being taken are the same under both abstractions.
Also, I think you may be confusing desiderata with assumptions. “Players who contribute nothing get nothing” was taken as a goal that the rules tried to achieve, and so it makes sense (in principle) to argue about whether that’s a good goal. Stuff like “players have utility functions” is not a goal; it’s more like a description of what problem is being solved. You could argue about how well that abstraction represents various real scenarios, but it’s not really a values statement.
My point is that this has already happened. The underlying assumptions bake in human values. The discussion so far did not convince me that an alien would share these values. I list instances where a human might object to these values. If a human may object to “a player which contributes absolutely nothing … gets nothing,” an alien may object too; if a human may object to “the only inputs are the set of players and a function from player subsets to utility,” an alien may object too; and so forth. These are assumptions baked into the rules of how to divide the resources. So, I am not convinced that these rules allow all agents with conflicting goals to reach a compromise because I am not convinced all agents will accept these rules.[1]
I brought up the “happy humans term” as a way to point out that maybe aliens wouldn’t object to the rule of “contribute nothing … get nothing” because they could always define the value functions so that the set of participants who contribute nothing is empty.
This sets up a meta-bargaining situation where we have to agree on which rules to accept to do bargaining before we can start bargaining. This situation seems to be a basic “Bargaining Game.” I think we might derive the utilities of each rule set from the utilities the participants receive from a bargain made under those rules + a term for how much they like using that rule set[2]. Unfortunately, except for “Choose options on the Pareto frontier whose utilities exceed the BATNA,” this game seems underdetermined, so we’ll have trouble reaching a consensus.
To understand why I think there should be a term for how much they like using the rule set, imagine aliens who value self-determination and cooperative decision-making for all sentient beings and can wipe us out militarily. Imagine we want to split the resources in an asteroid both of us landed on. Consider the rule set of “might makes right.” Under this set, they can unilaterally dictate how the asteroid is divided. So they get maximum utility from the asteroid’s resources. However, they recognize that this is the opposite of self-determination and cooperative decision making; so getting all of the resources this way is of less utility to them than getting all the resources under another set of rules.
While an alien (or a human) could in principle object to literally any rule (No Universally Compelling Arguments), I think “players who contribute nothing get nothing” is very reasonable on purely pragmatic grounds, because those players have nothing to bargain with. They are effectively non-players.
If you give free resources to “players” who contribute nothing, then what stops me from demanding additional shares for my pet rock, my dead grandparents, and my imaginary friends? The chaa division of resources shouldn’t change based on whether I claim to be 1 person or a conglomerate of 37 trillion cells that each want a share of the pie, if the real-world actions being taken are the same under both abstractions.
Also, I think you may be confusing desiderata with assumptions. “Players who contribute nothing get nothing” was taken as a goal that the rules tried to achieve, and so it makes sense (in principle) to argue about whether that’s a good goal. Stuff like “players have utility functions” is not a goal; it’s more like a description of what problem is being solved. You could argue about how well that abstraction represents various real scenarios, but it’s not really a values statement.