Curated! I really enjoyed this post (and its follow-up, though I didn’t read that one in as much depth) and wholeheartedly endorse continuing the LessWrong tradition of decision-theory posting. The results of the post feel beautiful (I guess that’s a common feeling when different notions are unified) and the explanations are lucid.
I won’t claim that the post feels immediately practical in my life, though I suspect I will find myself thinking about bargaining strategies and fairness/chaa in future decision theories, and eventually mulling on the ideas here (and seeking out further bargaining knowledge) until it does have implications for my decisions.
More than that though, reading this post felt “healthy”. It feels like the kind of seeking of rigor for “everyday” concepts and decisions that you ought to do. I almost feel like this is hunting for the true name of “fairness”.
To pull out one piece/attitude I liked:
Accordingly, using the term “fair” for any of these mathematical concepts has the problem of automatically importing human concepts of fairness, which needs to be resisted in order to look clearly at what the math is doing. It’ll be handy to have a separate word for “a mathematically distinguished point in a game where both parties have an interest in preventing destructive conflicts, that’s neutral enough that aliens would probably come up with it” to enforce that mental separation.
I’d love to see more posts like this, and would also love to see these notions connected to practical applications. Vanessa Kosoy replies in a comment that a reason some of the results might seem ugly is that we’re already assuming “morality”, i.e. already having a bargaining solution and we’re not starting from square 1. So I’d be interested to see bargaining applied to the situations we already find ourselves in.
Curated! I really enjoyed this post (and its follow-up, though I didn’t read that one in as much depth) and wholeheartedly endorse continuing the LessWrong tradition of decision-theory posting. The results of the post feel beautiful (I guess that’s a common feeling when different notions are unified) and the explanations are lucid.
I won’t claim that the post feels immediately practical in my life, though I suspect I will find myself thinking about bargaining strategies and fairness/chaa in future decision theories, and eventually mulling on the ideas here (and seeking out further bargaining knowledge) until it does have implications for my decisions.
More than that though, reading this post felt “healthy”. It feels like the kind of seeking of rigor for “everyday” concepts and decisions that you ought to do. I almost feel like this is hunting for the true name of “fairness”.
To pull out one piece/attitude I liked:
I’d love to see more posts like this, and would also love to see these notions connected to practical applications. Vanessa Kosoy replies in a comment that a reason some of the results might seem ugly is that we’re already assuming “morality”, i.e. already having a bargaining solution and we’re not starting from square 1. So I’d be interested to see bargaining applied to the situations we already find ourselves in.