Though Siobhan’s behavior here has convinced me that her ability is deductive rather than precognitive in nature—or, at least, that it depends on knowledge of salient facts about a situation. And it’s likely that Addy knows salient things about the Volturi that Siobhan doesn’t, and also likely that Siobhan knows salient things about her group that Addy doesn’t, so it’s not too surprising that they disagree about the next move.
Under those circumstances, having step one be “find out everything salient that Addy knows,” which seems to be what Siobhan is doing, makes a lot of sense.
To say this differently: Addy and Siobhan are demonstrating an unusually good approximation to a corollary to Aumann’s agreement theorem: two perfectly rational actors with a persistent disagreement must have saliently different priors. (Their shared power being as close an approximation to a perfect rationalist as one is likely to find.)
It would be interesting to see that pursued explicitly. That is, given that Siobhan’s talent gives a different answer when applied to her priors than it does when applied to Addy’s, one could infer things about Addy’s salient knowledge based on the differences between those answers, in much the same way that Elspeth infers facts about people from the way she wants to talk to them.
And given that Elspeth has a lot of Addy’s knowledge (though doesn’t necessarily access it the same way Addy does), Siobhan working out in this way the classes of things-Addy-knows that are most relevant to the situation can prompt Elspeth to remember the specific things-Addy-knows in those classes, allowing Siobhan to model Addy’s priors more closely. (And therefore more narrowly identify the remaining salient differences: lather, rinse, repeat.)
The fact that Siobhan and Addy aren’t doing the same thing reflects more the fact that they have very different goals. Addy, for instance, has no interest in controlling Ireland, and Siobhan doesn’t particularly care if a steady stream of interesting witches enter her life and let her play with their powers.
(nods) True.
Though Siobhan’s behavior here has convinced me that her ability is deductive rather than precognitive in nature—or, at least, that it depends on knowledge of salient facts about a situation. And it’s likely that Addy knows salient things about the Volturi that Siobhan doesn’t, and also likely that Siobhan knows salient things about her group that Addy doesn’t, so it’s not too surprising that they disagree about the next move.
Under those circumstances, having step one be “find out everything salient that Addy knows,” which seems to be what Siobhan is doing, makes a lot of sense.
To say this differently: Addy and Siobhan are demonstrating an unusually good approximation to a corollary to Aumann’s agreement theorem: two perfectly rational actors with a persistent disagreement must have saliently different priors. (Their shared power being as close an approximation to a perfect rationalist as one is likely to find.)
It would be interesting to see that pursued explicitly. That is, given that Siobhan’s talent gives a different answer when applied to her priors than it does when applied to Addy’s, one could infer things about Addy’s salient knowledge based on the differences between those answers, in much the same way that Elspeth infers facts about people from the way she wants to talk to them.
And given that Elspeth has a lot of Addy’s knowledge (though doesn’t necessarily access it the same way Addy does), Siobhan working out in this way the classes of things-Addy-knows that are most relevant to the situation can prompt Elspeth to remember the specific things-Addy-knows in those classes, allowing Siobhan to model Addy’s priors more closely. (And therefore more narrowly identify the remaining salient differences: lather, rinse, repeat.)
Neat!
The fact that Siobhan and Addy aren’t doing the same thing reflects more the fact that they have very different goals. Addy, for instance, has no interest in controlling Ireland, and Siobhan doesn’t particularly care if a steady stream of interesting witches enter her life and let her play with their powers.
(nods) Makes sense.