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FAWS comments on The Blackmail Equation - Less Wrong
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Comments (87)
Signaling is about perceptions, not the truth by necessity. That means that fooling is at least a hypothetical possibility. Which is not the case for my use of precommittment.
Taking the decision not to change your mind later in a way you will stick to. If as you seem to suggest the question whether the agent later acts a certain way or not is already implicit in its original source code then this agent already comes into existence precommitted (or not, as the case may be).
That you've taken this decision is a fact about your strategy (as such, it's timeless: looking at it from ten years ago doesn't change it). There is a similar fact of what you'd do if the situation was different.
Did you read about counterfactual mugging, and do you agree that one should give up the money? No precommitment in this sense could help you there: there is no explicit decision in advance, it has to be a "passive" property of your strategy (the distinction between a decision that was "made" and that wasn't is superficial one -- that's my point).
How could it be otherwise? And if so, "deciding to precommit" (in the sense of fixing this fact at a certain moment) is impossible in principle. All you can do is tell the other player about this fact, maybe only after you yourself discovered it (as being the way to win, and so the thing to do, etc.)
Yes, its a fact about your strategy, but this particular strategy would not have been your strategy before making that decision (it may have been a strategy you were considering, though). Unless you want to argue that there is no such thing as a decision, which would be a curious position in the context of a thought experiment about decision theory.
Yes, I considered myself precommitted to hand over the money when reading that. I would not have considered myself precommmitted before my speculations about time travel a couple of years ago, and if I had read the scenario of the counterfactual mugging and nothing else here, and if I had been forced to say whether I would hand over the money without time to think it though I would have said that I would not (I can't tell what I would have said given unlimited time).
Would it make a difference if Omega told you that it tossed the coin a thousand years ago (before you've "precommited"), but only came for the money now?
That would make no difference whatsoever of course. Only the time I learn about the mugging matters.
But the coin precommited to demand the money from you first. How do you reconcile this with your position about the order of precommitments?
Are you trying to make fun of me?
No, a serious question. I was referring to the discussion starting from the top-level comment here (it's more of praise's position -- my mistake for confusing this -- it's unclear whether you agree).
"Who precommits first wins" means that if one party can make the other party learn about its precommitment before the other party can commit the first party wins. Not because commitment has magical powers that vary with time, but because learning about the precommitment makes making an exception in just this one case "rational" (if it's not "rational" to you you already had implicitly precommmitted).
Yes, this (general spin of your argument, not particular point) was my position at one time as well, until I realized that all rational decision-making has to consist of such "implicit precommitments", which robs the word of nontriviality.
I don't agree. Not because I think you are believing anything crazy. I disagree with what is rational for the second person to do. I say that anything an agent can do by precommiting to an action it can also do just because it is the rational thing to do. Basically, any time you are in a situation where you think "I wish I could go back in time and change my source code that right now I would be precommitted to doing X" just do X. It's a bit counter-intuitive but it seems to give you the right answer. In this case the Baron will just not choose to precommit to defection because he knows that will not work due to the 'if I could time travel..." policy that he reads in your source code. It's kind of like 'free precommitment'!
ETA: The word 'rational' was quoted, distancing FAWS own belief from a possible belief that some other people may call "rational". So I do agree. :)
If you allow precommitments that are strategies, that react to what you learn (e.g. about other precommitments), you won't need any exceptions. You'd only have "blank" areas where you haven't yet decided your strategy.
Determinism doesn't allow such magic. You need to read up on free will.
Are you being deliberately obtuse?
I consider a strategy that involves killing myself in certain circumstances, but have not yet committed to it.
Before I can do so these circumstances suddenly arise. I chicken out and don't kill myself, because I haven't committed yet (or psyched myself up if you want to call it that). That strategy wasn't really my strategy yet.
5 Minutes later I have committed myself to that strategy. The circumstances I would kill myself under arise, and I actually do it (or so I hope. I'm not completely sure I can make precommittments that strong) The strategy I previously considered is now my strategy.
How is any of that free will magic?
Thanks, this explains the "would not have been your strategy" thing.
So, when you talk about "X is not my strategy", you refer to particular time: X is not the algorithm you implement at 10AM, but X is the algorithm you implement at 11AM. When you said "before I decided at 10:30AM, X wasn't my strategy", I heard "before I decided at 10:30AM, at 11AM there was no fact about which strategy I implement, but after that, there appeared a fact that at 11AM I implement X", while it now seems that you meant "at 10AM I wasn't implementing X; I decided to implement X at 10:30AM; at 11AM I implemented X". Is the disagreement resolved? (Not the original one though, of the top-level comment -- that was about facts.)
Yes. I can't see why you would interpret my position in a way that is both needlessly complicated (taking "before" to be a statement about some sort of meta-time rather than just plain normal time?) and doesn't make any sense whatsoever, though.
Well, it's a common failure mode, you should figure out some way of signalling that you don't fall in it (and I should learn to ask the right questions). Since you can change your mind about what to do at 11AM, it's appealing to think that you can also change the fact of the matter of what happens at 11AM. To avoid such confusion, it's natural enough to think about "the algorithm you implement at 10AM" and "the algorithm you implement at 11AM" as unrelated facts that don't change (but depend and are controlled by particular systems, such as your source code at given time, or even "acausally", or "logically" controlled by the algorithms in terms of which they are defined).
Any evidence, that is any way in which you may know facts about the world, is up to interpretation, and you may err in interpreting it. But it's also the only way to observe the truth.
You are talking about the relation between truth and your own perceptions. None of this is relevant for the relation between truth and what you want other peoples perceptions to be, which is the context those words are used in the post you reply to. Are you deliberately trying to misinterpret me? Do I need to make all of my posts lawyer-proof?
No.
The other people will interpret your words depending on whether they expect them to be in accordance with reality. Thus, I'm talking about the relation between the way your words will be interpreted by the people you talk to, and the truth of your words. If signaling (communication) bore no relation to the truth, it would be as useless as listening to white noise.
You're doing it again. I never said that signaling bore no relationship to the truth whatsoever, I said it was about perceptions and not by necessity about the truth, and what I (obviously, it seemed to me) meant was that signaling means attempting to manipulate the perceptions of others in a certain way, and that this does not necessarily mean changing the reality of the thing these perceptions are about.
You can't change reality... You can only make something change in time, but every instant, as well as the whole shape of the process of change, are fixed facts.
By signalling I mean, for example, speaking (though the term fits better in the original game). Of course, you are trying to manipulate the world (in particular, perceptions of other people) in a certain way by your actions, but it's a general property shared by all actions.
You can't change reality in this meta-time sort of sense you seem to be eager to assign me. If I take a book out of the book case and put it on my desk I have changed the reality of where that book is. I haven't changed the reality of where that book will be in 2 minutes in your meta-time sense through my magical free will powers at the meta-time of making the decision to do that, but have changed the reality of where that book is in the plain English sense.
EDIT: You edited your post while I was replying. I only saw the first sentence.
Agreed.