blogospheroid comments on Exploitation and cooperation in ecology, government, business, and AI - Less Wrong

18 Post author: PhilGoetz 27 August 2010 02:27PM

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Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 August 2010 11:04:51PM *  4 points [-]

Thinking a bit more about your government-related examples, it seems like one problem is that you don't specify how exactly the notion of "exploiting" translates from the animal world into human relations. Those forms of exploitation that are a clear analogy of animal predatory behavior (e.g. robbery and plunder) are normally illegal in any organized human society and done openly only by rogue criminals. When they're done by organized and persistent structures, rather than outlaw individuals, they're typically given a pretense of a mutually beneficial relationship (e.g. extortionists claiming to sell "protection").

Now, the question is: since the social arrangements that appear exploitative by some criteria will normally be backed by at least some theoretical pretense of mutual benefit, how can we discern to what extent such pretenses are false in each particular case? Moreover, since it's unlikely that any human relations will be purely exploitative or mutualistic in any meaningful sense, how to devise a reasonable measure by which we can rate concrete arrangements on this scale, without any unjustified subjective judgments of whose situation is better or worse? In any case, it seems to me that the approach taken in your "Government" section is too simplistic to be useful.

Comment author: blogospheroid 28 August 2010 01:24:48PM 1 point [-]

One simple heuristic i could think of is what would happen the "prey" agents in the system gained a small increase in intelligence/optimization power. Does the relationship increase in quantum or decrease? If its exploitative, it would decrease, if it is mutually beneficial, it would increase.