Rationality Quotes: November 2010

jaimeastorga2000

A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Suppose I'm an agent implementing TDT. My decision in Chicken depends on how much I know about my opponent.

If I know my opponent implements the same decision procedure I do (because I have access to its source code, say), and my opponent has this knowledge about me, I swerve. In this case, my opponent and I are in symmetrical positions and its choice is fully determined by mine; my choice is between payoffs of (0,0) and (-10,-10).
Else, I act identically to a CDT agent.

As Eliezer says here, the one-sentence version of TDT is "Choose as though controlling the logical output of the abstract computation you implement, including the output of all other instantiations and simulations of that computation."

So TDT is different from CDT only in cases where the game is perfectly symmetric? If you are playing a game that is roughly the symmetric PD, except that one guy's payoffs are shifted by a tiny +epsilon, then they should both defect?

1Perplexed16y

Thank you. I hope you realize that you have provided an example of a game in which CDT does better than TDT. For example, in the game with the payoff matrix shown below, there is a mixed strategy Nash equilibrium which is better than the symmetric cooperative result. [...]

2Sniffnoy16y

I'm not sure this is right. Isn't there a correlated equilibrium that does better?