AlephNeil comments on Open Thread, April 2011 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: ata 02 April 2011 06:43PM

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Comment author: AlephNeil 03 April 2011 05:36:09PM 0 points [-]

Negative-sum conflicts happen due to factual disagreements (mostly inaccurate assessments of relative power), not value disagreements.

By 'negative-sum' do you really mean 'negative for all parties'? Because, taking 'negative-sum' literally, we can imagine a variant of the Prisoner's Dilemma where A defecting gains 1 and costs B 2, and where B defecting gains 3 and costs A 10.

Comment author: cousin_it 03 April 2011 06:55:41PM 0 points [-]

I suppose I meant "Pareto-suboptimal". Sorry.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 April 2011 09:33:28PM *  1 point [-]

I suppose I meant "Pareto-suboptimal".

How does that make sense? You are correct that under sufficiently generous Coasian assumptions, any attempt at predation will be negotiated into a zero-sum transfer, thus avoiding a negative-sum conflict. But that is still a violation of Pareto optimality, which requires that nobody ends up worse off.

Comment deleted 03 April 2011 10:53:15PM [-]
Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 April 2011 11:06:20PM *  2 points [-]

Yes, this was a confusion on my part. You are right that starting from a Pareto-optimal state, a pure transfer results in another Pareto-optimal state.