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Nick_Tarleton comments on Kinnaird's truels - Less Wrong
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Comments (31)
A very skillful gunman is a high-priority target, but also an attractive ally. I wonder what determines which effect dominates. (A wild stab: Social status is associated with number of allies, and with a moving average of accomplishment. If a low-status individual performs too well, but doesn't gratuitously signal submission, they are punished for getting uppity - by those with higher status to mitigate the threat, or by those with equal status to curry favor. A high-status individual, though, couldn't safely be punished even if anyone wanted to; seeking alliance is favorable.)
See also Wei Dai on a game where the smarter players lose.
It's worth emphasizing that in both these cases the competent agents are hurt not by being competent, but by being perceived as competent, whether or not that perception is correct.
Unless there is some reason for the perception of competence to be systematically biased (can anyone think of a reason?), the only way to credibly feign incompetence is to be in situations where acting competently would benefit you, yet you act as if you're not competent. And you have to do this in every such situation where your actions are observed.
Having to feign incompetence substantially reduces the benefits of being competent (depending on how often you're observed), while the costs of becoming competent still has to be borne. As a positive theory, this explains why competence might not be as common as we'd otherwise expect.
As a normative theory, it suggests that if you expect to be in a truel-like situation, you should consider not becoming competent in the first place, or if the costs of becoming competent is already sunk, but you're not yet known to be competent, then you should feign incompetence, by behaving incompetently whenever such behavior can be observed.
My first thought exactly. It reminds me of the story from the Chuang Tzu regarding the hideously gnarled tree that survives to a ripe old age due to its 'flaws'.
Likewise, many employees feign incompetence with respect to certain kinds of tasks -- e.g., programmers feigning incompetence with regard to anything managerial.
Wei Dai begins by assuming that cooperation on the Prisoner's Dilemma is not rational, which is the same decision theory that two-boxes on Newcomb's Problem.
Last I saw, you were only advocating cooperation in one-shot PD for two superintelligences that happen to know each other's source code (http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2008-May/043379.html). Are you now saying that human beings should also play cooperate in one-shot PD?
What goes on with humans is no proof of what goes on with rational agents. Also, truly one-shot PDs will be very rare among real humans.