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Vladimir_Nesov comments on The True Epistemic Prisoner's Dilemma - Less Wrong
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Actually, I thought that I made a relatively clear argument, and I'm surprised that it's not upvoted (the same goes for the follow-up here). Maybe someone could constructively comment on why that is. I expect that the argument is not easy to understand, and maybe I failed at seeing the inferential distance between my argument and intended audience, so that people who understood the argument already consider it too obvious to be of notice, and people who disagree with the conclusion didn't understand the argument... Anyway, any constructive feedback on meta level would be appreciated.
On the concept of avoiders, see Dennett's lecture here. Maybe someone can give a reference in textual form.
Uh...
AllanCrossman asked: what if we can't precommit?
You answered: it's good to be able to precommit, maybe we can still arrange it somehow.
Thus simplified, it doesn't look like an answer. But you didn't say it in simple words. You added philosophical fog that, when parsed and executed, completely cancels out, giving us no indication how to actually precommit.
Disagree?
My reply can be summarized as explaining why "precommiting in binding way" is not a clear-cut necessity for this problem. If you are a cooperator, there is no need to precommit.
In your terms, being a cooperator for this specific problem is synonymous to precommitting. You're just shunting words around. All right, how do I actually be a cooperator?
No, it's not synonymous. If you precommit, you become a cooperator, but you can also be one without precommiting. If you are an AI that is written to be a cooperator, you'll be one. If you decide to act as a cooperator, you may be one. Being a cooperator is relatively easy. Being a cooperator and successfully signating that you are one, without precommitment, is in practice much harder. And a related problem, if you are a cooperator, you have to recognize a signal that the other person is a cooperator also, which may be too hard if he hasn't precommited.
What? The implication goes both ways. If you're a cooperator (in your terms), then you're precommitted to cooperating (in classical terms). Maybe you misunderstand the word "precommitment"? It doesn't necessarily imply that some natural power forces the other guy to believe you.
If you define precommitment this way, then every property becomes a precommitment to having that property, and the concept of precommitment becomes tautological. For example, is it a precommitment to always prefer good over evil (defined however you like)?
Not every property. Every immutable property. They're very rare. Your example isn't a precommitment because it's not immutable.
What's "mutable"? Changing in time? Cooperation may be a one-off encounter, with no multiple occasions to change over. You may be a cooperator for the duration of one encounter, and a rock elsewhere. Every fact is immutable, so I don't know what you imply here.
Yes, mutable means changing in time.
Precommitment is an interaction between two different times: the time when you're doing cheap talk with the opponent, and the time when you're actually deciding in the closed room. The time you burn your ships, and the time your troops go to battle. Signaling time and play time. If a property is immutable (preferably physically immutable) between those two times, that's precommitment. Sounds synonymous to your "being a cooperator" concept.