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VincentYu comments on Real World Solutions to Prisoners' Dilemmas - Less Wrong
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Comments (87)
This is a recurring issue, so perhaps my instructor and textbooks were atypical: we never discussed or even cared whether someone should defect on PD in my game theory course. The bounds were made clear to us in lecture – game theory studies concepts like Nash equilibria and backward induction (using the term 'rationality' to mean VNM-rationality) and applies them to situations like PD; that is all. The use of any normative language in homework sets or exams was pretty much automatically marked incorrect. What one 'should' or 'ought' to do were instead relegated to other courses in, e.g, economics, philosophy, political science. I'd like to know from others if this is a typical experience from a game theory course (and if anyone happens to be working in the field: if this is representative of the literature).
Upon reflection, I tend to agree with these statements. In this case, perhaps we should taboo 'rationality' in its game theoretic meaning – use the phrase 'VNM-rationality' whenever that is meant instead of LW's 'rationality'.
The normative claim is one I am making now about the 'rationality' theories in question. It is the same kind of normative claim I make when I say "empirical tests are better than beliefs from ad baculum".
I could agree to that---conditional on confirmation from one of the Vladimirs that the axioms in question do, in fact, imply the faux-rational (CDT like) conclusions the term would be used to represent. I don't actually see it at a glance and would expect another hidden assumption to be required. I wouldn't be comfortable using the term without confirmation.
I quoted badly; I believe there was a misunderstanding. The first quote in the parent to this should be taken in the context of your sentence segment that "Said literature gives advice". In my paragraph, I was objecting to this from my experiences in my course, where I did not receive any advice on what to do in games like PD. Instead, the type of advice that I received was on how to calculate Nash equilibria and find SPNEs.
Otherwise, I am mostly in agreement with the latter part of that sentence. (ETA: That is, I agree that if current game theoretic equilibrium solutions are taken as advice on what one ought to do, then that is often epistemically, instrumentally, and normatively bad.)
More ETA:
You are correct – VNM-rationality is incredibly weak (though humans don't satisfy it). It is, after all, logically equivalent to the existence of a utility function (the proof of this by von Neumann and Morgenstern led to the eponymous VNM theorem). The faux-rationality on LW and in popular culture requires much stronger assumptions. But again, I don't think these assumptions are made in the game theory literature – I think that faux-rationality is misattributed to game theory. The game theory I was taught used only VNM-rationality, and gave no advice.