I mean, "terribly horrible" on what scale? If the criterion is "can it be strictly dominated by another strategy in terms of results if we ignore the cost of making the strategy more complicated," then, sure, a strategy that reliably allows opponents to costlessly defect on the first of 100 rounds fails that criterion. I'd argue that a more interesting set of criteria are "is the expected utility close to the maximum expected utility generated by any strategy," "is the standard deviation in expected utility acceptably low," and "is the strategy simple enough that it can be taught, shared, and implemented with little or no error?" Don't let the perfect become the enemy of the good.
I mean, "terribly horrible" on what scale?
On a scale from 0 to "a million people died because someone was being irrational", it would be around "two million people died because someone was being irrational."
On an unrelated note, the idea of precommitting in non-repeated IPD is silly; because if both players are precommitting simultaneously (before learning of their opponent's precommittment) it's the same as no-one precommitting, since they can't update their strategy with that knowledge, and otherwise it's an asymmetrical ...
Today's post, The Truly Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma was originally published on 04 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The True Prisoner's Dilemma, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.