I was thinking along the lines of the blackmailer using the same reasoning to decide that whether or not the potential victim of blackmail would be a blackmail ignorer or not, the blackmailer would still blackmail regardless.
Only if you expect that the blackmail victim has not "already" decided that if the blackmailer does that, they will still ignore the blackmail regardless. Wise agents ignore order-0 blackmail, ignore order-1 blackmail in which the blackmailer decides to ignore their ignorance of order-0 blackmail, ignore order-omega blackmail in which the blackmailer decides to ignore all order-N refusals to be blackmailed, etcetera for all ordinals. If there is some ordinal of blackmail you do not ignore, you can be blackmailed, and how does that help?
This sort of thing would seem to lead to an equilibrium of lots of blackmailers blackmailing victims that will ignore them.
Only if those blackmailers have wrongly anticipated that their victims will be stupid enough to conform.
Only if those blackmailers have wrongly anticipated that their victims will be stupid enough to conform.
Not blackmailing in response to that anticipation is a property of the behavior of the blackmailers that seems to have been used in deciding to ignore all blackmail. Suppose there were lots of "stupid" blackmailers around that blackmailed everyone all day, even if no victim ever conformed. Would it be a good idea to ignore all blackmail in that case? Is there a distinction between such blackmailers and particularly unfair laws of physics (sa...
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