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gwern comments on A Story of Kings and Spies - Less Wrong
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Comments (33)
If you can prove malicious intent, then why the need for the bet in the first place...?
You can't prove it now, you may be able to prove it (or its absence) in a few days. If there is none, Orin just pays his 1000 coins.
The point of the bet was to properly incentivize Orin in the present.
How do you prove it in a few days? 'Oh, no army appeared' said Orin. 'My friend must have been wrong or the date was pushed back. Still, as an honest man, I stand by our deal though it beggar me.'
Are you asking me how the plot can play out in a fictional story? :-D
Here's one possibility -- the king's large and effective network of spies and informants will send the word that the Northern Kingdom executed a disinformation campaign against the king using a fellow named Orin...
Possibility is not good enough. And in any case, my proposed defeater can be implemented by exactly two people: a volunteer and a rich benefactor, and so it is vastly more likely to be undiscovered by spies & informants than an actual attack. The king is unsure his spy network will uncover every attack, so a fortiori, he is very unsure that my proposed scheme would be detected.
Not good enough for what?
Frankly, I don't see towards which point are you driving. This is a fable about, basically, an exercise in game theory. You don't like the story? You think it misleads? If you were king you would have behaved differently?
I pointed out, I thought clearly, my problems in my original comment: this is not isomorphic to existential risk (as the author clearly intended it to be) and solves an easier problem badly.
Maybe you should read it as a fable and not as a blueprint for dealing with the UFAI problem.
Why? As a fable it is boring and irrelevant, and clearly OP did not intend it to be taken the way you suggest taking it.
Gwern, I happen to agree with most of what you've said, if this were written in regards to x-risks. It is in fact irrelevant to UFAI, but was mostly an exercise in a) practicing writing, and b) working through some intuitions in regards to betting/prediction markets. I wrote it for LW because I assumed it would be enjoyed, but not really learned from (hence Discussion, not Main). A re-write would explore more thoroughly and explicitly the difference between Orin being correct, a spy, or mistaken, and how his bet changes those probabilities.
I suppose it makes an ok-ish example of "people take their money more seriously than their beliefs, and betting helps fix that" Which I think is am important lesson in general.