nshepperd comments on Causal decision theory is unsatisfactory - Less Wrong

20 Post author: So8res 13 September 2014 05:05PM

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Comment author: nshepperd 16 September 2014 01:26:18AM 2 points [-]

This causes the actual instantiation to change its behavior if it's a UDT agent but not if it's a CDT agent.

Only if the adversary makes its decision to attempt extortion regardless of the probability of success. In the usual case, the winning move is to ignore extortion, thereby retroactively making extortion pointless and preventing it from happening in the first place. (Which is of course a strategy unavailable to CDT, who always gives in to one-shot extortion.)

Comment author: dankane 16 September 2014 02:11:07AM 1 point [-]

Only if the adversary makes its decision to attempt extortion regardless of the probability of success.

And thereby the extortioner's optimal strategy is to extort independently of the probably of success. Actually, this is probably true is a lot of real cases (say ransomware) where the extortioner cannot actually ascertain the probably of success ahead of time.

Comment author: pengvado 16 September 2014 05:00:22AM 2 points [-]

That strategy is optimal if and only if the probably of success was reasonably high after all. Otoh, if you put an unconditional extortioner in an environment mostly populated by decision theories that refuse extortion, then the extortioner will start a war and end up on the losing side.

Comment author: dankane 16 September 2014 05:22:03AM 1 point [-]

Yes. And likewise if you put an unconditional extortion-refuser in an environment populated by unconditional extortionists.