Seems there’s a demon left a similar set-up in the church steeple down in Dwaynesville
This comment by Vladimir Nesov is relevant.
Yes. This second order issue where publicly (or predictably) pre-committing to "not negotiate with terrorists" doesn't come through in many discussions.
Translating the insight through to Hofstadter's parable of the tolling bell, the lack of any clear motive on the part of the postcard-demanding demon's becomes much more vivid. Why didn't Hofstadter give the demons a realistic motivation? Modeling the demon's as having an inscrutably weird appreciation for postcards, the apathy of the townsfolk (who largely refusing to capitulate and spend larg...
Possibly the main and original inspiration for Yudkowsky's various musings on what advanced game theories should do (eg. cooperate in the Prisoner's Dilemma) is a set of essays penned by Douglas Hofstadter (of Godel, Escher, Bach) 1983. Unfortunately, they were not online and only available as part of a dead-tree collection. This is unfortunate. Fortunately the collection is available through the usual pirates as a scan, and I took the liberty of transcribing by hand the relevant essays with images, correcting errors, annotating with links, etc: http://www.gwern.net/docs/1985-hofstadter
The 3 essays:
I hope you find them educational. I am not 100% confident of the math transcriptions since the original ebook messed some of them up; if you find any apparent mistakes or typos, please leave comments.