All of deo's Comments + Replies

deo20

Great post!

I think it's good to first expand a view on bureaucracy a bit -- while FDA may look as a prototypical bureaucracy, it's not the only example

As Matthew Barnett said, for-profit firms also create internal bureaucracies. In Soviet Union and other communist countries all command economy could be viewed as a single firm, and all economic management was done via in-firm internal bureaucracy. 

So I'd hypothesize that the thing bureaucracy (at any level or subunit) tries to maximize is "power", or to put it more concretely, ability to give orders. I... (read more)

deo30

Great post, lot of food for thought, thanks!

IIRC, in "Good and Real" Gary Drescher suggests to first consider a modified version of Newcomb's Problem, where both boxes are transparent. He then goes on to propose a solution in which agent precommits to one-box before being presented with the problem in a first place. This way, as I understand, causal diagram would first feature a node where agent chooses to precommit, and it both deterministically causes their later action to one-box, and Omega's action to put $1000000 in larger box. This initial node for c... (read more)

deo10

Yes, I'm wrong about this being prisoner's dilemma. One side defecting (dieing) against other cooperating (cryopreserving) won't make first side better off and second one worse off.

So it's just insufficient communication/coordination.

0wedrifid
We could also consider a game that was perhaps a step closer to the original. Leave cooperation and defection (and their PD laden connotations) behind and just consider a pair who would sincerely rather die than live on without the other. This is plausible even without trawling Shakespeare for fictional examples. Here on lesswrong I have seen the prospect of living on via cryopreservation without a friend joining them described as 'extrovert hell'. Then, as you say, a 'cremation' equilibrium would be the result of insufficient communication/coordination. A high time and or emotional cost to transitioning preferences would contribute to that kind of undesirable outcome. Incidentally, if we were to consider pair-cryo selection as an actual PD the most obvious scenario seems to be one in which both parties are overwhelmingly spiteful. Cryopreservation is the defect option. Where life is preferred but it is far more important to ensure that the other dies.
deo-40

Of course cryo people would love to take their loved ones with them, and are horrified when they ignore the chance.

If my loved ones signed up for cryonics, that would be reason enough for me.

What a horrendous case of prisoner's dilemma...

wedrifid140

What a horrendous case of prisoner's dilemma...

It is a horrendous case of a sub-optimal equilibrium in a coordination game. You know, one of the examples of game theory that isn't the @#%@ Prisoner's Dilemma.

7TobyBartels
Not really. If any of my loved ones were at all interested in cryonics, then we could discuss it and choose to sign up together. In the Prisoner's Dilemma, you don't know what your counterpart is doing.
deo00

Well, in 21 months we'll be able to have some partial track record:

http://wrongtomorrow.com/authors/bruce-bueno-de-mesquita

0Douglas_Knight
Those predictions are terribly vague. He produces an illusion of precise predictions about the timing of the power of various factions, as in graphs in his TED talk, but gives no explanation of what these numbers mean. It's not even clear who are the "moneyed interests." It's probably clear who are the different factions of mullahs, but how can we verify that one group has gained power? All this leaves of his prediction is that of the three choices of nothing nuclear, civilian power, and publicly endorsing weapons, he chooses the middle path, the status quo. (there's also the part about weapons grade uranium. I guess that's something.) Maybe always predicting the status quo gets you a better track record than most experts, but it's not a good enough track record to care. The fact that he does marketing, is not evidence against his prediction abilities, but it is important not to be distracted by the marketing.