All of Oz Agar's Comments + Replies

I think there are two areas - qualitative improvements, and regulatory hurdles - that are interesting to think about in the context of this (excellent!) summary.  These are some fairly loose thoughts without any real conclusions.

First are qualitative improvements.  These may be difficult to define - is the smartphone a truly qualitative improvement?  Some cyborg theory says yes (provides audiovisual transfer, eases access to vast repositories of information, etc), but smartphones are certainly far less useful than the internet.

In the near fu... (read more)

I would recommend a revision (close to a re-write) of the second vow for four reasons:

First, negotiations theory has progressed past game theory solutions to a more psychologically based methodology.  This approach has been demonstrated to be more effective in two well tested and well studied environments: FBI hostage negotiations (I'd recommend starting with Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss as a light, entertaining but still useful introductory work), and intelligence community asset recruitment. You can look up the transition from the relati... (read more)

2Vanessa Kosoy
Hmm. Do you have a reference which is not, like, an entire book? Well, the process is important, but I feel like the discourse norms exemplified by this community already have us covered there, give or take. It's not dollar value, it's utilon value. I agree that quantification is challenging, but IMO it only reflects the complexity of the underlying reality that we have to deal with one way or the other. In principle, you can always quantify the utility function by asking enough questions of the form "do I prefer this lottery over outcomes to that lottery over outcomes". I think that all relationships are already accounting, people are just not always honest about it. Problems arise from people having different expectations / standards of fairness that they expect others to follow while never negotiating them explicitly. The latter is what we want to avoid here.