This is mostly wishful thinking.
You're throwing away your advantages as an author to bargain with fictionally smart entities. You can totally void the deal with Olivia and she can do nothing about it because she's as dumb as you write her to be.
Likewise, the author writing about space warring aliens writing about giant cube-having humans could just consider the aliens that have space wars without consideration for humans at all; you haven't given enough detail for the aliens' modelization of the humans be precise enough that their behavior must depend on it.
Basically, you're creating characters that are to you as you are to a superintelligence, but dumb yourself down to their level for the fun of trading acausally. This is not acausal trading, because you are not actually on their level and their decisions do not in fact depend on reliably predicting you'll cooperate in the trade.
This is just fiction.
This doesn't seem any different than acausal trade in general. I can simply "predict" that the other party will do awesome things with no character motivation. If that's good enough for you, than you do not need to acausally trade to begin with.
I plan on having a less contrived example in Acausal Now II: beings in our universe but past the cosmological horizon. This should make it clear that the technique generalizes past fiction and is what is typically thought of as acausal trade.
I mean, as an author you can hack through them like butter; it is highly unlikely that out of all the characters you can write, the only ones that are interesting will all generate interesting content iff (they predict) you'll give them value (and this prediction is accurate).
I strongly suspect the actual reason you'll spend half of your post's value on buying ads for Olivia (if in fact you do that, which is doubtful as well) is not that (begin proposition) she would only accept this trade if you did that because
- she can predict your actions (as in, you wrote her as being unable to act in another manner than being able to predict your actions)
- she predicts you'll do that (in exchange for providing you with a fun story)
(end proposition).
I suspect that your actual reason is more like staying true to your promise, making a point, having fun and other such things.
I can imagine acausally trading with humans gone beyond the cosmological horizon, because our shared heritage would make a lot of the critical flaws in the post go away.
I mean, as an author you can hack through them like butter; it is highly unlikely that out of all the characters you can write, the only ones that are interesting will all generate interesting content iff (they predict) you'll give them value (and this prediction is accurate).
Yeah, I think it's mostly of educational value. At the top of the post: "It might be interesting to try them out for practice/research purposes, even if there is not much to gain directly from aliens.".
I suspect that your actual reason is more like staying true to your promise, making a point, having fun and other such things.
In principle "staying true to your promise" is the enforcement mechanism. Or rather, the ability for agents to predict each other's honesty. This is how the financial system IRL is able to retrofund businesses.
But in this case I made the transaction mostly because it was funny.
(if in fact you do that, which is doubtful as well)
I mean, I kind of have to now right XD. Even if Olivia isn't actually agent, I basically declared a promise to do so! I doubt I'll receive any retrofunding anyways, but that would just be lame if I did receive that and then immediately undermined the point of the post being retrofunded. And yes, I prefer to keep my promises even with no counterparty.
Olivia: Indeed, that is one of the common characteristics of Christopher King across all of LAIE's stories. It's an essential component of the LAIELOCK™ system, which is how you can rest easy at night knowing your acausal investments are safe and sound!
But if you'd like to test it I can give you a PayPal address XD.
I can imagine acausally trading with humans gone beyond the cosmological horizon, because our shared heritage would make a lot of the critical flaws in the post go away.
Note that this is still very tricky, the mechanisms in this post probably won't suffice. Acausal Now II will have other mechanisms that cover this case (although the S.E.C. still reduces their potential efficiency quite a bit). (Also, do you have a specific trade in mind? It would make a great example for the post!)
tl;dr. Weird forms of cooperation become humanly possible with the correct mechanisms. It might be interesting to try them out for practice/research purposes, even if there is not much to gain directly from aliens.
Note: the only part that is fiction is the quoted parts of The story of the acausal market section
In Decision theory does not imply that we get to have nice things we learn that humans probably can't acausally bargain with super-intelligences. I'll argue in this post, however, that humans could acausally bargain with aliens at a similar level to us. The problem is not that acausal bargaining requires super-intelligence, its that super-intelligences do not cooperate with humans at all (causally or acausally).
This post will discuss mechanisms for causal value handshakes, retrocausal bargains with aliens in our reality, and then finally a fully general mechanism for acausual bargains. Even though the acausal bargain mechanism is the main point of this post, they are easiest to grasp if read in order. (Retrocausal bargains are interesting in their own right though.)
Although I haven't thought about it too hard, I'm guessing aliens don't have much to acausally offer us. However, doing small trades might be interesting just to see what it teaches us about cooperation. Acausal bargaining is "cooperation-complete" so to speak. It might also be really nerdy and cool™ but also perhaps an extravagant use of weirdness points (which are overrated anyways).
Causal value handshakes
Imagine we meet aliens that are at our current tech level. A value handshake is actually the default outcome! That's because a currently existing mechanism, the economy, like's to merge with other versions of itself.
In particular, we are likely to begin trading with the aliens and our money will become valuable to each other. Than human charities can hire aliens and contract alien organizations and vice-versa.
For example, if the aliens value giant cubes, aliens can pay human construction companies to build them. Humans can use the alien money earned this way to pay aliens for mosquito nets.
In interest of diversification, humans and aliens will invest in a mix of human and alien companies. This results in value lock-in; it doesn't matter whether human or alien companies are more successful, since they both have the same investors. All that matters is the relative value during the "handshake". So the human and alien values are completely replaced by a linear combination between them.
And thus we see our first instance of prediction; the weight placed on human values v.s. alien values is based on the predicted resources that their companies will gather.
If the humans and aliens are risk-neutral or even risk-seeking, it might make sense for them to start with a giant donation lottery for all of their capital, so that they can take better advantage of economies of scale. However, I expect that this would result in the losing side defecting (i.e. they would illegally repossess all their capital from the winning side). And humans are pretty risk-averse anyways, so unless the aliens are risk-seeking (and thus willing to take poor odds) it probably won't happen.
Although not strictly necessary for this mechanism, it will be helpful to imagine that the humans and aliens buy certificates of impact instead of donating to charities in the normal way. This will make the retrocausal bargain and acausal bargain mechanisms easier to understand. (Ignore for now the SEC and the alien SEC; we will get to that later.)
Retrocausual bargains
This is where it gets interesting.
Say that we anticipate to meet aliens in the future, but we have no way to communicate with them yet. However, humans have a functional impact certificate market, and we anticipate the aliens will as well.
Humans in the present can build giant cubes and create certificates of impact. These impact certificates will then trade in the market. The value of these certificates will be based on how much we predict aliens will pay for it (after proper time discounting which the aliens have hopefully taken into account). Note that if aliens don't exist or they don't like giant cubes, the value will ultimately be $0, which will be taken into account by the expected value calculation.
Note that even people who think aliens are unlikely can still profit from the market. For example, imagine that Quanta just put out its rocks are cubes articles a minute ago. You might anticipate that humans who are alien enthusiasts will interpret this as a buy signal for the giant cube impact certificates. So you will buy it now and then sell it after the prices goes up. Thus our teleology is based on the same principle as stock markets and prediction markets.
Note that there is a risk that the aliens just don't buy the impact certificates because they think they are silly. Thus, humanity is in a similar position to Omega in Newcomb's Problem. This is vaguely similar to the process of calculating a credit score. If we encounter many aliens, only one needs to buy the impact certificates though. For example, AI safety impact certs would likely be valuable in a wide variety of alien civilizations since Earth spawning a rogue AI could range anywhere from very annoying to omnicidal. Some aliens might also appreciate the preservation of Earth historical sites and art, reduction of suffering, etc...
There is also a possibility of using prediction markets to hedge. You bet that aliens won't like giant cubes, such that the payoff is enough to cover your expenses when building them. As long as the profit from the impact certificate is greater than the cost of making the bet, it's a win-win! If it's not, then the giant cubes aren't worth it.
Going in the other direction, if aliens anticipate that humans will buy impact certificates, their investors can try collecting them now to sell to us once we make contact. If both humans and aliens do this, there's an interesting future where the net amount of money exchanged is small. It is mostly a moral trade. In general, the combined value of the universes impact certificates is a kind of universe-wide value system.
An important thing to note is that this just relies on a normal impact certificate market; it does not need to "acknowledge" aliens. Impact certificates can be made for anything, and thus the "giant cubes" impact certificate is valid on its own.
But what about the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (and potentially the Alien Securities and Exchange Commission if it exists)?
Note that I am not a lawyer and this section is very speculative. (Well, this entire post is pretty speculative.)
There is a risk that the SEC will shutdown your impact certificate market if it uses real money. However, I think that it could follow the structure of Manifold Markets and use a "play" currency instead. In particular, it should be impossible to trade the impact certs in for goods or services. You can still do moral trade, however. If investors planned on donating the money anyways, you could set up a way to allow them to convert the play currency into real charitable donations.
Sadly though, at this small scale people would probably just be trading impact certs for LessWrong posts and tweets instead of large charitable interventions.[1] Better than nothing though.
Acausal bargains
Let's say some group has a weird utility function that depends on another reality. That's right, we are talking about a fandom.
Usually super-intelligences are portrayed as simulating other realities when doing acausal bargains. Rigorous mathematical simulations of other universes is not an option for humans, but fiction writing is viable substitute.
For example, imagine a story about aliens who, in their fictional universe, have a story about our Earth. In particular, it is accurate in the sense that the story's depiction of the Earth story is a completely accurate history of the Earth. Let's say the alien's fandom for Earth would like the Earth (fictional from their point of view) to have giant cubes. And Earth's fandom for the aliens wants the fictional aliens to have a cool space battle (as sport, not actual war). However, they want it to be in character for the aliens (they need to have an actual motivation).
The fandom on Earth can take a giant cube impact cert and tell the author "we will trade this giant cube impact cert for a cool space battle impact cert". This appears in the Earth story in the alien story. The alien fandom then has a cool space battle and say "we accept". Both the Earth author and the alien author keep track of a ledger, and write down that the giant cube impact certificate is now "locked in" the alien story and the cool space battle impact certificate is "locked in" the Earth story.
In theory, this ledger doesn't need to only contain impact certificates. The ledger could also contain money or capital, leading to an acausal stock market. Impact certificates are the only way for value earned on one side to actually be "consumed" on the other (otherwise, your acausal stocks only give you fiction money, which no human wants unless impact certs are in play).
Note that the markets, again, do not need to explicitly "acknowledge" the acausal bargains. From a normal point of view, the aliens do not exist, the human author has traded a "write a story about a cool space battle" impact cert they produced for a "giant cubes" impact cert. The human author is the "custodian" of everything on the ledger. From the perspective of the fandoms though, the human author is just an intermediary. If the aliens later sell back the "giant cubes" impact cert to a human, the market will view this as the human author selling it for money, but the fandom will view this as the alien in the story selling it for Earth money, which is recorded on the human author's ledger.
The story of the acausal market
Of course, such recursively nesting stories are rare (usually only done intentionally). To make it easier to find them, you could write the story of an "acausal market" that helps these stories meet. The acausal market has every story in existence, and so can act as intermediary for any realities which write about it. (I think this much more elegant than the "possible girls" approach proposed by Neil Sinhababu. Whether the acausal market does acausal speed dating as a side-gig is left an exercise for the reader.)
Allow me to start weaving in one such story.
The sales agent is how you get "connected" to stories that want to trade with you. Such agents tend to have interesting personalities and tend to make novel remarks to give the story a "hook" to get more commission and...
That last part is key. The fact that the acausal market filters out stories with incorrect copies of itself is what allows consistent trades. This selection bias essentially makes the consistency a "coincidence".
The sales agent has started offering trades. As an example, I will turn down those trades, but will ask how much I could get for the impact certificate of this very post. Olivia, how much for Acausal Now: We could totally acausally bargain with aliens at our current tech level if desired?
Offer accepted. I now record that Olivia has 50% of this post's impact certificate, and I own a 50% stake in her commissions.
I think that's enough from Olivia for now.[2]
As an experiment in collaborative fiction, feel free to include the LAIE and Olivia in your stories. The only rules are that:
Keep in mind that the acausal trade I made with Olivia does have "real world" consequences for me. In accordance with the rules for how impact certs work, if someone starts retrofunding LessWrong posts with real money, I can only spend half of it "on myself". The other half must be spent on whatever Olivia would want to do to influence our reality (probably on advertising). Or if LessWrong posts start trading on an impact cert market, I can only decide to sell/barter 50% of it, the other 50% being decided by Olivia.
So there is a good chance I have, in our reality, been acausally scammed!
Conclusion
In essence, the similar mechanisms to those underlying capitalism would allow humans to retrocausally and acausally bargain with aliens at a similar tech level as us. This would be an interesting experiment in coordination mechanisms, since it can be used to implement many other coordination mechanisms.
Allowing users to trade LessWrong impact certificates between each other has been a feature request at the back of my mind for a while. It may even be able to serve as an alternative to karma. (If anyone wants to steal this suggestion, feel free!) ↩︎