I really liked the introduction—really well done. (shminux seems to agree!)
Some constructuve criticisms:
‘There are playing fields where you should cooperate with DefectBot, even though that looks completely insane from a naïve viewpoint. Optimality is a feature of the playing field, not a feature of the strategy.’ - I like your main point made with TrollBot, but this last sentence doesn’t seem like a good way of summing up the lesson. What the lesson seems to be in my eyes is: strategies’ being optimal or not is playing-field relative. So you could say that optimality is a relation holding between strategies and playing fields.
Later on you say ‘It helps to remember that “optimality” is as much a feature of the playing field as of the strategy.’ - but, my criticism above aside, this seems inconsistent with the last sentence of the previous quote (here you say optimality is equally a feature of two things, whereas before you said it was not a feature of the strategy)! Here you seem to be leaning more toward my proposed relational gloss.
Another suggestion. The Omega argument comes right after you say you’re going to show that we occupy a strange playing field right now. This tends to make the reader prepare to object ‘But that’s not very realistic!’. Maybe you like that sort of tension and release thing, but my vote would be to first make it clear what you’re doing there—i.e., not right away arguing about the real world, but taking a certain step toward that.
One final suggestion. You write ‘Knowing this, I have a compartment in which my willpower doesn’t deplete’, and something relevantly similar just earlier. Now this is obviously not literally what you mean—rather, it’s something like, you have a compartment housing the belief that your willpower doesn’t deplete. Obviously, you get a certain literary effect by putting it the way you do. Now, I realize reasonable people may think I’m just being overly pedantic here, but I suspect that’s wrong, and that in this sort of discussion, we should habitually help ourselves to such easily-had extra precision. Since things get confusing so quickly in this area, and we’re liable to slip up all over the place, apparently minor infelicities could make a real difference by sapping resources which are about to be taxed to the full.
I really liked the introduction—really well done. (shminux seems to agree!)
Some constructuve criticisms:
‘There are playing fields where you should cooperate with DefectBot, even though that looks completely insane from a naïve viewpoint. Optimality is a feature of the playing field, not a feature of the strategy.’ - I like your main point made with TrollBot, but this last sentence doesn’t seem like a good way of summing up the lesson. What the lesson seems to be in my eyes is: strategies’ being optimal or not is playing-field relative. So you could say that optimality is a relation holding between strategies and playing fields.
Later on you say ‘It helps to remember that “optimality” is as much a feature of the playing field as of the strategy.’ - but, my criticism above aside, this seems inconsistent with the last sentence of the previous quote (here you say optimality is equally a feature of two things, whereas before you said it was not a feature of the strategy)! Here you seem to be leaning more toward my proposed relational gloss.
Another suggestion. The Omega argument comes right after you say you’re going to show that we occupy a strange playing field right now. This tends to make the reader prepare to object ‘But that’s not very realistic!’. Maybe you like that sort of tension and release thing, but my vote would be to first make it clear what you’re doing there—i.e., not right away arguing about the real world, but taking a certain step toward that.
One final suggestion. You write ‘Knowing this, I have a compartment in which my willpower doesn’t deplete’, and something relevantly similar just earlier. Now this is obviously not literally what you mean—rather, it’s something like, you have a compartment housing the belief that your willpower doesn’t deplete. Obviously, you get a certain literary effect by putting it the way you do. Now, I realize reasonable people may think I’m just being overly pedantic here, but I suspect that’s wrong, and that in this sort of discussion, we should habitually help ourselves to such easily-had extra precision. Since things get confusing so quickly in this area, and we’re liable to slip up all over the place, apparently minor infelicities could make a real difference by sapping resources which are about to be taxed to the full.
Thanks, I’ve edited the post to incorporate these suggestions.