Yeah, that’s similar to how Benya explained reflective oracles to me years ago. It made me very excited about the approach back then. But at some point I realized that to achieve anything better than mutual defection in the PD, the oracle needs to have a “will of its own”, pulling the players toward Pareto optimal outcomes. So I started seeing it as another top-down solution to game theory, and my excitement faded.
Maybe not much point in trying to sway my position now, because there are already people who believe in cooperative oracles and more power to them. But this also reminds me of a conversation I had with Patrick several months before the Modal Combat paper came out. Everyone was pretty excited about it then, but I kept saying it would lead to a zoo of solutions, not some unique best solution showing the way forward. Years later, that’s how it played out.
We don’t have any viable attack on game theory to date, and I can’t even imagine what it could look like. In the post I tried to do the next best thing and draw a line: these problems are amenable to decision theory and these aren’t. Maybe if I get it just right, one day it will show me an opening.
Yeah, I also put a significant probability on the “there’s going to be a zoo of solutions” model of game theory. I suppose I’ve recently been more optimistic than usual about non-zoo solutions.
Yeah, that’s similar to how Benya explained reflective oracles to me years ago. It made me very excited about the approach back then. But at some point I realized that to achieve anything better than mutual defection in the PD, the oracle needs to have a “will of its own”, pulling the players toward Pareto optimal outcomes. So I started seeing it as another top-down solution to game theory, and my excitement faded.
Maybe not much point in trying to sway my position now, because there are already people who believe in cooperative oracles and more power to them. But this also reminds me of a conversation I had with Patrick several months before the Modal Combat paper came out. Everyone was pretty excited about it then, but I kept saying it would lead to a zoo of solutions, not some unique best solution showing the way forward. Years later, that’s how it played out.
We don’t have any viable attack on game theory to date, and I can’t even imagine what it could look like. In the post I tried to do the next best thing and draw a line: these problems are amenable to decision theory and these aren’t. Maybe if I get it just right, one day it will show me an opening.
Yeah, I also put a significant probability on the “there’s going to be a zoo of solutions” model of game theory. I suppose I’ve recently been more optimistic than usual about non-zoo solutions.