This is an important disagreement on terminology, and may be a good reason to avoid “cooperate” and “defect” as technical words. They have a much broader meaning than used here.
Whether “defect” is about reducing sum of payouts of the considered participants, or about violating agreements (even with better outcomes), or about some other behavior, use of the word without specification is going to be ambiguous.
The actual post is about payouts. Please keep in mind that these are _not_ resources, but utility. The pain of violating expectations and difficulty in future cooperation is already included (or should be) in those payout numbers.
This can turn into a very long discussion. I’m okay with that, but let me know if you’re not so I can probe only the points that are likely to resolve. I’ll raise the contentious points regardless, but I don’t want to draw focus on them if there’s little motivation to discuss them in depth.
I agree that a split in terminology is warranted, and that “defect” and “cooperate” are poor choices. How about this:
Coalition members may form consensus on the coalition strategy. Members of a coalition may follow the consensus coalition strategy or violate the consensus coalition strategy.
Members of a coalition may benefit the coalition or hurt the coalition.
Benefiting the coalition means raising its payoff regardless of consensus. Hurting the coalition means reducing its payoff regardless of consensus. A coalition may form consensus on the coalition strategy regardless of the optimality of that strategy.
Contentious points:
I expect that treating utility so generally will lead to paradoxes, particularly when utility functions are defined in terms of other utility functions. I think this is an extremely important case, particularly when strategies take trust into account. As a result, I expect that such a general notion of utility will lead to paradoxes when using it to reason about trust.
“Utility is not a resource.” I think this is a useful distinction when trying to clarify goals, but not a useful distinction when trying to make decisions given a set of goals. In particular, once the payoff tables are defined for a game, the goals must already have been defined, and so utility can be treated as a resource in that game.
I’m not sure a long discussion with me is helpful—I mostly wanted to point out that there’s a danger of being misunderstood and talking past each other, and “use more words” is often a better approach than “argue about the words”.
I am especially the wrong person to argue about fundamental utility-aggregation problems. I don’t think ANYONE has a workable theory about how Utilitarianism really works without an appeal to moral realism that I don’t think is justified.
Understood. I do think it’s significant though (and worth pointing out) that a much simpler definition yields all of the same interesting consequences. I didn’t intend to just disagree for the sake of getting clearer terminology. I wanted to point out that there seems to be a simpler path to the same answers, and that simpler path provides a new concept that seems to be quite useful.
This is an important disagreement on terminology, and may be a good reason to avoid “cooperate” and “defect” as technical words. They have a much broader meaning than used here.
Whether “defect” is about reducing sum of payouts of the considered participants, or about violating agreements (even with better outcomes), or about some other behavior, use of the word without specification is going to be ambiguous.
The actual post is about payouts. Please keep in mind that these are _not_ resources, but utility. The pain of violating expectations and difficulty in future cooperation is already included (or should be) in those payout numbers.
This can turn into a very long discussion. I’m okay with that, but let me know if you’re not so I can probe only the points that are likely to resolve. I’ll raise the contentious points regardless, but I don’t want to draw focus on them if there’s little motivation to discuss them in depth.
I agree that a split in terminology is warranted, and that “defect” and “cooperate” are poor choices. How about this:
Coalition members may form consensus on the coalition strategy. Members of a coalition may follow the consensus coalition strategy or violate the consensus coalition strategy.
Members of a coalition may benefit the coalition or hurt the coalition.
Benefiting the coalition means raising its payoff regardless of consensus. Hurting the coalition means reducing its payoff regardless of consensus. A coalition may form consensus on the coalition strategy regardless of the optimality of that strategy.
Contentious points:
I expect that treating utility so generally will lead to paradoxes, particularly when utility functions are defined in terms of other utility functions. I think this is an extremely important case, particularly when strategies take trust into account. As a result, I expect that such a general notion of utility will lead to paradoxes when using it to reason about trust.
“Utility is not a resource.” I think this is a useful distinction when trying to clarify goals, but not a useful distinction when trying to make decisions given a set of goals. In particular, once the payoff tables are defined for a game, the goals must already have been defined, and so utility can be treated as a resource in that game.
I’m not sure a long discussion with me is helpful—I mostly wanted to point out that there’s a danger of being misunderstood and talking past each other, and “use more words” is often a better approach than “argue about the words”.
I am especially the wrong person to argue about fundamental utility-aggregation problems. I don’t think ANYONE has a workable theory about how Utilitarianism really works without an appeal to moral realism that I don’t think is justified.
Understood. I do think it’s significant though (and worth pointing out) that a much simpler definition yields all of the same interesting consequences. I didn’t intend to just disagree for the sake of getting clearer terminology. I wanted to point out that there seems to be a simpler path to the same answers, and that simpler path provides a new concept that seems to be quite useful.