As I understand it an actor can prevent blackmail[1] by (rational) actors it they credibly pre-commit to never give in to blackmail.
Example: A newly elected mayor has many dark secrets and lots of people are already planning on blackmailing them. To preempt any such blackmail they livestreams themself being hypnotized and implanted with the suggestion to never give into blackmail. Since in this world hypnotic suggestions are unbreakable, all (rational) would-be blackmailers give up, since any attempt at blackmail would be guaranteed to fail.
In general pre-commiting in such examples is about reducing the payoff matrix to just [blackmail, refuse] and [don’t blackmail, refuse], which makes not blackmailing the optimal choice for the would-be blackmailer.
Of course, sufficiently intelligent / coherent actors wouldn’t need a external commitment mechanism and a sufficiently intelligent and informed opposition would be able to infer the existence of such a pre-commitment. More so, I believe to have heard that if a sufficiently intelligent / coherent actors notices that it would be better of if it had pre-commited, it can just act as if it had (post-commit?).
However, what if the would-be blackmailer also tries to limit the possible outcomes?
Example: The anti-blackmail hypnosis is so successful that soon every newly elected mayor does it. A new candidate is likely to win the next election. They know that the local crime boss has a lot of dirt on them, but they aren’t worried about blackmail, as they will just do the anti-blackmail hypnosis on their first day in office. On the evening of the election they are send a video of the crime boss being hypnotized into blackmailing the new mayor even if they have been anti-blackmail hypnotized.
This cuts down the payoff matrix to [blackmail, refuse] and [blackmail, give in]. Giving in to the blackmail is optimal for the new mayor and doing the anti-blackmail hypnosis just locks them into [blackmail, refuse].
So how does this work out between sufficiently intelligent / coherent actors? Does the first one to (credibly and transparently) pre-commit win?
And what if actors are able to post-commit (if that even is a thing and I didn’t misunderstand the concept)? A actor could act as if they had pre-commited to ignore the oppositions pre-commitment (to ignore pre-commitments to never give into blackmail), but then the opposition could act as if they had pre-commited to ignore that pre-commitment?
(This comment thread seems to discuss the same question but did not resolve it for me.)
- ^
By blackmail I mean a scenario where the would-be blackmailers choices are blackmail or don’t blackmail and the targets choices give in or refuse with a payoff matrix like this:
give in refuse blackmail target: −10
blackmailer: 20target: −100
blackmailer: −1don’t blackmail target: 0
blackmailer: 0target: 0
blackmailer: 0
This reminds me nested time machines discussed by gwern. https://gwern.net/review/timecrimes
Precomitments plays the role of time loops and they can propagate almost infinitely in time and space. For example, any one who is going to become a major, can pre-pre-pre-commit never open any video for mafia boss etc.
I’ve thought about this before too, and I no longer feel confused about it. It helps to reduce this into a decision problem. The decision problem could ‘be about’ programs deciding anything, in principle; it doesn’t need to be ‘agents deciding whether to blackmail’.
I’ll show decision structures symmetric to your examples, then give some more examples that might help.
Mayor
Program M
Crime boss blackmails mayor
C outputs 1
Mayor gives in to blackmail
M outputs 1
Your first example: M is a more advanced conditioner
C runs:
if [M outputs 1 if C outputs 1], output 1; else, output 0M runs:
if C runs "If [M outputs 1 if C outputs 1], output 1; else, output 0", output 0; else, <doesn't occur, unspecified>Outcome: Both output
0Your second example
C runs:
output 1[1]M runs:
<unspecified>Outcome: unspecified
When put like this, it seems clear to me that there’s no paradox here.
Below are examples not from the post. The last one where both try to condition is most interesting.
3. C is commit-rock[2], M is conditioner
C runs:
output 1M runs:
if C runs "If [M outputs 1 if C outputs 1], output 1; else, output 0", output 0; else, output 1Outcome: both output
14. Both are commit-rocks
C runs:
output 1M runs:
output 0Outcome: C outputs
1, M outputs05. Both condition
C runs:
run M. if M outputs 1 when C outputs 1, output 1; else, output 0M runs:
run C. if C outputs 0 when M outputs 0, output 0; else, output 1Outcome: The programs run the other recursively and never halt, as coded.
Again, there is no paradox here.
To directly answer the question in the title, I think a commitment “to not give into blackmail” and a commitment “to blackmail” are logically symmetric, because what a decision problem is about (what the
0s and1s correspond to in real life) is arbitrary. (Also, separately, there is no “commitment” primitive)I know in your second example you want the Crime boss’s decision to be conditional on the Mayor in some way, but it’s not specified how, so I’m going to just leave it like this with this footnote.
In some posts about decision dilemmas, the example is used of “a rock with the word defect written on it” to make it clear that the decision to defect was not conditional on the other player.
Thanks, that’s a interesting way to think about pre-commitments.
However, I’m not sure if I understand what your conclusion is. Do you believe that actors can not protect themself from blackmail with pre-commitments?
I don’t believe that. If I could prove that, I could also prove the opposite (i.e. replace ‘cannot’ with ‘can always’), because what a decision problem is about is arbitrary. The arbitrariness means any abstract solution has to be symmetric. In example 1, an actor protects themself from blackmail. We can also imagine an inverted example 1, where the more sophisticated conditioner instead represents the blackmailer.
I think that what happens when both agents are advanced enough to fully understand this kind of problem is most similar to example 5. But in reality, they wouldn’t recursively simulate each other forever, because they’d think that would be a waste of resources. They’d have to make some choice eventually. They’d recognize that there is no asymmetric solution to the abstract problem, before making that choice. I don’t know what their choice would be.
I can give a guess, with much less confidence than what I wrote about the logic. Given they’re both maximally advanced, they’d know they’ll perform similar reasoning; it’s similar to the prisoners-dillema-with-clone situation. They could converge to a compromise policy-about-blackmail-in-general for their values in their universe, if there are any such compromises available for their values in their universe. I’m finding it hard to predict what such a ‘compromise’ could be when they’re not on relatively equal footing, though, e.g. when one can blackmail the other, and the other can’t do it back. When they are on equal footing, e.g. have equal incentive to blackmail each other, maybe they would do this: “give each other the things the other wants, in cases where this increases our average value” (which is like normal acausal trade).
After thinking about it more (38 minutes more, compared to when I first posted this comment. I’ve been heavily editing/expanding it), it does feel like a game of ‘mutually’ choosing where-they-end-up-in-the-logical-space, and not one of ‘committing’. Of course, to the extent the decisions are symmetric, they could choose to lock in “I commit to not give in to blackmail, you commit to make and follow through on blackmail”; they just both wouldn’t want that.
I don’t quite know what else there is to do in that situation other than “symmetrically converge to the mid-point”. Even though I dislike where that leads in “unequal” cases like I described two paragraphs up (<the better-situated superintelligence makes half the blackmail, and the worse-situated superintelligence gives in every time>). Logic doesn’t care what I dislike. If this is true, I’ll just have to hope the side of good wins situationally and can prevent this from manifesting in cases it cares about.
Disclaimer: the above is about two superintelligences in isolation, not humans.