In both of them the ‘traditional’ academic position is that rational agents defects.
In PTPD (which is studied as a decision problem i.e it’s essentially single player—the only degree of freedom is your policy) defection is hotly contested both inside and outside of academia, and on LW the consensus is that you should co-operate.
But for ordinary prisoner’s dilemma (which is studied as a two player game—two degrees of freedom in policy space) I’m not sure anybody advocates a blanket policy of co-operating, even on LW. Certainly there’s an idea that two sufficiently clever agents might be able to work something out if they know a bit about each other, but the details aren’t as clearly worked out, and arguably a prisoner’s dilemma in which you use knowledge of your opponent to make your decision is better model as something other than a prisoner’s dilemma.
I think it’s a mistake to confuse LW’s emphatic rejection of CDT with an emphatic rejection of the standard game theoretic analysis of PD.
I think you’ve confused the psychological twin prisoner’s dillema (from decision theory) with the ordinary prisoner’s dilemma (from game theory).
In both of them the ‘traditional’ academic position is that rational agents defects.
In PTPD (which is studied as a decision problem i.e it’s essentially single player—the only degree of freedom is your policy) defection is hotly contested both inside and outside of academia, and on LW the consensus is that you should co-operate.
But for ordinary prisoner’s dilemma (which is studied as a two player game—two degrees of freedom in policy space) I’m not sure anybody advocates a blanket policy of co-operating, even on LW. Certainly there’s an idea that two sufficiently clever agents might be able to work something out if they know a bit about each other, but the details aren’t as clearly worked out, and arguably a prisoner’s dilemma in which you use knowledge of your opponent to make your decision is better model as something other than a prisoner’s dilemma.
I think it’s a mistake to confuse LW’s emphatic rejection of CDT with an emphatic rejection of the standard game theoretic analysis of PD.