Yeah, my impression as that the Unilateralist’s Curse as something bad mostly relies on the assumption that everyone is taking actions based on the common good. From the paper,
Suppose that each agent decides whether or not to undertake X on the basis of her own independent judgement of the value of X, where the value of X is assumed to be independent of who undertakes X, and is supposed to be determined by the contribution of X to the common good...
That is to say—if each agent is not deciding to undertake X on the basis of the common good, perhaps because of fundamental value differences or subconscious incentives, there is no longer an implication that the unilateral action will be chosen more often than it ought to be.
I believe that example of Galileo and the Pentagon Papers are both cases where the “common good” assumption fails. In the context of Galileo, it’s easy to justify this—I’m an anti-realist and the Church does not share my ethical stances so they differ in terms of the common good. In the context of the Pentagon papers, one has to grapple with the fact that most of the people choosing not to leak them were involved not-very-common-good-at-all actions that those papers revealed.
The stronger argument for the Unilateralist’s Curse for effective altruism in particular is that, for most of us, our similar perceptions of the common good are what attracted us in the first place (whereas, in many examples of the Unilateralist Curse, values are very inhomogenous). Also because cooperation is game-theoretically great, there’s a sort of institutional pressure for those involves in effective altruism to assume others are considering the common good in good-faith.
Yeah, my impression as that the Unilateralist’s Curse as something bad mostly relies on the assumption that everyone is taking actions based on the common good. From the paper,
That is to say—if each agent is not deciding to undertake X on the basis of the common good, perhaps because of fundamental value differences or subconscious incentives, there is no longer an implication that the unilateral action will be chosen more often than it ought to be.
I believe that example of Galileo and the Pentagon Papers are both cases where the “common good” assumption fails. In the context of Galileo, it’s easy to justify this—I’m an anti-realist and the Church does not share my ethical stances so they differ in terms of the common good. In the context of the Pentagon papers, one has to grapple with the fact that most of the people choosing not to leak them were involved not-very-common-good-at-all actions that those papers revealed.
The stronger argument for the Unilateralist’s Curse for effective altruism in particular is that, for most of us, our similar perceptions of the common good are what attracted us in the first place (whereas, in many examples of the Unilateralist Curse, values are very inhomogenous). Also because cooperation is game-theoretically great, there’s a sort of institutional pressure for those involves in effective altruism to assume others are considering the common good in good-faith.