If you haven’t already been built to believe that lying is bad, there’s nothing to object to: the agency is just doing straightforwardly correct consequentialist optimization of the information channel between states of the world, and actions.
Except that by doing it, the agency blows its credibility and loses some of its influence over whatever happens when it sends the next signal.
It’s a dumb strategy even in the context of a single pandemic, let alone a world where you will have to deal with other pandemics, with later political negotiations outside of pandemics, and whatever else. It only looks good in an artificially constrained model.
… and that’s where the whole concept of “lying” comes in. “Lying” is what you do when you try to send signals that cause others to act in ways that favor your interests over their own, and thereby induce them to invoke their own power of “withholding actions” in future rounds. And it’s frowned upon because, in the long-term, open-ended, indefinitely-iterated, unpredictable, non-toy-model “game” of the real world, it tends to reduce both total utility and individual utility in the long run. To the point where it becomes valuable to punish it.
Except that by doing it, the agency blows its credibility and loses some of its influence over whatever happens when it sends the next signal.
It’s a dumb strategy even in the context of a single pandemic, let alone a world where you will have to deal with other pandemics, with later political negotiations outside of pandemics, and whatever else. It only looks good in an artificially constrained model.
… and that’s where the whole concept of “lying” comes in. “Lying” is what you do when you try to send signals that cause others to act in ways that favor your interests over their own, and thereby induce them to invoke their own power of “withholding actions” in future rounds. And it’s frowned upon because, in the long-term, open-ended, indefinitely-iterated, unpredictable, non-toy-model “game” of the real world, it tends to reduce both total utility and individual utility in the long run. To the point where it becomes valuable to punish it.