This is exactly right! It’s a poor analogy for the Cold War both because the total payoff for defection was higher than the total payoff for cooperation, and because the reward was fungible. The cooperative solution is for one side to “nuke”, in order to maximize the total donation to both organizations, and then to use additional donations to even out the imbalance if necessary. That’s exactly what happened, and I’m glad the “nuking” framing didn’t prevent EAs from seeing what was really happening and going for the optimal solution.
I think the fungibility is a good point, but it seems like the randomizer solution is strictly better than this. Otherwise one side clearly gets less value, even if they are better off than they would have been had the game not happened. It’s still a mixed motive conflict!
This is exactly right! It’s a poor analogy for the Cold War both because the total payoff for defection was higher than the total payoff for cooperation, and because the reward was fungible. The cooperative solution is for one side to “nuke”, in order to maximize the total donation to both organizations, and then to use additional donations to even out the imbalance if necessary. That’s exactly what happened, and I’m glad the “nuking” framing didn’t prevent EAs from seeing what was really happening and going for the optimal solution.
I think the fungibility is a good point, but it seems like the randomizer solution is strictly better than this. Otherwise one side clearly gets less value, even if they are better off than they would have been had the game not happened. It’s still a mixed motive conflict!