There’s a specific problem with acausal trade that I want to point out. Acausal cooperation does make sense, from a certain point of view, but I think acausal trade is taking it a bit too far. Correct me if I’m wrong on anything here or misunderstood the post.
Take two parties and with reward functions and . If produces a bundle of goods and similarly for with (Where is the proportional production frontier simplex),
Here we are acausal, and for some reason care what happens outside our light cone, so each party passes the goods bundle produced by other parties through a value function .
Reward then becomes under acausal trade
where corresponds to no acausal trade ( controls and controls ) and is the goods bundle would produce if it was completely producing according to ’s values. I.e. for all good bundles produced by . Further similarly maximizes
Can you see the problem? For any we get suboptimial reward because the expected reward from other universes is constant.
Trade is temporal, its dynamic. It takes place only when there is a given future where reward may be different. But with acausal trade there is no future reward, just the background expectation of what other light cones are doing, and because of acausality there is nothing we can do to change this.
If we knew lowering would cause the expected value from the other light cones to rise trade would be feasible but by definition we don’t have that guarantee.
I think you can simulate a bunch of other universes, determine what values are held by people in other universes who are into acausal cooperation (roughly speaking), then cooperate with those values and expect that some people in other universes will cooperate with you perfectly corresponding to your cooperativeness propensity. Like in Newcomb’s problem, you get to choose the output of your decision procedure and that determines both what you do and what good predictors will predict you’ll do. Maybe I misunderstand your point; maybe we don’t disagree.
Ah okay. I think this reveals a larger disagreement actually.
You are assuming we already value acausal trade.
I’m saying we should look at the basic reward function as the dynamics of a microstate within a larger sociophysical system. My point is we can use game theory to layout the acausal landscape then use these dynamics to generate an estimate of if societies will converge to your assumption in the first place.
When I say ‘converge’ I don’t mean by opinion either. I’m not saying people are inherently selfish and only care about the reward functions within their light-cone. I mean societies at scale simply aren’t capable of acausal trade by the natural sociological natural selection.
Look inside the light cone at the social configuration space , i.e. the set of all possible socieities. Each socieity has aggregate reward across all its individuals. Let be the probability of a society existing. If we let the expected aggregate reward across socieites be fixed then the entropy maximizing probability distribution is Boltzmann-Gibbs.
So depending on the Lagrange multiplier you get that either societies with higher aggregate reward are more or less likely to exist. I argue that since societies which actively minimize their aggregate reward seems misanthropic at best.
So if we take my previous comment, lowering individual reward lowers the social aggregate reward, resulting in a rarer socieity. Societies that engage in complete acausal specialization will be very rare.
There’s a specific problem with acausal trade that I want to point out. Acausal cooperation does make sense, from a certain point of view, but I think acausal trade is taking it a bit too far. Correct me if I’m wrong on anything here or misunderstood the post.
Take two parties
Here we are acausal, and for some reason care what happens outside our light cone, so each party passes the goods bundle produced by other parties through a value function
Reward then becomes under acausal trade
where
Can you see the problem? For any
Trade is temporal, its dynamic. It takes place only when there is a given future where reward may be different. But with acausal trade there is no future reward, just the background expectation of what other light cones are doing, and because of acausality there is nothing we can do to change this.
If we knew lowering
I think you can simulate a bunch of other universes, determine what values are held by people in other universes who are into acausal cooperation (roughly speaking), then cooperate with those values and expect that some people in other universes will cooperate with you perfectly corresponding to your cooperativeness propensity. Like in Newcomb’s problem, you get to choose the output of your decision procedure and that determines both what you do and what good predictors will predict you’ll do. Maybe I misunderstand your point; maybe we don’t disagree.
Ah okay. I think this reveals a larger disagreement actually.
You are assuming we already value acausal trade.
I’m saying we should look at the basic reward function as the dynamics of a microstate within a larger sociophysical system. My point is we can use game theory to layout the acausal landscape then use these dynamics to generate an estimate of if societies will converge to your assumption in the first place.
When I say ‘converge’ I don’t mean by opinion either. I’m not saying people are inherently selfish and only care about the reward functions within their light-cone. I mean societies at scale simply aren’t capable of acausal trade by the natural sociological natural selection.
Look inside the light cone at the social configuration space
So depending on the Lagrange multiplier you get that either societies with higher aggregate reward are more or less likely to exist. I argue that
So if we take my previous comment, lowering individual reward lowers the social aggregate reward, resulting in a rarer socieity. Societies that engage in complete acausal specialization will be very rare.