(I seem to have a talent for writing stuff, then deleting it, and then getting interesting replies. Okay. Let it stay as a little inference exercise for onlookers! And please nobody think that my comment contained interesting secret stuff; it was just a dumb question to Eliezer that I deleted myself, because I figured out on my own what his answer would be.)
Thanks for verbalizing the problems with “blackmail”. I’ve been thinking about these issues in the exact same way, but made no progress and never cared enough to write it up.
Perhaps the reason you are having trouble coming up with a satisfactory characterization of blackmail is that you want a definition with the consequence that it is rational to resist blackmail and therefore not rational to engage in blackmail.
Pleasant though this might be, I fear the universe is not so accomodating.
Elsewhere VN asks how to unpack the notion of a status-quo, and tries to characterize blackmail as a threat which forces the recipient to accept less utility than she would have received in the status quo. I don’t see any reason in game theory why such threats should be treated any differently than other threats. But it is easy enough to define the ‘status-quo’.
The status quo is the solution to a modified game—modified in such a way that the time between moves increases toward infinity and the current significance of those future moves (be they retaliations or compensations) is discounted toward zero. A player who lives in the present and doesn’t respond to delayed gratification or delayed punishment is pretty much immune to threats (and to promises).
(I seem to have a talent for writing stuff, then deleting it, and then getting interesting replies. Okay. Let it stay as a little inference exercise for onlookers! And please nobody think that my comment contained interesting secret stuff; it was just a dumb question to Eliezer that I deleted myself, because I figured out on my own what his answer would be.)
Thanks for verbalizing the problems with “blackmail”. I’ve been thinking about these issues in the exact same way, but made no progress and never cared enough to write it up.
Perhaps the reason you are having trouble coming up with a satisfactory characterization of blackmail is that you want a definition with the consequence that it is rational to resist blackmail and therefore not rational to engage in blackmail.
Pleasant though this might be, I fear the universe is not so accomodating.
Elsewhere VN asks how to unpack the notion of a status-quo, and tries to characterize blackmail as a threat which forces the recipient to accept less utility than she would have received in the status quo. I don’t see any reason in game theory why such threats should be treated any differently than other threats. But it is easy enough to define the ‘status-quo’.
The status quo is the solution to a modified game—modified in such a way that the time between moves increases toward infinity and the current significance of those future moves (be they retaliations or compensations) is discounted toward zero. A player who lives in the present and doesn’t respond to delayed gratification or delayed punishment is pretty much immune to threats (and to promises).