Thanks for commenting, Reeves! Yes, there are fair division mechanisms more complicated than the object-level 1/Nth for everyone (as I noted in the post), though among humans, I think, only people of good will can do complicated things without incurring large overhead costs from politics as people argue and try to push the division their way. And most of the participants may all believe they got less than they deserved, if the fair division involves many decision points where people can all overestimate how much they deserve and underestimate how much others deserve.
How much should the winners compensate the losers? A dollar more, a dollar less and soon people are pulling out the handaxes again.
So I do admit that 1/Nth has a certain charm for me as a human solution to the given pie-in-the-forest problem—though I would laugh at the idea that AIs capable of perfectly introspecting on complex non-noisy inferences, would have to do the same thing.
An interesting question is whether we can view more complicated mechanisms as the equivalent of “1/Nth of the meta-pie for everyone”, in the sense that the mechanism itself doesn’t favor any particular party’s interests over any other. (Obviously this is a more plausible assertion when the division mechanism has been worked out by outside game theorists, and adopted in advance of seeing the particular pie.) IMHO, one kind of fairness that’s very clearly inspired by “1/Nth of the meta-pie for everyone” is Rawl’s Veil of Ignorance.
Thanks for commenting, Reeves! Yes, there are fair division mechanisms more complicated than the object-level 1/Nth for everyone (as I noted in the post), though among humans, I think, only people of good will can do complicated things without incurring large overhead costs from politics as people argue and try to push the division their way. And most of the participants may all believe they got less than they deserved, if the fair division involves many decision points where people can all overestimate how much they deserve and underestimate how much others deserve.
How much should the winners compensate the losers? A dollar more, a dollar less and soon people are pulling out the handaxes again.
So I do admit that 1/Nth has a certain charm for me as a human solution to the given pie-in-the-forest problem—though I would laugh at the idea that AIs capable of perfectly introspecting on complex non-noisy inferences, would have to do the same thing.
An interesting question is whether we can view more complicated mechanisms as the equivalent of “1/Nth of the meta-pie for everyone”, in the sense that the mechanism itself doesn’t favor any particular party’s interests over any other. (Obviously this is a more plausible assertion when the division mechanism has been worked out by outside game theorists, and adopted in advance of seeing the particular pie.) IMHO, one kind of fairness that’s very clearly inspired by “1/Nth of the meta-pie for everyone” is Rawl’s Veil of Ignorance.