In order to get a better handle on the problem, I’d like to try walking through the mechanics of a how a vote by moral parliament might work. I don’t claim to be doing anything new here, I just want to describe the parliament in more detail to make sure I understand it, and so that it’s easier to reason about.
Here’s the setup I have in mind:
let’s suppose we’ve already allocated delegates to moral theories, and we’ve ended up with 100 members of parliament, MP_1 through MP_100
these MP’s will vote on 10 bills B_1 through B_10 that will each either pass or fail by majority vote
each MP M_m has a utility score for each bill B_b passing U_m,b (and assigns zero utility to the bill failing, so if they’d rather the bill fail, U_m,b is negative)
the votes will take place on each bill in order from B_1 to B_10, and this order is known to all MP’s
all MP’s know each other’s utility scores
Each MP wants to maximize the utility of the results according to their own scores, and they can engage in negotiation before the voting starts to accomplish this.
Does this seem to others like a reasonable description of how the parliamentary vote might work? Any suggestions for improvements to the description?
If others agree that this description is unobjectionable, I’d like to move on to discussing negotiating strategies the MP’s might use, the properties these strategies might have, and whether there are restrictions that might be useful to place on negotiating strategies. But I’ll wait to see if others think I’m missing any important considerations first.
It seems like votes should be considered simultaneously to avoid complex alliances of the form: I will vote on B4 in the direction you like if you vote on B3 in the direction I like, but this is only possible in one direction WRT time. Having such an ordering and resulting negotiations means that some agents have an incentive to bargain for moving the location of a bill. It seems better to be able to make all such Bx vote for By vote trades. I’m not familiar enough with voting models to know the tradeoffs for a simultaneous system though.
A very quick thought about one type of possible negotiating strategies. A delegate might choose a subset of bills, choose another delegate to approach and offer a usual cake cutting game for two players, when the first delegate divides that subset into two “piles” and allows the second delegate to choose one of them. Then they each would decide how to vote on the bills from their respective “piles” and promise to vote in accordance to each other’s decisions.
However, it is not clear to me how these two choices (marked by asterisks) should work. Also, whether the second candidate should be allowed to reject the offer to play a cake cutting game.
edit: A potential flaw. Suppose we have a bill with two possible voting options A_1 and A_2 (e.g. “yes” and “no”) with no possibility to introduce a new intermediate option. If a option A is supported by a small enough minority (0.75), this minority would never be able to achieve A (even though they wouldn’t know that), and utility difference
U_m (A_1) - U_m (A_2)
for each m would not matter, only the sign of difference would.
A remark that seems sufficiently distinct to deserve its own comment. At this moment we are only thinking about delegates with “fixed personalities”. Should “personality” of a delegate be “recalculated[1]” after each new agreement/trade [2]? Changes would temporary, only within a context of a given set of bills, they would revert to their original “personalities” after the vote. Maybe this could give results that would be vaguely analogous to smoothing a function? This would allow us to have a kind of “persuasion”.
In the context of my comment above, this could enable taking into account utility differences and not just signs, assuming large differences in utility would usually require large changes (and therefore, usually more than one change) in “personality” to invert the sign of it. I admit that this is very handwavy.
[1] I do not know what interpolation algorithm should be used
[2] A second remark. Maybe delegates should trade changes in each other’s “personality” rather than votes themselves, i.e. instead of promising to vote on bills in accordance to some binding agreement, they would promise to perform a minimal possible non-ad-hoc change [3] to their personalities that would make them vote that way? However, this could create slippery slopes, similar to those mentioned here.
It seems to me that the less personal MPs are, and the fewer opportunities we allow for anthropomorphic persuasion between them (through appeals such as issue framing, pleading, signaling loyalty to a coalition, ingratiation, defamation, challenges to the MPs status, deceit (e.g. unreliable statements by MPs about their private info relevant to probable consequences of acts resulting from the passage of bills)), then all the more we will encapsulate away the hard problems of moral reasoning within the MPs.
Even persuasive mechanisms more amenable to formalization—like agreements between MPs to reallocate their computational resources, or like risk-sharing agreements between MPs based on their expectations that they might lose future influence in the parliament if the agent changes its assignment of probabilities to the MPs’ moral correctness based on its observation of decision consequences—even these sound to me, in the absence of reasons why they should appear in a theory of how to act given a distribution over self-contained moral theories, like complications that will impede crisp mathematical reasoning, introduced mainly for their similarity to the mechanisms that function in real human parliaments.
Or am I off base, and your scare quotes around “personality” mean that you’re talking about something else? Because what I’m picturing is basically someone building cognitive machinery for emotions, concepts, habits and styles of thinking, et cetera, on top of moral theories.
Well, I agree that I chose words badly and then didn’t explain the intended meaning, continued to speak in metaphors (my writing skills are seriously lacking). What I called “personality” of a delegate was a function that assigns a utility score for any given state of the world (at the beginning they are determined by moral theories). In my first post I thought about these utility function as constants and stayed that way throughout negotiation process (it was my impression that ESRogs 3rd assumption implicitly says basically the same thing), maybe accepting some binding agreements if they help to increase the expected utility (these agreements are not treated as a part of utility function, they are ad-hoc).
On the other hand, what if we drop the assumption that these utility functions stay constant? What if, e.g. when two delegates meet, instead of exchanging binding agreements to vote in a specific way, they would exchange agreements to self-modify in a specific way that would correspond to those agreements? I.e. suppose a delegate M_1 strongly prefers option O_1,1 to an option O_1,2 on an issue B_1 and slightly prefers O_2,1 to O_2,2 on an issue B_2, whereas a delegate M_2 strongly prefers option O_2,2 to an option O_2,1 on an issue B_2 and slightly prefers O_1,2 to O_1,1 on an issue B_1. Now, M_1 could agree to vote (O_1,1 ;O_2,2) in exchange for a promise that M_2 would vote the same way, and sign a binding agreement. On the other hand, M_1 could agree to self-modify to slightly prefer O_2,2 to O_2,1 in exchange for a promise that M_2 would self-modify to slightly prefer O_1,1 to O_1,2 (both want to self-modify as little as possible, however any modification that is not ad-hoc would probably affect utility function at more than one point (?). Self-modifying in this case is restricted (only utility function is modified), therefore maybe it wouldn’t require heavy machinery (I am not sure), besides, all utility functions ultimately belong to the same persons). These self-modifications are not binding agreements, delegates are allowed to further self-modify their “personalities”(i.e. utility functions) in another exchange.
Now, this idea vaguely reminds me a smoothing over the space of all possible utility functions. Metaphorically, this looks as if delegates were “persuaded” to change their “personalities”, their “opinions about things”(i.e. utility functions) by an “argument” (i.e. exchange).
I would guess these self-modifying delegates should be used as dummy variables during a finite negotiation process. After the vote, delegates would revert to their original utility functions.
Hmm. What I was intending to do there was capture the idea that a bill failing to pass is the default state, and I’m only interested in the difference between a bill passing and a bill failing. So the utility score of a bill passing is supposed to represent the difference between it getting passed vs nothing happening.
Does that make sense? Am I just using utility terminology in a confusing way?
Pinning the utility of a failed bill to 0 for all agents gets rid of some free parameters in the model, but it’s not clear to me that it’s the complete way to do so (you still have enough free parameters that you could do more).
What do we get from using the utility per bill framework?
We enforce that the combined desirability of a bill portfolio can only depend on the sum of the individual desirabilities of the bills.
We allow MPs to price gambles between bills.
It’s not clear to me that the second is going to be useful (do they have access to a source of randomness and binding commitments?), and it’s not clear to me that the first is a requirement we actually want to impose. Suppose B1 is something like “cows are people” and B2 is something like “we shouldn’t eat people.” A MP who is against eating humans but for eating cows will flip their opinion on B2 based on the (expected) outcome of B1.
So then it seems like we should assign values to portfolios (i.e. bitstrings of whether or not bills passed), and if we don’t need probabilistic interpretations then we should deal with ordinal rankings of those bitstrings that allow indifference, which would look like (01>11>10=00). A perhaps inaccessible way to talk about those rankings is sets of permutations of bitstrings (the previous ranking is <(01,11,10,00),(01,11,00,10)>).
That’s a good suggestion about the allowing the MP’s assign utilities to portfolios. I went with the per bill framework because I thought it was simpler, and was trying to find the simplest formalization I could that would capture the interesting parts of the parliamentary model.
But perhaps dependence of bills on each other (or in the real world of actions that one’s moral parliament might take on each other) might be a key feature?
It might be interesting to see if we can analyze both models.
In order to get a better handle on the problem, I’d like to try walking through the mechanics of a how a vote by moral parliament might work. I don’t claim to be doing anything new here, I just want to describe the parliament in more detail to make sure I understand it, and so that it’s easier to reason about.
Here’s the setup I have in mind:
let’s suppose we’ve already allocated delegates to moral theories, and we’ve ended up with 100 members of parliament, MP_1 through MP_100
these MP’s will vote on 10 bills B_1 through B_10 that will each either pass or fail by majority vote
each MP M_m has a utility score for each bill B_b passing U_m,b (and assigns zero utility to the bill failing, so if they’d rather the bill fail, U_m,b is negative)
the votes will take place on each bill in order from B_1 to B_10, and this order is known to all MP’s
all MP’s know each other’s utility scores
Each MP wants to maximize the utility of the results according to their own scores, and they can engage in negotiation before the voting starts to accomplish this.
Does this seem to others like a reasonable description of how the parliamentary vote might work? Any suggestions for improvements to the description?
If others agree that this description is unobjectionable, I’d like to move on to discussing negotiating strategies the MP’s might use, the properties these strategies might have, and whether there are restrictions that might be useful to place on negotiating strategies. But I’ll wait to see if others think I’m missing any important considerations first.
This looks reasonable to analyse (although I’d be interested in analysing other forms too).
I’d be tempted to start with a simpler example to get complete analysis. Perhaps 2 bills and 2 MPs. If that’s easy, move to 3 MPs.
It seems like votes should be considered simultaneously to avoid complex alliances of the form: I will vote on B4 in the direction you like if you vote on B3 in the direction I like, but this is only possible in one direction WRT time. Having such an ordering and resulting negotiations means that some agents have an incentive to bargain for moving the location of a bill. It seems better to be able to make all such Bx vote for By vote trades. I’m not familiar enough with voting models to know the tradeoffs for a simultaneous system though.
An alternative is to say that only one of the votes actually occurs, but which it is will be chosen randomly.
A very quick thought about one type of possible negotiating strategies. A delegate might choose a subset of bills, choose another delegate to approach and offer a usual cake cutting game for two players, when the first delegate divides that subset into two “piles” and allows the second delegate to choose one of them. Then they each would decide how to vote on the bills from their respective “piles” and promise to vote in accordance to each other’s decisions.
However, it is not clear to me how these two choices (marked by asterisks) should work. Also, whether the second candidate should be allowed to reject the offer to play a cake cutting game.
edit: A potential flaw. Suppose we have a bill with two possible voting options A_1 and A_2 (e.g. “yes” and “no”) with no possibility to introduce a new intermediate option. If a option A is supported by a small enough minority (0.75), this minority would never be able to achieve A (even though they wouldn’t know that), and utility difference U_m (A_1) - U_m (A_2) for each m would not matter, only the sign of difference would.
A remark that seems sufficiently distinct to deserve its own comment. At this moment we are only thinking about delegates with “fixed personalities”. Should “personality” of a delegate be “recalculated[1]” after each new agreement/trade [2]? Changes would temporary, only within a context of a given set of bills, they would revert to their original “personalities” after the vote. Maybe this could give results that would be vaguely analogous to smoothing a function? This would allow us to have a kind of “persuasion”.
In the context of my comment above, this could enable taking into account utility differences and not just signs, assuming large differences in utility would usually require large changes (and therefore, usually more than one change) in “personality” to invert the sign of it. I admit that this is very handwavy.
[1] I do not know what interpolation algorithm should be used
[2] A second remark. Maybe delegates should trade changes in each other’s “personality” rather than votes themselves, i.e. instead of promising to vote on bills in accordance to some binding agreement, they would promise to perform a minimal possible non-ad-hoc change [3] to their personalities that would make them vote that way? However, this could create slippery slopes, similar to those mentioned here.
[3] This is probably a hard problem
It seems to me that the less personal MPs are, and the fewer opportunities we allow for anthropomorphic persuasion between them (through appeals such as issue framing, pleading, signaling loyalty to a coalition, ingratiation, defamation, challenges to the MPs status, deceit (e.g. unreliable statements by MPs about their private info relevant to probable consequences of acts resulting from the passage of bills)), then all the more we will encapsulate away the hard problems of moral reasoning within the MPs.
Even persuasive mechanisms more amenable to formalization—like agreements between MPs to reallocate their computational resources, or like risk-sharing agreements between MPs based on their expectations that they might lose future influence in the parliament if the agent changes its assignment of probabilities to the MPs’ moral correctness based on its observation of decision consequences—even these sound to me, in the absence of reasons why they should appear in a theory of how to act given a distribution over self-contained moral theories, like complications that will impede crisp mathematical reasoning, introduced mainly for their similarity to the mechanisms that function in real human parliaments.
Or am I off base, and your scare quotes around “personality” mean that you’re talking about something else? Because what I’m picturing is basically someone building cognitive machinery for emotions, concepts, habits and styles of thinking, et cetera, on top of moral theories.
Well, I agree that I chose words badly and then didn’t explain the intended meaning, continued to speak in metaphors (my writing skills are seriously lacking). What I called “personality” of a delegate was a function that assigns a utility score for any given state of the world (at the beginning they are determined by moral theories). In my first post I thought about these utility function as constants and stayed that way throughout negotiation process (it was my impression that ESRogs 3rd assumption implicitly says basically the same thing), maybe accepting some binding agreements if they help to increase the expected utility (these agreements are not treated as a part of utility function, they are ad-hoc).
On the other hand, what if we drop the assumption that these utility functions stay constant? What if, e.g. when two delegates meet, instead of exchanging binding agreements to vote in a specific way, they would exchange agreements to self-modify in a specific way that would correspond to those agreements? I.e. suppose a delegate M_1 strongly prefers option O_1,1 to an option O_1,2 on an issue B_1 and slightly prefers O_2,1 to O_2,2 on an issue B_2, whereas a delegate M_2 strongly prefers option O_2,2 to an option O_2,1 on an issue B_2 and slightly prefers O_1,2 to O_1,1 on an issue B_1. Now, M_1 could agree to vote (O_1,1 ;O_2,2) in exchange for a promise that M_2 would vote the same way, and sign a binding agreement. On the other hand, M_1 could agree to self-modify to slightly prefer O_2,2 to O_2,1 in exchange for a promise that M_2 would self-modify to slightly prefer O_1,1 to O_1,2 (both want to self-modify as little as possible, however any modification that is not ad-hoc would probably affect utility function at more than one point (?). Self-modifying in this case is restricted (only utility function is modified), therefore maybe it wouldn’t require heavy machinery (I am not sure), besides, all utility functions ultimately belong to the same persons). These self-modifications are not binding agreements, delegates are allowed to further self-modify their “personalities”(i.e. utility functions) in another exchange.
Now, this idea vaguely reminds me a smoothing over the space of all possible utility functions. Metaphorically, this looks as if delegates were “persuaded” to change their “personalities”, their “opinions about things”(i.e. utility functions) by an “argument” (i.e. exchange).
I would guess these self-modifying delegates should be used as dummy variables during a finite negotiation process. After the vote, delegates would revert to their original utility functions.
Remember there’s no such thing as zero utility. You can assign an arbitrarily bad value to failing to resolve, but it seems a bit arbitrary.
Hmm. What I was intending to do there was capture the idea that a bill failing to pass is the default state, and I’m only interested in the difference between a bill passing and a bill failing. So the utility score of a bill passing is supposed to represent the difference between it getting passed vs nothing happening.
Does that make sense? Am I just using utility terminology in a confusing way?
Pinning the utility of a failed bill to 0 for all agents gets rid of some free parameters in the model, but it’s not clear to me that it’s the complete way to do so (you still have enough free parameters that you could do more).
What do we get from using the utility per bill framework?
We enforce that the combined desirability of a bill portfolio can only depend on the sum of the individual desirabilities of the bills.
We allow MPs to price gambles between bills.
It’s not clear to me that the second is going to be useful (do they have access to a source of randomness and binding commitments?), and it’s not clear to me that the first is a requirement we actually want to impose. Suppose B1 is something like “cows are people” and B2 is something like “we shouldn’t eat people.” A MP who is against eating humans but for eating cows will flip their opinion on B2 based on the (expected) outcome of B1.
So then it seems like we should assign values to portfolios (i.e. bitstrings of whether or not bills passed), and if we don’t need probabilistic interpretations then we should deal with ordinal rankings of those bitstrings that allow indifference, which would look like (01>11>10=00). A perhaps inaccessible way to talk about those rankings is sets of permutations of bitstrings (the previous ranking is <(01,11,10,00),(01,11,00,10)>).
That’s a good suggestion about the allowing the MP’s assign utilities to portfolios. I went with the per bill framework because I thought it was simpler, and was trying to find the simplest formalization I could that would capture the interesting parts of the parliamentary model.
But perhaps dependence of bills on each other (or in the real world of actions that one’s moral parliament might take on each other) might be a key feature?
It might be interesting to see if we can analyze both models.