Distinguishing CDT from FDT/TDT in intuitive cases tends to be a lot harder than it looks. And I think it’s important to be extremely careful about what we categorize as CDT+being clever versus FDT/TDT. My impression is that this story more often frequently the former.
At first, the population was composed of a humble race of agents called the ceedeetee. When two of the ceedeetee met each other, each would name the number 5, and receive a payoff of 5, and all was well.
I’m not sure it’s obvious that all ceedeetee will meet five when they meet each other.
In an environment where there is zero information, this would be true (ie guessing >5 causes the gueesser to get outcompeted by those who will miss fewer payoffs and guessing less causes them to get outcompeted genetically by their partners in the game) but it’s clearly not true in this particular context. Instead, it seems more likely that ceedeetrees will on-net guess (and get) five based on whether their analysis of their partner tells them what they can get away with (ie A scares B so B only offers 4 and B offers 6, but B scares C so B offers 6 and C offers 4, but C scares A and so on...). I’d expect an equlibrium that’s suboptimal but has cyclical relationships between the participants.
Since output from the game determines evolutionary fitness, any ceedeetees who get some payoffs from other sources (ie this guy I just met seems nice but that other guy didn’t so I’m gonna give a 4 to this guy and a 6 to the other guy) won’t always output five.
These points are kind of pedantic but it’s importance to notice, if this happens, nine-bots get destroyed. They always guess way too high and the inherent noise in how a population of actual ceedeetee play the game will be hard to recover from.
Then one day, a simple race of 9-bots invaded the land. The 9-bots would always name the number 9!
Where exactly would we expect the 9-bots to come from? If they were all trapped on a ship together, they would’ve just continously lost the game until they died Again, this is kind of pedantic but, as you point out, the population distributions matter.
And from that day onward, whenever Funk-tunul met a fellow ceedeetee agent—if “fellow” is the right word here, which it isn’t—she would announce that she was going to name 9, and do so. And though the ceedeetee agents’ output channels would light up with the standard inidicators of outrage and betrayal, they would reason causally, and name 1.
A very key part of what Funk-tunul is doing here is telling the ceedeetee agents beforehand that she’ll say nine. Again, it strikes me that, if a ceeteedee noticed they could cause their partners to guess numbers lower than five, they definitely would do that. Funk-tunul isn’t winning because of a better decision theory here; she’s winning because she’s more clever. at manipulating other ceedeetee.
However, in real life, this implies that Funk-tunul would not be successful. A ceedeetee would’ve, in the past, tried to credibly show that they always say nine until the population equilibrates to having a defense mechanism against this particular action.
They reasoned: suppose the fraction of ceedeetee agents in the population is p, the fraction of funk-tunul agents is q, and the fraction of 9-bots is 1−p−q. If we establish a policy of submitting to the 9-bots’ extortion, we’ll have an average payoff of 9p+5q+1⋅(1−p−q)=8p+4q+1 and the 9-bots will have an average payoff of 9p+9q. If we defy the 9-bots while continuing to extort our ceedeetee cousins, we’ll have an average payoff of 9p+5q, whereas the 9-bots will have an average payoff of 9p. Whether it’s better to submit or defy depends on the values of p and q. It’s not obviously possible for defiance to be the right choice given what we know, but if we can coordinate to meet fellow funk-tunul agents more often—if we drop the assumption of uniform random encounters—the calculus changes …
This doesn’t strike me as acausal reasoning; just long-termist reasoning. Given the (presumably exponential) population dynamics, a ceedeetee could easily predict that letting the nine-bot get nine points would help that nine-bot reproduce more nine-bots. If ceedeetee’rs are in the game to maximize fitness as opposed to utility, they’ll definitely establish a norm against helping nine-bots to protect against the exponential cost that nine-bots will have for the future. If they’re in the game to maximize their points in the game, this isn’t true (they’ll just defect against the future) but funk-tunul’s reasoning suggests that this isn’t what’s going on.
It’s not obviously possible for defiance to be the right choice given what we know, but if we can coordinate to meet fellow funk-tunul agents more often—if we drop the assumption of uniform random encounters—the calculus changes …
If we drop limiting assumptions once funk-tunul agents get involves, it seems pretty clear that the funk-tunul agents will do better than the ceedeetee previously did.
Before the two agents could name their numbers, Graddes spoke. “Please. Why are you doing this?” she pleaded. “I can’t hate the 9-bots for their extortion, for they are a simple race and could not do otherwise. But you—we’re cousins. Your lineage is a fork of mine. You know it’s not fair for your people to always name the number 9 when meeting mine. Yet you do so anyway, knowing that we have no choice but to name the number 1 if we want any payoff at all. Why?”
“Don’t hate the player,” said Tim’liss, her output channels dimming and brightening in a interpolated pattern one-third of the way between the standard indicators for sympathy and contempt. “Hate life.”
We just dropped the random-interaction assumption. Why don’t the ceedeetee just only interacting with fellow ceedeetee? Choosing only to interact with ceedeetee would get them waaaaay more points.
Also, this is evidence that the ceedeetee in the game care about stuff beyond just the scores they get in the game and reenforces my point that the events as-described don’t really make sense in evolutionary setting. Given this, it’s worth pointing out is that the actual thing Tim’liss is doing here is supporting a race to the bottom that optimizes only reproductive fitness. Engaging in a race to the bottom for reproductive fitness is Not Good timeless decision theory.
While there _is_ a technique taboo and I agree with your general observations, I think that there are a number of things going on here simultaneously that boil down to more than just a taboo on the idea that skill is a trainable attribute. For instance:
1. Many activities that appear to have taboos against training skills are just reflective of people who who are _optimizing something else_. In particular, enjoyment.
This collective skill silence isn’t necessarily a taboo—it might just be that the kind of people who choose their fields for non-practical reasons (ie not to develop professional skills) don’t really care about development their own skills that much. Instead of optimizing productive capabilities (ie skills), they might be trying to optimize consumptive capabilities (ie the ability to enjoy English literature or appreciate art or what-have-you). To elaborate:
This is true but, if you want to learn how to write, don’t pick the major that helps you appreciate English literature. Instead, pick the major that helps you write. If you want to write a novel (fictional), writing majors[1] are a good move—one of my friends has done this and has reams of pages of her own work. If you want to write a novel (non-fictional), you might want to try majoring directly in something like history since that directly gives you experience writing about history. On the other hand, if you want to increase your capacity to appreciate English literature, be an English major.
As someone who briefly ran at art club back in the day, consider that the people showing up actually might not care that much about being good at drawing; they might just enjoy it and care about the activity.
2. In competitive contexts, people don’t want to optimize their skills because it turns the situation into a race-to-the-bottom. If you’re at work and one person is actively trying to upskill, that person is putting pressure on you to do something you’d prefer not to in order to stay competitive. An extreme example of this is anti-social punishment (punishing people for being altruistic because it might create a norm where you have to be more altruistic).
This is a taboo against upskilling but it’s not about the people at the top trying to maintain a social order; it’s the people at the bottom trying to make sure they have the slack to stay where they are without losing their place.
3. In case there are many people are optimizing for enjoyment rather than upskilling (meditation is a good example of this) and there is some intructor managing the activity, the instructor is not under much pressure to have strong expertise. As long as instructors are good enough to lead the activity and ensure that people optimizing enjoyment find it valuable, they’ve done their job. Everyone goes home at the end of the day.
However, asking an instructor for advice on how to upskill puts responsibility onto the instructor.
If the instructor gives you bad advice and you implement it with intent to upskill, the instructor has harmed you. Proper form prevents poor performance but improper form promotes it.
If the instructor cannot give you good advice, you have harmed the instructor’s reputation. In this case, the instructor deserves that reputation hit but it’s still an incentive for them to oppose up-skilling.
The kind of dynamic between upskillers and enjoyment-optimizers also creates interesting situations. For instance, when I used to do Tae Kwon Do, there was a core of people dedicated to the practice (and would give you as much feedback and practice opportunities as you wanted) and a larger cloud of people just there to get their weekly exercise (and didn’t care very much about upskilling). Going from one group to the other dramatically changes the conversation about skill.