This caused me to get around to writing a comment on the linked How to Give in to Threats post, which I had meant to for a while.
Orioth
Karma: 25
I’d say it’s more like D&D 3.5 than any two of [AD&D, D&D 3.5, D&D 4E, D&D 5E] are like each other.
When somebody offers you a 7:5 split, instead of the 6:6 split that would be fair, you should accept their offer with slightly less than 6⁄7 probability. Their expected value from offering you 7:5, in this case, is 7 * slightly less than 6⁄7, or slightly less than 6. This ensures they can’t do any better by offering you an unfair split; but neither do you try to destroy all their expected value in retaliation. It could be an honest mistake, especially if the real situation is any more complicated than the original Ultimatum Game.
If they offer you 8:4, accept with probability slightly-more-less than 6⁄8, so they do even worse in their own expectation by offering you 8:4 than 7:5.
Having thought about this strategy a bit, one thing I remain uncertain about is how to generalize it to a situation where the other party can try offering you a better deal if you reject the initial offer (or one where you get to make counteroffers, for that matter, which might or might not have the same problem).
If you evaluate subsequent offers independently, then it would seem to be in their interest to open with an offer of 1:11. With slightly less than 6⁄11 probability, you accept and they profit; with slightly greater than 6⁄11 probability, you say “no deal” and they say “fine, how about 2:10″, and so on until a deal is reached, which will never be better for you than fair, and may be worse.
So obviously you won’t do that.
In this scenario, it’s a pretty transparent exploit, and you can just consider yourself committed to not even consider subsequent worse-than-fair offers after you’ve rejected the first one. But in real life, there may be situations where there’s a perfectly legitimate reason for your counterparty to make you a better offer once you’ve rejected their initial one, and committing to reject those seems like it’ll result in missed opportunities.
Made some updates to this:
added songs I remembered folks singing during Less Online and Manifest this year
tinkered with the categorization
added links to chords (whatever was the first search result, mostly; I don’t know if there are better or worse chord websites out there) and links to lyrics when lyrics weren’t given on the webpage with the chords
The terms ‘living money’ and ‘dead money’ seem to include an unwarranted implication that living is better. As I understand it, that framework would count money spent on buying something just because one wants it as ‘dead money’ - there’s no hope of a financial return, it gets used up via paying people to do things and then it’s gone. But being able to spend it to get what one wants is arguably the entire point of money! It’s not clear to me if this generalizes to willpower in this analogy, though.
I think parts of your Notes on Honesty are as close to the post I was trying to write as what I actually wrote was. I wonder if I had some cryptomnesia going on, even. In any case, thanks for writing that and for pointing it out here!
Virtues related to honesty
What do the Rats Sing?
(A list of songs compiled from impromptu group singing sessions at several rationalist-adjacent events. Anything where the program was decided in advance is excluded from this list. This is all done from memory of events I happened to be at, and I’m more likely to remember songs I’m familiar with.)
Group singing standards
Country Roads (x3)
Hallelujah (x2)
Wellerman (x2)
Songs which were written for Secular Solstice
Our Favorite Things (lyrics, sheet music)
(and see the ‘Filk and filk-adjacent’ and ‘Uncategorized’ sections, which include some that weren’t written for Solstice but are oft sung at it)
Filk and filk-adjacent
Time Wrote the Rocks (x2)
What’s it Like to Be a Bat (lyrics nowhere I can find on the internet, chords based on I Am My Own Grandpa)
Bob Dylan
We went through the whole album Blood on the Tracks that one time:
The Beatles
Hey Jude (x2)
Here Comes the Sun (x2)
Imagine (Yes, this is John Lennon solo, but I’m putting it in the Beatles section since he was a Beatle, if not at the time he wrote it.)
Some Manifest Attendees Prefer Modern Pop Music
Uncategorized
American Pie (x2)
So, in general not having your values changed is an Omohundro goal, right? But would I suggest that if you you change your utility function[1] from
U(w) = weightedSumSapientSatisfaction(w) + personalHappiness(w) + someIdiosyncraticPreferences(w)or whatever it is, toU(w) = weightedSumSapientSatisfaction(w) + personalHappiness(w) + someIdiosyncraticPreferences(w) + 5000, all your choices that involve explicit expected utility comparisons will come out the same as before, but you’ll be happier.- ^
There are a lot of issues with utility functions as a framing for describing actual human motivations, but bear with me.
- ^
My script for organizing OBNYC meetups
Orioth’s Shortform
[...] Ricardo’s Law Of Comparative Advantage was one of the most inspirational things he’d ever read. This is an economic theorem which says that under ideal frictionless capitalism, even if you’re the worst person in the world at everything, you can do the thing you’re relatively least worst at, trade with other people, and be guaranteed to make nonzero money. Maybe not very much money, but nonzero. It will mean that your actions have made other people nonzero better off, and they are nonzero grateful to you.
I do not find this inspiring! Under ideal frictionless capitalism, if you’re the worst person in the world at everything, you can make nonzero money, but most likely less then the cost of living, so the most likely outcome is that you die in abject poverty, having in the meantime done some things that made other people nonzero better off, and which might—or might not—outweigh any costly screw ups you may have made or suffering you may have undergone in the process.
And that’s under ideal frictionless capitalism! In the real world this can and does sometimes happen even to people who are pretty good at some things!
I’m not convinced that this remains optimal when you’re bargaining with an entity that might offer you a better deal if you reject their first offer for legitimate reasons, rather than in an attempt to exploit your bargaining strategy.
Suppose a deal falls through, your counterparty tries their BATNA, it goes worse than they thought, so they come back and make a better offer than they did the first time. Or maybe they, or you, learn something new regarding the value of the goods being negotiated for. Shouldn’t it be possible to take this into account and reopen negotiations? If not, a lot of mutually beneficial trades become impossible.
But I don’t see a specific strategy that allows for this without being exploitable, since you can’t necessarily tell whether a new offer is prompted by new information or whether it’s just a bargaining tactic.