# philh

Karma: 3,863
• Thanks for find­ing this! I’m a bit con­fused, though; it sug­gests that the game with payoffs

3,3   2,1
1,2   0,0


(an in­stance of Cake Eat­ing), is equiv­a­lent to one of those named games. But… which? It only has one pure Nash equil­ibrium, so it can’t be ei­ther hawk-dove or BOS, which both have two. And it can’t be equiv­a­lent to PD—an in­stance of that would be

3,3   1,4
4,1   0,0


and these aren’t equiv­a­lent. We have (3 > 1) but (3 < 4). So what am I miss­ing?

(I had in­tended to try look this up my­self, but I’m un­likely to do that in a timely man­ner, so I’m just leav­ing a com­ment. No obli­ga­tion on you, of course.)

• I ab­solutely think it makes sense, I just don’t know if I en­dorse it. Maybe it’s con­text de­pen­dent; some­one who just wants to write about the Nash equil­ibria of games won’t have any rea­son to dis­t­in­guish these cases, and lump­ing them all un­der “Pri­soner’s Dilemma” seems ab­solutely fine. But Iter­ated Pri­soner’s Dilemma (in my sense) is prob­a­bly a very differ­ent game from Iter­ated Too Many Cooks, but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard any­one talk about ITMC. And from a so­cial per­spec­tive, “pun­ish any­one who defects in a PD” makes sense but “pun­ish any­one who doesn’t cook in TMC” risks leav­ing value on the table.

Maybe it would make sense to call them a “(some­thing) Pri­soner’s Dilemma” and a “(some­thing else) Pri­soner’s Dilemma” but I’m not sure what the some­things would be.

• I don’t in gen­eral think there’s any­thing wrong with com­par­ing util­ities be­tween peo­ple in these things—that’s what I’m do­ing when I talk about whether - but it would be sim­pler not to do so. Still, even then I think ex­tend­ing to all 8 would give far too many pos­si­bil­ities to be man­u­ally tractable—I make it .

But it wouldn’t be too hard to write a pro­gram to clas­sify them ac­cord­ing to Nash equil­ibria, if some­one wanted to do that. That might be a de­cent start.

# Clas­sify­ing games like the Pri­soner’s Dilemma

4 Jul 2020 17:10 UTC
61 points
(reasonableapproximation.net)
• (Tran­scrip­tion nit­pick: IIRC I said “fewer con­straints”, not “pure con­straints”.)

• A com­ment from the zoom chat (I for­get who from) said some­thing like: If the en­vi­ron­ment gives you a hash of an ob­ser­va­tion, and then the ob­ser­va­tion it­self, then you have com­pres­sion but not pre­dic­tion.

(I.e., you can take the out­put and re­move the hashes to com­press it, but you can’t pre­dict what’s com­ing next.)

• Can you elab­o­rate? The wikipe­dia sum­mary, which ac­cords with my mem­ory, is that

1. She kills the per­son she thinks is the God of War. This doesn’t stop the war.

2. Steve sac­ri­fices him­self to stop the poi­son gas. (This is most of the “not liter­ally noth­ing” I was refer­ring to. I may have been down­play­ing it.)

3. She kills the ac­tual God of War. The war stops. (This is the “beat up the villain and then ev­ery­thing will be fine” I was refer­ring to.)

If it weren’t for (3) I’d agree with you.

# Short es­says on var­i­ous things I’ve watched

12 Jun 2020 22:50 UTC
9 points
(reasonableapproximation.net)
• Con­flict the­o­rists, cashed out as some­thing like “peo­ple who saw the ar­ti­cle as an at­tempted power grab and so up­voted the per­son at­tack­ing it” feels like it fits, but… I dunno, I try to be hes­i­tant to use con­flict the­ory as an ex­pla­na­tion, be­cause it’s so easy to make it fit. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

I ap­pre­ci­ated your words more than I would have done up­votes; thank you.

• Per­haps, but… I hon­estly can’t tell what opinion that would be.

Like, a thing I ap­pre­ci­ate about the com­menter is that they’re ad­mirably straight­for­ward. They say what they think and don’t try to weasel out of it later. I don’t love that they’re de­liber­ately try­ing to hurt me (seem­ingly with­out check­ing if they could ac­com­plish their goals some other way), but at least they’re up­front about it. It seems to me that there’s un­usu­ally lit­tle room for mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion here.

And yet, so much of what they’re say­ing is com­pletely out there, and I just don’t be­lieve that most peo­ple agree with it.

I could be­lieve that most peo­ple agree, at least un­re­flex­ively and per­haps af­ter con­sid­er­a­tion, with “OSS main­tain­ers have no re­spon­si­bil­ity”. (And pos­si­bly even with “no re­spon­si­bil­ity at all with­out con­sent”.) But I think most of them would not bite the bul­lets that this user does.

Like, I could see some­one say­ing “they don’t have a re­spon­si­bil­ity here, but they still shouldn’t de­liber­ately in­tro­duce bugs to brick peo­ple’s OSes, and it’s to­tally rea­son­able for peo­ple to com­plain if they do”. And then there’s a con­ver­sa­tion about what does re­spon­si­bil­ity even mean, and maybe it turns out we don’t mean the same thing by it and don’t re­ally dis­agree that much, or maybe we ac­tu­ally do have some im­por­tant dis­agree­ments. But that’s not at all where the con­ver­sa­tion went.

I don’t be­lieve most peo­ple agree with “If some­one de­liber­ately bricks a bunch of peo­ple’s OSes, and then stops do­ing that, you call them gen­er­ous”. I don’t even be­lieve most peo­ple agree with the ear­lier bit about de­liber­ately brick­ing OSes not be­ing some­thing to com­plain about.

I could be­lieve that most peo­ple agree, at least un­re­flex­ively and per­haps af­ter con­sid­er­a­tion, that I’m be­ing too de­mand­ing. I in­cluded a list of quotes to say “no, re­ally, I’m de­mand­ing very lit­tle”, but I could see some­one think­ing I’m de­mand­ing more than I re­al­ize, or think­ing I’m be­ing dishon­est about how much I’m de­mand­ing, or some­thing. But that’s not where the con­ver­sa­tion went ei­ther. That user doesn’t ob­vi­ously think ei­ther of those. They call me a nar­cis­sist, but not a liar. They don’t say that the opt-outs I offer are bur­den­some.

I don’t be­lieve that most peo­ple agree with the thing about “if I have a habit of offer­ing to vac­uum for peo­ple and not show­ing up, no one has the right to ask me why”.

So to the ex­tent those com­ments ex­press an opinion held by /​r/​pro­gram­ming at large, I think they also ex­press much more ex­treme opinions that /​r/​pro­gram­ming doesn’t hold.

(I could be miss­ing some­thing, of course. I don’t trust my­self to see clearly here.)

• Lately it’s a red­dit ar­gu­ment I had re­cently.

Not just the ar­gu­ment it­self. One ass­hole I could deal with. The fact that peo­ple up­voted them...

Like, there’s noth­ing that par­tic­u­larly stands out to me about /​r/​pro­gram­ming read­ers. As far as I know they’re gen­er­ally fairly nor­mal hu­mans. And a bunch of gen­er­ally fairly nor­mal hu­mans ap­par­ently thought that those com­ments were good?

:(

• Yes, thanks! Some­one on red­dit also pointed me at pure­script.

I’ve re­al­ized that since the only lan­guage I know with ex­ten­si­ble records is Elm, it doesn’t say much that I don’t know any with open var­i­ants.

• I think I ba­si­cally agree. If I had to pick a chief benefit (which I don’t) I’d say that it en­ables easy macros—but it does that be­cause it’s easy to parse and rep­re­sent as Lisp data, so to some ex­tent it just de­pends what level you feel like look­ing at.