AI alignment researcher supported by MIRI and LTFF. Working on the learning-theoretic agenda.
Vanessa Kosoy(Vanessa Kosoy)
Karma: 3,555
Ah, super fair. Splitting any outside income 50⁄50 would still work, I think.
I think that a 50⁄50 splits creates the wrong incentives, but I am reluctant to discuss this in public.
PS: Of course this was also prompted by us nerding out about your and Marcus’s vows so thank you again for sharing this. I’m all heart-eyes every time I think about it!
<3
I had an extremely painful and emotional divorce myself, so I am aware. Although, I tend to reject the idea that emotions prevent you from thinking straight. I think that’s a form of strategic self-deception.
Strictly speaking, the vows don’t say all decisions must be unanimous (although if they aren’t it becomes kinda tricky to define the bargaining solution). However, arguably, if both of us follow the vows and we have common knowledge about this, we should arrive at unanimous decisions[1]. This is the desirable state. On the other hand, it’s also possible that one of us breaks the vows, or erroneously beliefs that the other broke the vows[2], in which case unilateral action might be consistent with the vows. So, there’s no implication that unilateral divorce is completely forbidden.
By Aumann agreement, but even if we have different priors so Aumann agreement doesn’t apply, we should still be able to state those priors and compute the bargaining solution on that basis. ↩︎
Further levels of recursion are ruled out if we assume that one is not allowed to dismiss the vows on account of an unconscionable violation by the other party without declaring this to the other party, which is probably a good clause to add. ↩︎
Let me first state, that this is quite inspiring!
Thank you!
70% of the couples that marry these days (meaning, Millenials and Generation X) are subject to get a divorce within a decade...
I wanted to inquire, without judgement, how do you reconcile with this fact?
I am divorced myself, and my previous marriage lasted about a decade. Still, I don’t know if there’s much to reconcile. Obviously there is always risk that the marriage will fail. Equally obviously, staying without a primary lover forever is a worse alternative (for me).
Previous generations did not have WhatsApp, and so they missed each other truly. They did not have Instagram, and so they did not lust after things they do not have nor did they constantly focused on what is ‘missing’ in their life. They did not have facebook or Linkedin, and so they did not spend the time running the rat-race, chasing passions to prove to others a point.
Luckily I don’t have Instagram or Facebook, and although I have a LinkedIn account, I don’t engage with the content there. I do have WhatsApp but I’m skeptical that it’s really so bad.
One way to interpret this is “I will do my best effort to follow the optimal policy”. On the other hand, when you’re optimizing for just your own utility function, one could argue that the “best effort” is exactly equal to the optimal policy once you take constraints and computational/logical uncertainty into account. On the third hand, perhaps for bargaining the case for identifying “best effort” and “optimal” is weaker. In practice, what’s important is that even if you followed a suboptimal policy for a while, there’s a well-defined way to return to optimal behavior. This is true for Nash bargaining (because of independence of irrelevant alternatives), less so for KS! Which is why I’m leaning towards switching to Nash. And if I fail to even make the best effort, there’s the clause about how to amend.
In the original paper they have “Assumption 4” which clearly states they disregard solutions that don’t dominate the disagreement point. But, you have a good point that when those solutions are taken into account, you don’t really have monotonicity.
First of all, this is awesome.
Thank you :)
It seems kind of odd that terrible solutions like (1000, −10^100) could determine the outcome (I realize they can’t be the outcome, but still).
I think you might be misunderstanding how KS works. The “best” values in KS are those that result when you optimize one player’s payoff under the constraint that the second player’s payoff is higher than the disagreement payoff. So, you completely ignore outcomes where one of us would be worse off in expectation than if we didn’t marry.
We do have margin for minor violations of the vows, as long as they are not “unconscionable”. Granted, we don’t have a precise definition of “unconscionable”, but certainly if both of us agree that a violation is not unconscionable then it isn’t.
Marcus has chronic illness. This means their contribution to the household can vary unpredictably, practically on any timescale. As a result, it’s hard to think of any split that’s not going to be skewed in one or other direction in some scenarios. Moreover, they are unable to hold to job, so their time doesn’t have opportunity cost in a financial sense.
Our first question is whether you intend to merge your finances.
We do, at least because I’m the only one who has income.
My next question is why the KS solution vs the Nash solution to the bargaining problem?
I’m actually not sure about this. Initially I favored KS because monotonicity seemed more natural than independence of irrelevant alternatives. But then I realized than in sequential decision making, IIA is important because it allows you to consistently optimize your policy on a certain branch of the decision tree even if you made suboptimal actions in the past. There seems to be a way of working around this violation of IIA in KS, but it makes KS look more like a hack.
But also are you sure the Shapley value doesn’t make more sense here?
Shapley value is for distributing transferable values, like money. For general utility functions there’s no easy way to convert 1 Vanessa-utilon to 1 Marcus-utilon.
Thanks so much for sharing this. It’s so sweet and nerdy and heart-warming and wonderful! And congratulations!
Thank you <3
Firstly I think that ” ’s ” is a grammar mistake and it should just read ”...or until my [spouse] breaks...” instead.
You’re right, thanks!
Allowing yourself to cancel following your vows because your spouse willfully stopped following theirs is a little dangerous. It leads to situations where you might rather justify your own breach of the vows by pointing to their breach instead of trying to make things right.
I agree that it’s a possible failure mode, but the alternative seems worse? Suppose that my spouse starts completely disregarding the vows and breaking them egregiously. Do you really think I should still follow my own vows to the letter?
We, as in humans, are poorly defined, barely conscious, irrational, lumps of meat. We are not aware of our own utility functions let alone those of others, especially as they change over time and chaotically in the course of a day. We are unable to follow a precise recipe like the one you have outlined.
I’m not convinced. I have a rather favorable view of human agency and rationality compared to the distribution of opinions in this community, and I think it’s not the place to hash out these differences. For our present purpose, just assume that we are able (or at least give concrete examples of where we will fail).
I think the only thing you can communicate with your vows is the spirit of your words not their contractual meaning. That’s why you often hear in others vows poorly defined meaningless things like “I feel you and I were destined to be together” or “I love you with all of my heart”.
I think that marriage is a contract, except that usually it’s unwritten. Which often enough leads to disaster when the two spouses have different notions of what the contract entails. People prefer meaningless things over explicit contracts for signaling reasons, but we explicitly decided to pursue a different strategy.
Very interesting—and congratulations!
Thank you :)
It strikes me that the first vow will sometimes conflict with the second.
Well, yes, the intent it is that the Vow of Honest takes precedence over the Vow of Concord.
Have you considered going meta? “I make the set of vows determined by the Kalai-Smorodinski solution to the bargaining problem...”
I’m not sure what’s the difference between “set of vows” and “policy”? When I say “policy” I refer to the set of behaviors we are actually capable of choosing from, including computational and other constraints.
A more precise formulation would be: “when choosing what information to pass on, optimize solely for your best estimate of the spouse’s utility function”.
That’s why I wrote “in the counterfactual in which the source of said doubt or dispute would be revealed to us and understood by us with all of its implications at that time as well as we understand it at the time it actually surfaced”, so we do use the new information and experience.
The reason I want to anchor it to our present selves is because at present we are fairly aligned. We have pretty good common understanding of what we want form these vows. On the other hand, the appearance of a dispute in the future might be the result of us becoming unaligned. This would create the temptation for each of us to interpret the vows in their own favor. The wedding-time anchor mitigates that somewhat, because it requires us to argue with a straight face that our wedding-time-selves would endorse the given interpretation.
So then, these vows could only be made if you have an extremely high level of already having untangled yourself / the elephant, such that it’s even possible for you to not (self-)deceive.
I believe that it’s always possible for you to not self-deceive. The only real agent is the “elephant”. The conscious self is just a “mask” this agent wears, by choice. It can equally well choose to wear a different mask if that benefits it.
What’s “on purpose” doing here?
I just mean that there is an intent to deceive, rather than an accidental miscommunication.
Thank you :)
Thank you for sharing. I’m sorry it worked out so poorly for you!
It sounds like your situation was not at all Pareto efficient? If so, this Vow of Concord would not preclude you from divorce? Notice that the Vow does not say that both spouses must locally prefer divorce for divorce to happen. It only says that divorce must be part of the bargaining-optimal policy.
For example, consider the following scenario:
If we wouldn’t get married, our payoffs would be .
With probability we will have a mutually beneficial marriage in which each has payoff .
With probability the marriage will be detrimental to me (payoff ) and beneficial to my spouse (payoff ).
With probability the marriage will be beneficial to me (payoff ) and detrimental (w.r.t counterfactual) to my spouse (payoff ).
(Here “beneficial” and “detrimental” are to be understood relatively to the counterfactual in which this marriage didn’t happen.)
Then, the policy “never get divorced” has payoff vector whereas the policy “stay married iff the marriage is mutually beneficial” has payoff vector . The latter is Pareto dominant therefore the Vow of Concord will select the latter.
Now let’s change the payoffs:
If we wouldn’t get married, our payoffs would be .
With probability we will have a mutually beneficial marriage in which each has payoff .
With probability the marriage will be detrimental to me (payoff ) and beneficial to my spouse (payoff ).
With probability the marriage will be beneficial to me (payoff ) and detrimental to my spouse (payoff ).
Now “never get divorced” has payoff vector while “stay married iff the marriage is mutually beneficial” still has payoff vector . The Vow of Concord requires us to stay married. Without the Vow (or decision-theoretic ability to simulate the Vow), both of us would be worse off in expectation!
In practice, I think that miserable marriages are virtually guaranteed to land in the “get divorced” territory, since they tend to make both spouses miserable.
Well, at any given moment we will use the best-guess decision theory we have at the time.
To phrase my intent more precisely: whatever the decision theory we will come to believe in[1] is, we vow to behave in a way which is the closest analogue in that decision theory of the formal specification we gave here in the framework of ordinary Bayesian sequential decision making.
It is also possible we will disagree about decision theory. In that case, I guess we need to defer to whatever is the most concrete “metadecision theory” we can agree upon. ↩︎
Hmm. Do you have a reference which is not, like, an entire book?
Well, the process is important, but I feel like the discourse norms exemplified by this community already have us covered there, give or take.
It’s not dollar value, it’s utilon value. I agree that quantification is challenging, but IMO it only reflects the complexity of the underlying reality that we have to deal with one way or the other. In principle, you can always quantify the utility function by asking enough questions of the form “do I prefer this lottery over outcomes to that lottery over outcomes”.
I think that all relationships are already accounting, people are just not always honest about it. Problems arise from people having different expectations / standards of fairness that they expect others to follow while never negotiating them explicitly. The latter is what we want to avoid here.