Re: Status of Superrationality

From: Wei Dai (weidai@weidai.com)
Date: Sun May 25 2003 - 21:21:10 MDT

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    On Sun, May 25, 2003 at 11:44:38AM -0700, Hal Finney wrote:
    > And I think it is important in the definition of the Prisoner's Dilemma
    > that you do know what the payoffs are for the other guy. Just seeing
    > and knowing your own payoffs is not enough to create the dilemma.

    Although the classical PD formulation assumes common knowledge of both
    parties utility functions, I'm sure I can come up with a version where
    each side only has probabilistic knowledge of each other's utilities.
    These types of games are regularly studied under the name "games with
    incomplete information".

    > Without analyzing it in detail, I think this level of honesty,
    > in conjunction with the usual game theory assumption of rationality,
    > would be enough to imply the result that the two parties can't disagree.
    > Basically the argument is the same, that since you both have the same
    > goals [...]

    But the totalist and the averagist do not have the same goals. One wants
    to maximize total happiness, and the other wants to maximize average
    happiness.



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