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If we're talking about LessWrong Rationalists, then the whole idea behind learning to be rational is that "Rationalists Should Win."
They should achieve their instrumental goals at minimal cost and end up with more utility points than when they started.
But having rigid 'moral principles' implies there are personal rules that you simply will not break. And if another rational actor knows you have rules you won't break, they can exploit those rules to reliably defeat you in any given contest. Here "defeat" just means "increase their own utility even at the expense of your utility."
One particularly silly example is if you had the moral rule "Never physically hurt women." Then your opponent could just pay a woman to come around and beat you up and take your stuff whenever they wanted, knowing you probably won't fight back.
If you have certain rules governing your behavior that you NEVER will alter, you're precommitting to certain actions that can lead to you 'losing,' which means you're making a 'precommitment to behave irrationally in specific circumstances' and thus not being fully 'rational' since, as above, "Rationalists should win."
You have it almost exactly backwards. The whole point of the "Rationalists should win" blog post you linked is that in some circumstances it can be rational to act in ways that are 100% guaranteed to have worse consequences, such as by cooperating in the one-shot prisoner's dilemma (cooperating has a worse result both if the other prisoner has cooperated and if the other prisoner has defected) or paying in Parfit's Hitchhiker. This is because, while the action itself has purely worse consequences, being the sort of agent who will take that action has good consequences. "Rationalists should win" is not at all "the whole idea behind learning to be rational", it is a contrast with the mainstream view among decision theorists in regards to Newcomb's Problem that one-boxers get better results, and they could easily choose to one-box if they wanted, but that the "rational" course of action is to two-box and then complain that the "irrational" choice was the one that won.
When applied to morality this will most obviously apply to situations where agents have a choice between abiding with a general principle and choosing the action that is better in the moment, where in some circumstances being the sort of agent that will abide by the general principle has good results even if the action itself doesn't. This is more likely to be relevant when the agent is a country, as discussed in my other comment, since countries are worse at deception. And obviously in iterated games, at which point you don't need any exotic decision-theory to justify it. (Of course, another way it relates to morality is that it's probably part of how we evolved moral instincts in the first place.)
Oh is this going to be one of those arguments.
Yeah, now its just a question of how recursive you want to get. Defecting makes sense in a one-shot prisoner's dilemma when you have no way of judging that the other party might be willing to cooperate. Iterated games, if they're of indefinite length present different strategic options.
I wasn't even agreeing with the premise of "moral principles force you to act in an irrational way." Just pointing out the potential contradiction if you want to 'win' you might have to bend or break certain moral principles, which was the gist of the original question.
Indeed, I think the whole point of invoking morals as principles rather than as 'mere' variables in a utility function, some principles exist because they DO create better outcomes in a systemic way, even if it leads to 'losing' a few local contests. As you say, 'being the sort of person' who does the Good thing even at personal cost will probably create many more utils over the long run.
But there are indeed some moral principles which can be systemically exploited and if your principles cause you to repeatedly lose, you're not being 'rational' on your own terms.
But then we're back to the question: what do you value and is it easier to maximize your utility by following certain moral guiding principles even when it leads to 'losing' a few isolated games, or by being completely unprincipled other than trying to maximize your own utility in every single game you encounter and adapt your strategy accordingly.
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That's an odd reading of yud there. Rats pull heavily from game theory and a (perhaps the) prototypical game theory question is how to avoid losing the prisoner's dilemma. Continually hitting the defect button is losing. You are flushing utils down the toilet. If a rationalist should win here, they should find ways to obtain credible pre-commitments and not ferret around for a way to get one over down the line.
Ah, but that's only if you're actually in an iterated game.
Some people might correctly model an interaction as a one-shot game with a new stranger every single time, with no mutual knowledge or expectations established beforehand. In that case, hitting 'defect' will let you win in cases where the other side magnanimously chooses cooperate.
If you go into an interaction knowing you're pitted against person who will choose 'cooperate' on principle, and you don't expect to have repeated interactions with that person, you can 'win' by defecting because you 'know' you're escaping scott-free in that case.
Indeed, I don't know of any prisoner's dilemma tournaments where the 'cooperate every time' strategy wins.
With all that said, I'm agreeing that if you take it up one level, being the 'sort of person' who cooperates when faced with such a dilemma creates a much better world, and thus will likely create more utility for you, and for all other players, which can certainly compound over time.
So adopting the moral principle that loses you individual games can still make you the overall winner.
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