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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   30524 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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Given that the left has won since the 1500s, I'm less inclined to believe that. You turn the other cheek but you do fight back once that's no longer an option

This reply, from @mrvanillasky, seems to be saying he wants to move from a cooperate bot into some kind of TfT bot, because he is tired of hitting cooperate only to get burned because the other side didn't.

It seems at least somewhat germane to discuss the kinds of strategies for defecting that the right is going to take, when making a general call for the right to start defecting more.

  1. I am not sure if I am really on the wrong meta level.

  2. I think we will just have to agree to disagree, TfTwF is a program, it is hard for me to imagine anything being more capable of 'abiding by a rule', as that is the very nature of the beast.

  3. I quoted the specific phrase I did for a reason, outright incorrect seem to me, to say something more like 'This strategy is never correct' more than it says 'In this specific situation this strategy is not correct'.

  4. (1+3)If you narrowly define 'abiding by moral principles' to mean 'cooperating with a defect bot' then sure, but I don't think it was unreasonable of me to not define it that narrowly, given the actually discussion was of real world politics and these toy models are just abstractions anyways.

edit: formatting

can you please tell me what TfT, TfTwF mean here?

Tit for Tat and Tit for Tat with forgiveness. They are strategies derived from game theory. The idea was an iterative game where you can either cooperate or defect, and people would write computer programs to play the game in a tournament. The initial experiment resulted in Tit for Tat winning, a simple program that just copied whatever the other program did the turn before, so if you defected last round, tit for tat would respond with defect in the next round, if you cooperate, tit for tat would cooperate next time.

The same basic experimental design has been run several times with several different organizational structures, but tit for tat always ends up doing very well.

One of the few strategies that do better though, is tit for tat with forgiveness, which is the basic tit for tat program, plus every now and then it will attempt to restart cooperation by cooperating after the other program defected.

One idea for why TfTwF does better that TfT is that two Tit for Tat like programs can get caught in a defect spiral where they both just spam defect, and the occasional forgiveness allows them to get back to cooperating.

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