An interesting strategy, which seems related to FDT's prescription to ignore threats, which seems to have worked:
From the very beginning, the People’s Republic of China had to maneuver in a triangular relationship with the two nuclear powers, each of which was individually capable of posing a great threat and, together, were in a position to overwhelm China. Mao dealt with this endemic state of affairs by pretending it did not exist. He claimed to be impervious to nuclear threats; indeed, he developed a public posture of being willing to accept hundreds of millions of casualties, even welcoming it as a guarantee for the more rapid victory of Communist ideology. Whether Mao believed his own pronouncements on nuclear war it is impossible to say. But he clearly succeeded in making much of the rest of the world believe that he meant it—an ultimate test of credibility.
I don't think FDT has anything to do with purely causal interactions. Insofar as threats were actually deterred here this can be understood in standard causal game theory terms. (I.e., you claim in a convincing manner that you won't give in -> People assign high probability to you being serious -> Standard EV calculation says not to commit to threat against you.) Also see this post.
3Garrett Baker
Thus why I said related. Nobody was doing any mind-reading of course, but the principles still apply, since people are often actually quite good at reading each other.
What principles? It doesn’t seem like there’s anything more at work here than “Humans sometimes become more confident that other humans will follow through on their commitments if they, e.g., repeatedly say they’ll follow through”. I don’t see what that has to do with FDT, more than any other decision theory.
If the idea is that Mao’s forming the intention is supposed to have logically-caused his adversaries to update on his intention, that just seems wrong (see this section of the mentioned post).
(Separately I’m not sure what this has to do with... (read more)