I wonder if this question is related to the revulsion many people feel against certain kinds of price discrimination tactics. I mean things like how in the 19th century, train companies would put intentionally uncomfortable benches in the 3rd class carriages in order to encourage people to buy 2nd class tickets, or nowadays software that comes with arbitrary, programmed-in restrictions that can be removed by paying for the "professional" version.
People really don't like that! It seems like there is some folk-ethics norm that "if you can make me better off with no effort on your part, then you have an obligation to do so", which seems like part of a "no blackmail" condition.
It seems that we cry blackmail when a shelling point already exists, and the other agent is threatening to force us below it. The moral outrage functions as a precommittment to punish the clear defection.
In normal human life, 'do nothing' is the schelling point, because most people don't interact with most people. But sometimes the schelling point does move, and it seems what constitutes blackmail does too: if a child's drowning in a pond, and I tell you I'll only fish him out if you give me $1,000, it seems like I'm blackmailing you.
Sometimes both sides feel like they're being blackmailed though; like when firefighters go on strike, and both city hall and the union accuse the other of endangering people. Could this be put down to coordination problems?
if a child's drowning in a pond, and I tell you I'll only fish him out if you give me $1,000, it seems like I'm blackmailing you.
Perhaps a borderline case like this is most helpful. Is this extortion? Even though the default case in this case isn't 'doing nothing'. The default is saving the child. Because that is what someone should do.
So maybe the word is difficult to unpack because it has morality behind it. A person shouldn't bomb your car, and shouldn't expose your private secrets. On the other hand, they needn't give you food, so it's OK to ask for money for that.
If I demand money for being faithful to my husband, than that is extortion because I'm supposed to be faithful. If, however, I want a divorce and would divorce him, I'm allowed to let him pay me for faithfulness. Such gray areas indicate to me that it is indeed about some notion of expected/moral behavior.
Selling food to starving families -- when they become so poor that you ought to give them food for free -- then that is extortion.
So: demanding more compensation when you should do it for less (or demanding any when you should do it for free).
I know this isn't quite rigorous, but if I can calculate the counterfactual "what would the other player's strategy be if ze did not model me as an agent capable of responding to incentives," blackmail seems easy to identify by comparison to this.
Perhaps this can be what we mean by 'default'?
I think this ties into Larks' point -- if Larks didn't think I responded to incentives, I think ze'd just help the child, so asking me $1,000 would be blackmail. Clippy would not help the child, and so asking me $1,000 is trade.
To first order, this means that folks playing decision-theoretic games against me actually have an incentive to self-modify to be all-else-equal sadistic, so that their threats can look like offers. But then I can assume that they would not have so modified in the first place if they hadn't modelled me as responding to incentives, etc. etc.
Should you find yourself in the greater Boston area, drop me a line and I will give you some pie.
(I suspect that there is a context to this comment, and I might even find it interesting if I were to look it up, but I'm sort of enjoying the comment in isolation. Hopefully it isn't profoundly embarrassing or anything.)
This is a clever idea, but I don't think it works: you need to unpack the question of why a decision algorithm would deem cooperation non-optimal, and see if it coincides with a special class of problems where cooperation is generally non-optimal.
So I think what gets an offer labeled as blackmail is the recognition that cooperation would lead the other party to repeatedly use their discretion to force my next remaining options to be even worse. So blackmail and trade differ in that:
And yes, these two situations are equivalent, except for what I want the offerer to do, which I think is what yields the distinction, not the concept of a baseline in the initial offer.
You can phrase blackmail as a sort of ...
In general, I think synonyms are bad. It's a waste of vocabulary to have two words that mean the same thing in the same language unless there is something meaningfully different about them (connotation, scope, flavor, nuance, something). When "blackmail" just means "extortion", and not a kind of extortion (the threat to reveal incriminating information), the words become synonyms, instead of one of them being a special case of the other.
The default is special because it costs the other person time/money/effort to do anything other than the default.
Hence, not blowing up your car is the default, but so is not giving you food.
It seems to me the relevant difference is that in blackmail one or both parties end up worse off. So a group of individuals who blackmail each other tend to get poorer over time, compared to a group that successfully deters blackmail.
Current guess.
Blackmailing is a class of situations similar to Counterfactual Mugging, where you are willing to sacrifice utility in the actual world, in order to control its probability into being lower, so that the counterfactual worlds (that have higher utility) will gain as much probability as possible, and will thus improve the overall expected utility, even as utility of the actual world becomes lower.
Or, simply, you are being blackmailed when you wish this wouldn't be happening, and the correct actions are those that make the reality as improbable a...
Suppose that Blackmail is
merely an affective category, a class of situations activating a certain psychological adaptation
-- then we should ask what features of the ancestral environment caused us to evolve it. We might understand it better in that case.
I suspect that the ancestral environment came with a very strong notion of a default outcome for a given human, in the absence of there being any particular negotiation, and also came with a clear notion of negative interaction (stabbing, hitting, kicking) versus positive interaction (giving fish, teaching how to hunt better, etc).
My take: what we call "extortion" or "blackmail" is where agent A1 offers A2 a choice between X and Y, both of which are harmful to A2, and where A1 has selected X to be less harmful to A2 than Y with the intention of causing A2 to choose X.
"Not responding to blackmail" comprises A2 choosing Y over X whenever A2 suspects this is going on.
A1 can still get A2 to choose X over Y, even if A2 has a policy of not responding to blackmail, by not appearing to have selected X... that is, by not appearing to be blackmailing A2.
For exa...
Agent 1 negotiates with agent 2. Agent 1 can take option A or B, while agent 2 can take option C or D. Agent 1 communicates that they will take option A if agent 2 takes option C and will take option B if agent 2 takes option D.
If utilities are such that for
and for
or
this is an offer.
If
Isn't it because you want to incentivize people to bargain with you but incentivize them not to blackmail you?
Why is the "default" special here?
Because in a blackmail, I do not wish the trade to happen at all. Let the "default" outcome for a trade T be one where the trade doesn't happen. Assume that my partner (the Baron) gets to decide whether T happens or not.
If T is a blackmail, then every option is worse than not-T. So, if I can commit to ensuring that T is also negative for the Baron, then the Baron won't let T happen. This gives a definition for blackmail: a trade T where every option is worse than not-T, but where I can commit to acti...
It's an interesting question. My thoughts follow a similar path and I like the way you described it here:
My hypothesis is that "blackmail" is what the suggestion of your mind to not cooperate feels like from the inside, the answer to a difficult problem computed by cognitive algorithms you don't understand, and not a simple property of the decision problem itself.
Taking a step back from the internal viewpoint we can also give a workable description in social terms. Which way people will tend to think of the decision offered is primarily dete...
It seems that if we could explain what we mean by a "default" action, the explanation of blackmail in terms of the "default" action would work.
Hmm. Bear with me.
The decision that maximises your gain, as Red, is for Blue to pick 5, -10. The decision that minimises your loss, as Blue, is to pick 5, -10. And so it is that extortionism is rediscovered by all agents like Red. But Blues sometimes pick -1, -20, more often than ‘some people are purely irrational’ would predict.
In a society that deeply understood game theory, they could recognise that this extortion scenario would be iterated. In an iterated series of extortion games, if a lunatic Blue completely ignored their o...
Why is the "default" special here? If bargaining or blackmail did happen, we know that "default" is impossible.
This seems like you're setting up a game scenario, and then telling us at the beginning of the second turn that we should ignore what the other player did on the first turn.
Initiating negotiations is an in-game choice. The blackmailer's choice imposes a cost on me, me pre-committing makes the blackmailer's payoff 0-0.
And in most cases it takes extra work to attempt blackmail. On the other hand, You should be open to blackmail by your enemies, since it would benefit them to harm you.
Couldn't parse what FAWS's comment was saying, but the following may be similar in spirit:
Assume we have a two-player game with a unique Nash equilibrium. Now allow player 1 to make a credible threat ("if you do X then I'll do Y"), and then player 2 must react to it "optimally" without making any prior precommitments of his own. If the resulting play makes player 1 better off and player 2 worse off than they would've fared under the Nash equilibrium, then let's say player 1 is being "too pushy".
For example, take the PD and add...
Does this mean we shouldn't care about the law? Regardless of the exact definition, I'm pretty sure that building a prison and putting me in it is not the default.
It still seems like a bad idea to not follow the law, even if that'd lead to a society that doesn't have laws, so where does my thinking go wrong? My current heuristic of "don't submit to blackmail, except when done by this or this or this organization" seems very ugly, especially as it isn't clear what organizations should be in that whitelist.
I must say, I'm surprised this comment has a two-digit positive karma as a front-page post.
Now that there's a discussion section, I expected the posting of unfinished thoughts, in need of discussion, to be mostly confined to that section; with the front page kept for thoughts that had been developed to a high level, and would serve to educate/inform those reading them.
I know this isn't quite rigorous, but if I can calculate the counterfactual "what would the other player's strategy be if ze did not model me as an agent capable of responding to incentives," blackmail seems easy to identify by comparison to this.
Perhaps this can be what we mean by 'default'?
I think this ties into Larks point -- if Larks didn't think I responded to incentives, I think ze'd just help the child, and asking me $1,000 would be blackmail. Clippy would not help the child, and so asking me $1,000 is trade.
I feel like what people call blackmail is largely related to intentionality. The blackmailer goes out of their way to harm you should you not cooperate.
In the trade example, whereas if someone wants to trade and you don't, and you need the object but don't trade, we don't blame that on the other person trying to harm you.
The decision to blackmail is made in the hope to gain something by you responding. If the blackmailer knows that you won't respond, their expected gain is drastically lowered, and they will probably decide to do something else instead ("something that takes less effort"). I suggest that maybe this is what we could call the "default". So if your expected utility is lower in the "default" case it's bargaining, otherwise, blackmail.
However this definition would call an offer "bargaining" if the "default" was t...
"Blackmail consists of two things, each indisputably legal on their own; yet, when combined in a single act, the result is considered a crime. What are the two things? First, there is either a threat or an offer. In the former case, it is, typically, to publicise on embarrassing secret; in the latter, it is to remain silent about this infonnation. Second, there is a demand or a request for funds or other valuable considerations. When put together, there is a threat that, unless paid off, the secret will be told." -Walter Block
Keep in mind: Controlling Constant Programs, Notion of Preference in Ambient Control.
There is a reasonable game-theoretic heuristic, "don't respond to blackmail" or "don't negotiate with terrorists". But what is actually meant by the word "blackmail" here? Does it have a place as a fundamental decision-theoretic concept, or is it merely an affective category, a class of situations activating a certain psychological adaptation that expresses disapproval of certain decisions and on the net protects (benefits) you, like those adaptation that respond to "being rude" or "offense"?
We, as humans, have a concept of "default", "do nothing strategy". The other plans can be compared to the moral value of the default. Doing harm would be something worse than the default, doing good something better than the default.
Blackmail is then a situation where by decision of another agent ("blackmailer"), you are presented with two options, both of which are harmful to you (worse than the default), and one of which is better for the blackmailer. The alternative (if the blackmailer decides not to blackmail) is the default.
Compare this with the same scenario, but with the "default" action of the other agent being worse for you than the given options. This would be called normal bargaining, as in trade, where both parties benefit from exchange of goods, but to a different extent depending on which cost is set.
Why is the "default" special here? If bargaining or blackmail did happen, we know that "default" is impossible. How can we tell two situations apart then, from their payoffs (or models of uncertainty about the outcomes) alone? It's necessary to tell these situations apart to manage not responding to threats, but at the same time cooperating in trade (instead of making things as bad as you can for the trade partner, no matter what it costs you). Otherwise, abstaining from doing harm looks exactly like doing good. A charitable gift of not blowing up your car and so on.
My hypothesis is that "blackmail" is what the suggestion of your mind to not cooperate feels like from the inside, the answer to a difficult problem computed by cognitive algorithms you don't understand, and not a simple property of the decision problem itself. By saying "don't respond to blackmail", you are pushing most of the hard work into intuitive categorization of decision problems into "blackmail" and "trade", with only correct interpretation of the results of that categorization left as an explicit exercise.
(A possible direction for formalizing these concepts involves introducing some kind of notion of resources, maybe amount of control, and instrumental vs. terminal spending, so that the "default" corresponds to less instrumental spending of controlled resources, but I don't see it clearly.)
(Let's keep on topic and not refer to powerful AIs or FAI in this thread, only discuss the concept of blackmail in itself, in decision-theoretic context.)
