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I think a bunch of discussion of acausal trade might be better framed as "simulation trade." It's hard to point to "acausal" trade in the real world because, well, everything is at least kinda iterated and at least kinda causally connected. But, there's plenty of places where the thing you're doing is mainly trading with a simulated partner. And this still shares some important components with literal-galaxy-brains making literal acausal trade.
There is convoluted-causality in a lot of trust relationships. "I trust this transaction because most people are honest in this situation", which works BECAUSE most people are, in fact, honest in that situation. And being honest does (slightly) reinforce that for future transactions, including transactions between strangers which get easier only to the degree they're similar to you.
But, while complex and involving human social norms and "prediction", it's not comparable to Newcomb (one-shot, high-stakes, no side-effects) or acausal trade (zero-shot, no path to specific knowledge of outcome).
2Gunnar_Zarncke
In which way is sharing some common social knowledge relevantly different from sharing the same physical universe?
Common social knowledge has predictive power and causal pathways to update the knowledge (and others' knowledge of the social averages which contain you). Acausal trade isn't even sharing the same physical universe - it's pure theory, with no way to adjust over time.
This is an experiment in short-form content on LW2.0. I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:
I ask people not to create top-level comments here, but feel free to reply to comments like you would a FB post.