A good reference, but it's worth remembering that if I tried the radio sabotage trick in real life, either I'd accidentally break the transmit capability as well as receive, or I'd be there until the deadline had come and gone happily blabbering about how I'm on the hill that looks like a pointy hat, while you were 20 miles away on a different hill that also looked like a pointy hat, cursing me, my radio and my inadequate directions.
In other words, like most things that are counterintuitive, these findings are counterintuitive precisely because their applicability in real life is the exception rather than the rule; by all means let's recognize the exceptions, but without forgetting what they are.
In the post I tried pretty hard to show the applicability of the techniques to real life, and so did Schelling. Apparently we haven't succeeded. Maybe some more quotes will tip the scales? Something of a more general nature, not ad hoc trickery?
If one is committed to punish a certain type of behavior when it reaches certain limits, but the limits are not carefully and objectively defined, the party threatened will realize when the time comes to decide whether the threat must be enforced or not, his interest and that of the threatening party will coincide in an attempt to avoid the mutually unpleasant consequences.
Or what do you say to this:
Among the legal privileges of corporations, two that are mentioned in textbooks are the right to sue and the "right" to be sued. Who wants to be sued! But the right to be sued is the power to make a promise: to borrow money, to enter a contract, to do business with someone who might be damaged. If suit does arise, the "right" seems a liability in retrospect; beforehand it was a prerequisite to doing business.
Or this:
...If each party agrees to send a million dollars to the Red Cross on condition the other does, each may
In other words, like most things that are counterintuitive, these findings are counterintuitive precisely because their applicability in real life is the exception rather than the rule; by all means let's recognize the exceptions, but without forgetting what they are.
The examples in the original post are not exceptions. It just takes a while to recognise them under the veneers of social norms and instinctual behaviours.
The broken radio, for example, is exactly what I see when attempting to communicate with those who would present themselves as higher status. Blatant stupidity (broken receiver) is often a signal, not a weakness. (And I can incorporate this understanding when dealing with said people, which I find incredibly useful.)
Having read only a portion of the book so far (thanks for the pdf cousin_it and Alicorn!), I've noticed that the techniques and strategies Schelling goes over are applicable to my struggles with akrasia.
I'm sure it's been said before on lesswrong that when there's a conflict between immediate and delayed gratification, you can think of yourself as two agents: one rational, one emotional; one thinking in the present, one able to plan future moves and regret mistakes. These agents are obviously having a conflict, and I often find Rational Me (RM) losing ground to Irrational Me (IM) in situations that this book describes perfectly.
Say RM wants to work, and IM wants to watch TV online. If RM settles on "some" TV, IM can exploit the vagueness and non-natural settling point, and watch an entire season of a show. The two most stable negotiating points seem to be "no TV" and "unlimited amounts of TV".
Other techniques people use to avoid akrasia map really well with Schelling's conflict strategies, like breaking up commitments into small chunks ("fifteen minutes of work, then I can have a small reward") and forming a commitment with a third party to force your hand (like using stickk.com or working with friends or classmates).
Slightly related (talking about game theory), one of the most bizarre things was the 1994 football/soccer match between Grenada and Barbados, in which both teams tried to win the game by deliberately score against themselves (and the opponents trying to prevent that).
A search through the comments on this article turns up exactly zero instances of the term "Vietnam".
Taking a hard look at what Schelling tried when faced with the real-world 'game' in Vietnam is enlightening as to the ups and downs of actually putting his theories -- or game theory in general -- into practice.
Fred Kaplan's piece in Slate from when Schelling won the Nobel is a good start:
So what happens in the broken radio example if both the persons have already read schellings book? Nobody gets the prize? I mean how does such a situation is resolved? If everybody perfects the art of rationality, who wins? and who loses?
Shelling was actually the less ruthless of the pioneers of game theory. The other pioneer was Von Neumann who advocated a unilateral nuclear attack on the USSR before they developed their own nuclear weapons.
By contrast, Shelling invented the red hotline between the US and USSR, since more communication meant less chance of WW3.
Basically he was about ruthlessness for the good of humanity.
Shelling was actually the less ruthless of the pioneers of game theory. The other pioneer was Von Neumann who advocated a unilateral nuclear attack on the USSR before they developed their own nuclear weapons.
One thing I don't understand, why didn't the US announce at the end of World War II that it will nuke any country that attempts to develop a nuclear weapon or conducts a nuclear bomb test? If it had done that, then there would have been no need to actually nuke anyone. Was game theory invented too late?
You are the President of the US. You make this announcement. Two years later, your spies tell you that the UK has a well-advanced nuclear bomb research programme. The world is, nevertheless, as peaceful on the whole as in fact it was in the real timeline.
Do you nuke London?
I can think, straight away, of four or five reason why this would have been very much the wrong thing to do.
Basically he was about ruthlessness for the good of humanity.
Yeah I think the clue is in there. Better to be about the good of humanity, and ruthless if that's what's called for. Setting yourself up as 'the guy who has the balls to make the tough decisions' usually denotes you as a nutjob. Case in point: von Neumann suggesting launching was the right strategy. I don't think anyone would argue today that he was right, though back then the decision must have seemed pretty much impossible to make.
Case in point: von Neumann suggesting launching was the right strategy. I don't think anyone would argue today that he was right, though back then the decision must have seemed pretty much impossible to make.
Survivorship bias. There were some very near misses (Cuban Missile Crisis, Stanislav Petrov, etc.), and it seems reasonable to conclude that a substantial fraction of the Everett branches that came out of our 1946 included a global thermonuclear war.
I'm not willing to conclude that von Neumann was right, but the fact that we avoided nuclear war isn't clear proof he was wrong.
This strikes me as a variant of the ultimatum game. The allies would have to accept a large asymmetry of power. If even one of them rejects the ultimatum you're stuck with the prospect of giving up your strategy (having burned most or all of your political capital with other nations), or committing mass murder.
When you add in the inability of governments to make binding commitments, this doesn't strike me as a viable strategy.
Kaj, I was discussing a hypothetical nuclear strategy. We can't discuss any such strategy without involving the possibility of killing millions. Do the ethical injunctions imply that such discussions shouldn't occur?
Recall that MAD required that the US commit itself to destroy the Soviet Union if it detected that the USSR launched their nuclear missiles. Does MAD also violate ethical injunctions? Should it also not have been discussed? (How many different ways could things have gone wrong with MAD?)
So says the man from his comfy perch in an Everett branch that survived the cold war.
What I'm really getting at here is that [a comment you made on LW] unfits you for inclusion in the human race.
Downvoted for being one of the most awful statements I have ever seen on this site, far and away the most awful to receive so many upvotes. What the fuck, people.
anyone who's blandly willing to murder millions of non-combatants of a friendly power in peacetime because they do not accede to empire-building is unfit for inclusion in the human race
You do realize that the point of my proposed strategy was to prevent the destruction of Earth (from a potential nuclear war between the US and USSR), and not "empire building"?
I don't understand why Richard and you consider MAD acceptable, but my proposal beyond the pale. Both of you use the words "friendly power in peacetime", which must be relevant somehow but I don't see how. Why would it be ok (i.e., fit for inclusion in the human race) to commit to murdering millions of non-combatants of an enemy power in wartime in order to prevent nuclear war, but not ok to commit to murdering millions of non-combatants of a friendly power in peacetime in service of the same goal?
A comment on LW is not the same as that bland willingness to slaughter, and you do yourself no favours by incorrectly paraphrasing it as such.
I also took Richard's comment personally (he did say "your bland willingness", emphasis added), which is probably why I didn't respond to it.
The issue seems to be that nuking a friendly power in peacetime feels to people pretty much like a railroad problem where you need to shove the fat person. In this particular case, since it isn't a hypothetical, the situation has been made all the more complicated by actual discussion of the historical and current geopolitics surrounding the situation (which essentially amounts to trying to find a clever solution to a train problem or arguing that the fat person wouldn't weigh enough.) The reaction is against your apparent strong consequentialism along with the fact that your strategy wouldn't actually work given the geopolitical situation. If one had an explicitly hypothetical geopolitical situation where this would work and then see how they respond it might be interesting.
I was commenting on what he said, not guessing at his beliefs.
I don't think you've made a good case (any case) for your assertion concerning who is and is not to be included in our race. And it's not at all obvious to me that Wei Dai is wrong. I do hope that my lack of conviction on this point doesn't render me unfit for existence.
Anyone willing to deploy a nuclear weapon has a "bland willingness to slaughter". Anyone employing MAD has a "bland willingness to destroy the entire human race".
I suspect that you have no compelling proof that Wei Dai's hypothetical nuclear strategy is in fact wrong, let alone one compelling enough to justify the type of personal attack leveled by RichardKennaway. Would you also accuse Eliezer of displaying a "bland willingness to torture someone for 50 years" and sentence him to exclusion from humanity?
According to this book, in May 1949 (months before the Soviet's first bomb test), the US had 133 nuclear bombs and a plan (in case of war) to bomb 70 Soviet cities, but concluded that this was probably insufficient to "bring about capitulation". The book also mentions that the US panicked and speeded up the production of nuclear bombs after the Soviet bomb test, so if it had done that earlier, perhaps it would have had enough bombs to deter the Soviets from developing them.
Also, according to this article, the idea of using nuclear weapons to deter the development/testing of fusion weapons was actually proposed, by I I Rabi and Enrico Fermi:
They believed that any nation that violated such a prohibition would have to test a prototype weapon; this would be detected by the US and retaliation using the world’s largest stock of atomic bombs should follow. Their proposal gained no traction.
It seems equally rational for the US to have renounced its own nuclear program, thereby rendering it immune to the nuclear attacks of other nations. That is what you're saying, right? The only way for the USSR to be immune from nuclear attack would be to prove to the US that it didn't have a program. Ergo, the US could be immune to nuclear attack if it proved to the USSR that it didn't have a program. Of course, that wouldn't ever deter the nuclear power from nuking the non-nuclear power. If the US prevented the USSR from developing nukes, it could hang the threat of nuclear war over them for as long as it liked in order to get what it wanted. Developing nuclear weapons was the only option the USSR had if it wanted to preserve its sovereignty. Therefore, threatening to nuke the USSR if it developed nukes would guarantee that you would nuke it if they didn't (i.e. use the nuke threat in every scenario, because why not?), which would force the USSR to develop nukes. Expecting the USSR, a country every inch as nationalistic as the US, a country that just won a war against far worse odds than the US ever faced, to bend the knee is simply unrealistic.
Also, what would the long-term outcome be? Either the US rules the world through fear, or it nukes every country that ever inches toward nuclear weaponry and turns the planet into a smoky craphole. I'll take MAD any day; despite its obvious risks, it proved pretty stable.
I think that proposed equilibrium would have been extremely unlikely under circumstances where the US (a) had abandoned their pre-war isolationist policies and (b) were about to embark on a mission of bending other nations, often through military force, to their will. Nukes had just been used to end a war with Japan. Why wouldn't the US use them to end the Korean war, for example? Or even to pre-empt it? Or to pre-empt any other conflict it had an interest in? The US acted incredibly aggressively when a single misstep could have sent Soviet missiles in their direction. How aggressive might it have been if there was no such danger? I think you underestimate how much of a show stopper nuclear weapons were in the 40s and 50s. There was no international terrorism or domestic activism that could exact punitive measures on those who threatened to use or used nukes.
Even though the cold war is long over, I am still disturbed by how many nuclear weapons there are in the world. Even so, I would much rather live in this climate than one in which only a single nation - a nation with a long history of interfering with other sovereign countries, a nation that is currently engaged in two wars of aggression - was the only nuclear power around.
There seems to be a free online version of Schelling's book at http://www.questiaschool.com/read/94434630.
The radio example is strangely apt given the most blatant manipulation of this sort I've experienced has involved people texting saying 'I'm already at [my preferred pub] for the evening: meet here? Sorry but will be out of reception', or people emailing asking you to deal with something and then their out of office appearing on your response.
"Anyone, no matter how crazy, who you utterly and completely ignore will eventually stop bothering you." quote from memory from Spider Robinson, context was working in a mental hospital so escalation to violence wasn't a risk.
In the radio example, there is no way for me to convince you that the receive capability is truly broken. Given that, there is no reason for me to actually break the receive ability, and you should distrust any claim on my part that the receive ability has been broken.
But Schelling must have been able to follow this reasoning, so what point was he trying to illustrate with the radio example?
It can be difficult to pretend to be unable to hear someone on the other end of a two way communication. The impulse not to interrupt is strong enough to cause detectable irregularities in speech. Actually breaking, or at least turning off, the receive capability might be essential to maintaining the impression on the other end that it's broken.
One obvious "upgrade" to any decision theory that has such problems is to discard all of your knowledge (data, observations) before making any decisions (save for some structural knowledge to leave the decision algorithm nontrivial). For each decision that you make (using given decision algorithm) while knowing X, you can make a conditional decision (using the same decision algorithm) that says "If X, then A else B", and then recall whether X is actually true. This, for example, mends the particular failure of not being able to precommit (you remember that you are on the losing branch only after you've made the decision to do a certain disadvantageous action if you are on the losing branch).
I sometimes think of game theory as being roughly divided in three parts, like Gaul. There's competitive zero-sum game theory, there's cooperative game theory, and there are games where players compete but also have some shared interest.
I'm still trying to figure out a good description of "cooperative game theory". What do you think of this:
Cooperative game theory studies situations where agreements to cooperate can be enforced, and asks which agreements and outcomes will result. This typically involves considerations of individual rationality and fairness.
This seems interesting in the horrifying way I have been considering excising from myself due to the prevalence of hostile metastrategic bashes: that is, people find you are the kind of person who flat-out welcomes game theory making a monster of em, and then refuses to deal with you, good day, enjoy being a sociopath, and without the charm, to boot.
I sometimes think of game theory as being roughly divided in three parts, like Gaul. There's competitive zero-sum game theory, there's cooperative game theory, and there are games where players compete but also have some shared interest
Almost all human interactions are the third type. In fact, I think of this not as 3 parts, but as one thing - strategy, which has (at least) 2 special cases that have been studied: zero-sum and cooperative positive-sum. These special cases are interesting not because they occur, but because they illuminate aspects of the whole.
I haven't read this book, but I can't see how Schelling would convincingly make this argument:
Leo Szilard has even pointed to the paradox that one might wish to confer immunity on foreign spies rather than subject them to prosecution, since they may be the only means by which the enemy can obtain persuasive evidence of the important truth that we are making no preparations for embarking on a surprise attack.
It's true that enemy spies can provide a useful function, in allowing you to credibly signal self-serving information. However, deliberate, public...
I don't quite see how conferring immunity on foreign spies would degrade the information they could access. Deliberately and openly feeding them information is going to be pointless, as they obviously can't trust you. But encouraging foreign spies by not prosecuting them should not negatively affect their ability to obtain and relay information.
I sometimes think of game theory as being roughly divided in three parts, like Gaul. There's competitive zero-sum game theory, there's cooperative game theory, and there are games where players compete but also have some shared interest. Except this third part isn't a middle ground. It's actually better thought of as ultra-competitive game theory. Zero-sum settings are relatively harmless: you minimax and that's it. It's the variable-sum games that make you nuke your neighbour.
Could you clarify that last bit for me? You seem to have a valid point but I...
I am in the middle of reading this book, due to this post. I strongly second the recommendation to read it.
Why should it be advantageous to break your reciever? You've been dropped in a wild, mountainous region, with only as many supplies as you can carry down on your parachute. Finding and coordinating with another human is to your advantage, even if you don't get extracted immediately upon meeting the objective. The wilderness is no place to sit down on a hilltop. You need to find food, water, shelter and protection from predators, and doing this with someone else to help you is immensely easier. We formed tribes in the first place for exactly this reason.
This is where rationality and logic meet. If, upon landing, you knew that the other person had broken their own radio in order to avoid work, you would most likely meet up with them anyway. Being that you are away from civilization and will only be picked up upon rendezvous, it is in your own best interest to meet, and then reveal the other's deception upon pickup. Even if you are not given their share, you still have your own, which is the original goal, and you have not lost anything. Also, the work that it may have taken to reach a coordinate acceptable to both persons may be equal or more than the work put out if you had gone straight to the other person.
It's an old book, I know, and one that many of us have already read. But if you haven't, you should.
If there's anything in the world that deserves to be called a martial art of rationality, this book is the closest approximation yet. Forget rationalist Judo: this is rationalist eye-gouging, rationalist gang warfare, rationalist nuclear deterrence. Techniques that let you win, but you don't want to look in the mirror afterward.
Imagine you and I have been separately parachuted into an unknown mountainous area. We both have maps and radios, and we know our own positions, but don't know each other's positions. The task is to rendezvous. Normally we'd coordinate by radio and pick a suitable meeting point, but this time you got lucky. So lucky in fact that I want to strangle you: upon landing you discovered that your radio is broken. It can transmit but not receive.
Two days of rock-climbing and stream-crossing later, tired and dirty, I arrive at the hill where you've been sitting all this time smugly enjoying your lack of information.
And after we split the prize and cash our checks I learn that you broke the radio on purpose.
Schelling's book walks you through numerous conflict situations where an unintuitive and often self-limiting move helps you win, slowly building up to the topic of nuclear deterrence between the US and the Soviets. And it's not idle speculation either: the author worked at the White House at the dawn of the Cold War and his theories eventually found wide military application in deterrence and arms control. Here's a selection of quotes to give you a flavor: the whole book is like this, except interspersed with game theory math.
The use of a professional collecting agency by a business firm for the collection of debts is a means of achieving unilateral rather than bilateral communication with its debtors and of being therefore unavailable to hear pleas or threats from the debtors.
A sufficiently severe and certain penalty on the payment of blackmail can protect a potential victim.
One may have to pay the bribed voter if the election is won, not on how he voted.
I can block your car in the road by placing my car in your way; my deterrent threat is passive, the decision to collide is up to you. If you, however, find me in your way and threaten to collide unless I move, you enjoy no such advantage: the decision to collide is still yours, and I enjoy deterrence. You have to arrange to have to collide unless I move, and that is a degree more complicated.
We have learned that the threat of massive destruction may deter an enemy only if there is a corresponding implicit promise of nondestruction in the event he complies, so that we must consider whether too great a capacity to strike him by surprise may induce him to strike first to avoid being disarmed by a first strike from us.
Leo Szilard has even pointed to the paradox that one might wish to confer immunity on foreign spies rather than subject them to prosecution, since they may be the only means by which the enemy can obtain persuasive evidence of the important truth that we are making no preparations for embarking on a surprise attack.
I sometimes think of game theory as being roughly divided in three parts, like Gaul. There's competitive zero-sum game theory, there's cooperative game theory, and there are games where players compete but also have some shared interest. Except this third part isn't a middle ground. It's actually better thought of as ultra-competitive game theory. Zero-sum settings are relatively harmless: you minimax and that's it. It's the variable-sum games that make you nuke your neighbour.
Sometime ago in my wild and reckless youth that hopefully isn't over yet, a certain ex-girlfriend took to harassing me with suicide threats. (So making her stay alive was presumably our common interest in this variable-sum game.) As soon as I got around to looking at the situation through Schelling goggles, it became clear that ignoring the threats just leads to escalation. The correct solution was making myself unavailable for threats. Blacklist the phone number, block the email, spend a lot of time out of home. If any messages get through, pretend I didn't receive them anyway. It worked. It felt kinda bad, but it worked.