Iterated conversation games
Arsehat is an invasive strategy
July 8, 2022 — June 23, 2022
Assumed audience:
Anyone who has ever wanted just that one tiny thing to make the world nicer
Heavy construction right now.
Ok, I think I flogged the idea in tokenism and table stakes to death. Now I have thought about it again, but from the perspective of iterated games, which leads me to wonder about conversational generosity as a soft mechanism design problem.
Disclaimer: I strongly suspect I am not the first person to think of this kind of model, but I want to reason it through for myself to see where it takes me. Specifically, I want an iterative game theory model of communication norms and movement design.
There are two pieces here: iterated iterated game theory, and cheap talk. Plugging these together I think we can learn something about what how we could design our communication style.
But first, those pieces. I’ll do the big one first.
The iterated prisoners dilemma has been flogged to death as a metaphor, and has been justifiably criticised for being applied too often, and/or too loosely.
However, there is an arena in which I think the IPD provides some servicable metaphors for how we treat one another: conversation.
The useful point of attack here is that I think this model gives us a means of thinking about ways of speak not just as right or wrong, polite or rude, but rather, in a way that invite us to thing about the effect, side effects, and reactions that those ways of conversing will bring about.
1 Game theoretic conversation
Let us examine a model for conversation.
2 Principle of charity
3 What conversation strategies will spread?
The commodity that we trade in conversation is also constrained: status, self esteem. I think the rarefied, abstracted economy of interpersonal status potentially maps nicely onto the abstracted economy of iterated game theory. In particular, we often seem to behave as if we believe the dynamics of online communication are simpler than those of the abstracted game-theory models.
In particular, I think that iterative game theory models answer questions such Why can’t people just be nice? and more interestingly for me, have can we persuade people to be nicer?. In particular, we can answer questions without resorting to boring, unactionable and shallow analyses such as people are mean, or those people are mean unlike these people, and reason through How can we foster people being nice to one another? Let us get into it.
4 A game theoretic model of tweets
5 Which strategies proper depends on which strategies are out there
Strategies need to spread and also maintain.
6 Teams and tribes
7 Word salad while I think this through
So why by the way this for me the reason would be that even though these iterated game the methods have fallen out of favour when it comes to modelling real economies or real international conflict or whatever, they actually might be unusually effective for modelling social interactions at large on the I and in particular, I think that some of the stylised observations that the models give us are actually real insights into what types of communication can prosper in the Publix fear and how we can best communicate with one another effectively and maybe even kindly.
What are these novel insights the first one for me, the big one that has that made waves when it again the first became big was the idea that we can’t just think about how things are or how things would work if we could get to some hypothetical new state game theory we have to think about everything is evolution reprocess we can’t just think about a steady state. We can’t just think about ideal state. We have to consider both the state that were now the state that we’d like to get to how we might get there and how we would maintain that state once we got there, some states we might like to get into just aren’t feasible to reach some that we could reach. We couldn’t necessarily maintain even if we got there and that’s much like evolution itself so if we consider for example that it might be nice if all animals learned to be kind to another, and if the lion were lie down with the lamb and so on, that would indeed be nice, but that is not a maintainable state for an ecosystem. If you have an ecosystem where there are no predators and everything can learn to can make the choice to give away its defensive mechanisms then that ecosystem is vulnerable to invasion by predators, so if the line and the lamb lie down together and both forget how to fight and eventually wolves might turn up and eat them both. So there is there is a certain degree to which any plausible ecosystem has to trade-off Between things going great for the participants in that ecosystem and also the ecosystem being robust against being invaded by outsiders. We have to have systems that are in some sense self maintaining and robust against New invasions from the outside or within.
I’m interesting corollary to this is that we might also need to be open to the idea that a new way of any strategy and wave communicating with another might need to might need to adapt over time so in the classic irritate prisoners dilemma
All these examples are very biological. Let’s imagine how we might apply these kind of concepts to public communication so a great example of a strategy which would be very high yield. Probably if we could attain it would be that when we are communicating with each other, we always tell the truth, so just imagine if you communicating with the Internet never lied you always said exactly what you meant to the best of your ability communicating in such a world would be very simple and we can imagine this amazingly effective world to live in possibly be some downsides. Maybe you’ll be told whether that stripey shirt really does look good on you or not with a little bit too much honesty, but in general, it would probably be a fairly functional world to oper, however, this is probably not an evolutionarily stable strategy in the world, where everyone tells the truth all the time the first person who discovers how to lie, will do extremely well that one person who has the ability to tell untruths will be able to get away with telling all man not untruths because everyone else will have forgotten how to be suspicious and how to, and that there is a need to fact check the informatio so in that sense, always telling the truth is a high value but unstable strategy. We can imagine the opposite always lie if you never tell the truth whatsoever and that is probably a stable strategy, but also with very low surplus, very bad strategy and a will wear all of us lie all the time Min, no point communicating all. We couldn’t get anything done, so be pretty grim to live on the other hand alone, truth, teller, alone, person who is actually capable of communicat can’t do much in this world. They won’t have anyone else that they can truthfully communicate with at least individually. We can imagine more complex situations are society where people tell truth, a lot and society Pool tell liars a lot and imagine that maybe but you know but there’s some mixture of truth and mixture of lies in each of that population scale. A population of truth. Tell us could function quite well population of usual truth. Tellers could do quite well, and a population of usual lies would do quite badly, so maybe one individual truth can invade a whole population of lies, but if you have to societies one with a stronger norm of truth, but another, maybe the society with stronger, normal truth will do quite well, but maybe if there’s enough lies and keep on their toes, they will still be robust against invasions by populations of liars, so this kind of complicated dynamic is the kind of thing we expect an integrated game theory mole
That last example shows at one of, I think the key insights for iterative games theory in it we can naturally think about competing populations of different strategies we can be very general about this purely abstract theory. Let’s think about a phenomenal, observe in particular on the modern Internet, which we if we have different cultures and different subcultures with different communication strategies, both inside their groups and outward facing, in this context, we might wonder if the community strategies are one particular group be copied can be expand to spread throughout the entire entire population, or whether they can achieve some success, or whether they will naturally self limiting all these kind of questions we might ask about communicate strategies in the context of think about how they compete with one other on the Internet
8 Incoming
Köster et al. (2022):
How do societies learn and maintain social norms? Here we use multiagent reinforcement learning to investigate the learning dynamics of enforcement and compliance behaviors. Artificial agents populate a foraging environment and need to learn to avoid a poisonous berry. Agents learn to avoid eating poisonous berries better when doing so is taboo, meaning the behavior is punished by other agents. The taboo helps overcome a credit assignment problem in discovering delayed health effects. Critically, introducing an additional taboo, which results in punishment for eating a harmless berry, further improves overall returns. This “silly rule” counterintuitively has a positive effect because it gives agents more practice in learning rule enforcement. By probing what individual agents have learned, we demonstrate that normative behavior relies on a sequence of learned skills. Learning rule compliance builds upon prior learning of rule enforcement by other agents. Our results highlight the benefit of employing a multiagent reinforcement learning computational model focused on learning to implement complex actions.