A lot of social things appear arbitrary when deep down they must be deterministic. But bridging that gap is perhaps both computationally infeasible and doesn’t lend itself to particularly powerful abstractions (except for intentionality). At the same time, though, the subject is more inextricably integrated with the environment, so that it makes more sense to model the environment as falling into intentional units (agents) who are reactive. And then maybe certain bargaining procedures emerged (because they were adaptive) that are now integrated into our psyche as customs and moral intuitions.
For these bargaining procedures, I imagine, it’ll be important to abstract usefully from specific situations to more general games. Then you can classify a new situation as one that either requires going through the bargaining procedure again or is a near-replication of a situation whose bargaining outcome you already have stored. That would require exactly the indexer types of abilities – abstracting from situations to archetypes and storing the archetypes.
(E.g., if you sell books, there’s a stored bargaining solution for that where you declare a price, and if it’s right, hand over the book and get the money for it, and otherwise keep the book and don’t get the money. But if you were the first to create a search engine that indexes the full-text of books, there were no stored bargaining solutions for that and you had to go through the bargaining procedures.)
It also seems to me that there are people who, when in doubt, tend more toward running through the bargaining procedure, while others instead tend more toward observing and learning established bargaining solutions very well and maybe widening their references classes for games. I associate the first a bit with entrepreneurs, low agreeableness, Australia, and the Pavlov strategy, and the second with me, agreeable friends of mine, Germany/Switzerland, and tit for tat.
Thank you!
Yeah, that feels fitting to me too. I found these two posts on the term:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xqAnKW46FqzPLnGmH/causal-reality-vs-social-reality https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j2mcSRxhjRyhyLJEs/what-is-social-reality
A lot of social things appear arbitrary when deep down they must be deterministic. But bridging that gap is perhaps both computationally infeasible and doesn’t lend itself to particularly powerful abstractions (except for intentionality). At the same time, though, the subject is more inextricably integrated with the environment, so that it makes more sense to model the environment as falling into intentional units (agents) who are reactive. And then maybe certain bargaining procedures emerged (because they were adaptive) that are now integrated into our psyche as customs and moral intuitions.
For these bargaining procedures, I imagine, it’ll be important to abstract usefully from specific situations to more general games. Then you can classify a new situation as one that either requires going through the bargaining procedure again or is a near-replication of a situation whose bargaining outcome you already have stored. That would require exactly the indexer types of abilities – abstracting from situations to archetypes and storing the archetypes.
(E.g., if you sell books, there’s a stored bargaining solution for that where you declare a price, and if it’s right, hand over the book and get the money for it, and otherwise keep the book and don’t get the money. But if you were the first to create a search engine that indexes the full-text of books, there were no stored bargaining solutions for that and you had to go through the bargaining procedures.)
It also seems to me that there are people who, when in doubt, tend more toward running through the bargaining procedure, while others instead tend more toward observing and learning established bargaining solutions very well and maybe widening their references classes for games. I associate the first a bit with entrepreneurs, low agreeableness, Australia, and the Pavlov strategy, and the second with me, agreeable friends of mine, Germany/Switzerland, and tit for tat.