This is certainly an interesting experiment to read about! Question though: Does it technically count as a true prisoner’s dilemma if the aggregate wellbeing increases with unilateral defection? I would have thought it wouldn’t be a prisoner’s dilemma unless the unilateral defection reward were something between $100 and $200, rather than $300…? If I really wanted $100 to be donated to one of the orgs but also liked the other one (albeit not to the same extent), I might have just said something like “I will commit to nuking one org, then I will verifiably commit to donating >$100 to the org that gets nuked.”
I expect most people to think either that AMF or MIRI is much more likely to do good. So from most agent’s perspectives, the unilateral defection is only better if their chosen org wins. If someone has more of a portfolio approach that weights longtermist and global poverty efforts similarly, then your point holds. I expect that’s a minority position though.
According to wikipedia, the $300 vs $100 is fine for a one-shot prisoner’s dilemma. But an iterated prisoner’s dilemma would require (defect against cooperate)+(cooperate against defect) < 2*(cooperate cooperate), since the best outcome is supposed to be permanent cooperate/cooperate rather than alternating cooperation/defection.
However, the fact that this games gives out the same 0$ for both cooperate/defect and defect/defect means it nevertheless doesn’t count as an ordinary prisoner’s dilemma. Defecting against someone who defects needs to be strictly better than cooperating against a defector. In fact, in this case, every EA is likely going to put some positive valuation on $300 to both miri and amf, so cooperating against a defector is actively preferred to defecting against a defector.
This is certainly an interesting experiment to read about! Question though: Does it technically count as a true prisoner’s dilemma if the aggregate wellbeing increases with unilateral defection? I would have thought it wouldn’t be a prisoner’s dilemma unless the unilateral defection reward were something between $100 and $200, rather than $300…? If I really wanted $100 to be donated to one of the orgs but also liked the other one (albeit not to the same extent), I might have just said something like “I will commit to nuking one org, then I will verifiably commit to donating >$100 to the org that gets nuked.”
I expect most people to think either that AMF or MIRI is much more likely to do good. So from most agent’s perspectives, the unilateral defection is only better if their chosen org wins. If someone has more of a portfolio approach that weights longtermist and global poverty efforts similarly, then your point holds. I expect that’s a minority position though.
According to wikipedia, the $300 vs $100 is fine for a one-shot prisoner’s dilemma. But an iterated prisoner’s dilemma would require (defect against cooperate)+(cooperate against defect) < 2*(cooperate cooperate), since the best outcome is supposed to be permanent cooperate/cooperate rather than alternating cooperation/defection.
However, the fact that this games gives out the same 0$ for both cooperate/defect and defect/defect means it nevertheless doesn’t count as an ordinary prisoner’s dilemma. Defecting against someone who defects needs to be strictly better than cooperating against a defector. In fact, in this case, every EA is likely going to put some positive valuation on $300 to both miri and amf, so cooperating against a defector is actively preferred to defecting against a defector.