I find the unilateralist’s curse a particularly valuable concept to think about. However, I now worry that “unilateralist” is an easy label to tack on, and whether a particular action is unilateralist or not is susceptible to small changes in framing.
Consider the following hypothetical situations:
Company policy vs. team discretion
Alice is a researcher in a team of scientists at a large biomedical company. While working on the development of an HIV vaccine, the team accidentally created an air-transmissible variant of HIV. The scientists must decide whether to publish their discovery with the rest of the company, knowing that leaks may exist, and the knowledge may be used to create a devastating biological weapon, but also that it could help those who hope to develop defenses against such weapons, including other teams within the same company. Most of the team thinks they should keep it quiet, but company policy is strict that such information must be shared with the rest of the company to maintain the culture of open collaboration.
Alice thinks the rest of the team should either share this information or quit. Eventually, she tells her vice president her concerns, who relayed it to the rest of the company in a company-open document.
Alice does not know if this information ever leaked past the company.
Stan and the bomb
Stan is an officer in charge of overseeing a new early warning system intended to detect (nuclear) intercontinental ballistic missiles from an enemy country. A warning system appeared to have detected five missiles heading towards his homeland, quickly going through 30 early layers of verification. Stan suspects this is a false alarm, but is not sure. Military instructions are clear that such warnings must immediately be relayed upwards.
Stan decided not to relay the message to his superiors, on the grounds that it was probably a false alarm and he didn’t want his superiors to mistakenly assume otherwise and therefore start a catastrophic global nuclear war.
Listen to the UN, or other countries with similar abilities?
Elbonia, a newly founded Republic, has an unusually good climate engineering program. Elbonian scientists and engineers are able to develop a comprehensive geo-engineering solution that they believe can reverse the climate crisis at minimal risk. Further, the United Nations’ General Assembly recently passed a resolution that stated in no uncertain terms that any nation in possession of such geo-engineering technology must immediately a) share the plans with the rest of the world and b) start the process of lowering the world’s temperature by 2 °C.
However, there’s one catch: Elbonian intelligence knows (or suspects) that five other countries have developed similar geo-engineering plans, but have resolutely refused to release or act on them. Furthermore, four of the five countries have openly argued that geo-engineering is dangerous and has potentially catastrophic consequences, but refused to share explicit analysis why (Elbonia’s own risk assessment finds little evidence of such dangers).
Reasoning that he should be cooperative with the rest of the world, the prime minister of Elbonia made the executive decision to obey the General Assembly’s resolution and start lowering the world’s temperature.
Cooperation with future/past selves, or other people?
Ishmael’s crew has a white elephant holiday tradition, where individuals come up with weird and quirky gifts for the rest of the crew secretly, and do not reveal what the gifts are until Christmas. Ishmael comes up with a brilliant gift idea and hides it.
While drunk one day with other crew members, Ishmael accidentally lets slip that he was particularly proud of his idea. The other members egg him on to reveal more. After a while, Ishmael finally relents when some other crew members reveal their ideas, reasoning that he shouldn’t be a holdout. Ishmael suspects that he will regret his past self’s decision when he becomes more sober.
Putting aside whether the above actions were correct or not, in each of the above cases, have the protagonists acted unilaterally?
I think this is a hard question to answer. My personal answer is “yes,” but I think another reasonable person can easily believe that the above protagonists were fully cooperative. Further, I don’t think the hypothetical scenarios above were particularly convoluted edge cases. I suspect that in real life, figuring out whether the unilateralist’s curse applies to your actions will hinge on subtle choices of reference classes. I don’t have a good solution to this.
I really like this (I think you could make it top level if you wanted). I think these of these are cases of multiple levels of cooperation. If you’re part of an organization that wants to be uncooperative (and you can’t leave cooperatively), then you’re going to be uncooperative with one of them.
Good point. Now that you bring this up, I vaguely remember a Reddit AMA where an evolutionary biologist made the (obvious in hindsight, but never occurred to me at the time) claim that with multilevel selection, altruism on one level is often means defecting on a higher (or lower) level. Which probably unconsciously inspired this post!
As for making it top level, I originally wanted to include a bunch of thoughts on the unilateralist’s curse as a post, but then I realized that I’m a one-trick pony in this domain...hard to think of novel/useful things that Bostrom et. al hasn’t already covered!
I find the unilateralist’s curse a particularly valuable concept to think about. However, I now worry that “unilateralist” is an easy label to tack on, and whether a particular action is unilateralist or not is susceptible to small changes in framing.
Consider the following hypothetical situations:
Company policy vs. team discretion
Alice is a researcher in a team of scientists at a large biomedical company. While working on the development of an HIV vaccine, the team accidentally created an air-transmissible variant of HIV. The scientists must decide whether to publish their discovery with the rest of the company, knowing that leaks may exist, and the knowledge may be used to create a devastating biological weapon, but also that it could help those who hope to develop defenses against such weapons, including other teams within the same company. Most of the team thinks they should keep it quiet, but company policy is strict that such information must be shared with the rest of the company to maintain the culture of open collaboration.
Alice thinks the rest of the team should either share this information or quit. Eventually, she tells her vice president her concerns, who relayed it to the rest of the company in a company-open document.
Alice does not know if this information ever leaked past the company.
Stan and the bomb
Stan is an officer in charge of overseeing a new early warning system intended to detect (nuclear) intercontinental ballistic missiles from an enemy country. A warning system appeared to have detected five missiles heading towards his homeland, quickly going through 30 early layers of verification. Stan suspects this is a false alarm, but is not sure. Military instructions are clear that such warnings must immediately be relayed upwards.
Stan decided not to relay the message to his superiors, on the grounds that it was probably a false alarm and he didn’t want his superiors to mistakenly assume otherwise and therefore start a catastrophic global nuclear war.
Listen to the UN, or other countries with similar abilities?
Elbonia, a newly founded Republic, has an unusually good climate engineering program. Elbonian scientists and engineers are able to develop a comprehensive geo-engineering solution that they believe can reverse the climate crisis at minimal risk. Further, the United Nations’ General Assembly recently passed a resolution that stated in no uncertain terms that any nation in possession of such geo-engineering technology must immediately a) share the plans with the rest of the world and b) start the process of lowering the world’s temperature by 2 °C.
However, there’s one catch: Elbonian intelligence knows (or suspects) that five other countries have developed similar geo-engineering plans, but have resolutely refused to release or act on them. Furthermore, four of the five countries have openly argued that geo-engineering is dangerous and has potentially catastrophic consequences, but refused to share explicit analysis why (Elbonia’s own risk assessment finds little evidence of such dangers).
Reasoning that he should be cooperative with the rest of the world, the prime minister of Elbonia made the executive decision to obey the General Assembly’s resolution and start lowering the world’s temperature.
Cooperation with future/past selves, or other people?
Ishmael’s crew has a white elephant holiday tradition, where individuals come up with weird and quirky gifts for the rest of the crew secretly, and do not reveal what the gifts are until Christmas. Ishmael comes up with a brilliant gift idea and hides it.
While drunk one day with other crew members, Ishmael accidentally lets slip that he was particularly proud of his idea. The other members egg him on to reveal more. After a while, Ishmael finally relents when some other crew members reveal their ideas, reasoning that he shouldn’t be a holdout. Ishmael suspects that he will regret his past self’s decision when he becomes more sober.
Putting aside whether the above actions were correct or not, in each of the above cases, have the protagonists acted unilaterally?
I think this is a hard question to answer. My personal answer is “yes,” but I think another reasonable person can easily believe that the above protagonists were fully cooperative. Further, I don’t think the hypothetical scenarios above were particularly convoluted edge cases. I suspect that in real life, figuring out whether the unilateralist’s curse applies to your actions will hinge on subtle choices of reference classes. I don’t have a good solution to this.
I really like this (I think you could make it top level if you wanted). I think these of these are cases of multiple levels of cooperation. If you’re part of an organization that wants to be uncooperative (and you can’t leave cooperatively), then you’re going to be uncooperative with one of them.
Good point. Now that you bring this up, I vaguely remember a Reddit AMA where an evolutionary biologist made the (obvious in hindsight, but never occurred to me at the time) claim that with multilevel selection, altruism on one level is often means defecting on a higher (or lower) level. Which probably unconsciously inspired this post!
As for making it top level, I originally wanted to include a bunch of thoughts on the unilateralist’s curse as a post, but then I realized that I’m a one-trick pony in this domain...hard to think of novel/useful things that Bostrom et. al hasn’t already covered!