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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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Okay, well I include some degree of adaptation in my definition of "very intelligent". In fact, adaptation is the main advantage that consequentialists have over deontologists.

Your adversary is allowed to adapt too, and they are allowed to (and in fact incentivized to) adapt in the way that is as inconvenient as possible for your ability to counter that adaptation.

BTW in terms of a concrete adversarial environment I'm thinking "high frequency trading". You can build a gloriously detailed model of the world and a list of actions you can take within the world and the predicted effect of those actions, and you are certainly free to choose the algorithm of "consult my super detailed world model about the expected outcome of each of my possible actions, and take the action with the best expected result according to that model". But your environment contains a bunch of different entities trying out a multitude of different strategies, keeping the ones that work and discarding the ones that don't. The strategies that lose money on average will run out of money and stop trading, and eventually a strategy that makes money on average while trading with you will emerge (and keep trading as long as it continues making money). It is entirely possible that neither you nor your adversary will know why their strategy beats yours on average.

If you're talking about how consequentialism becomes optimal in the limit as your world model approaches perfection, then sure, but I don't think the behavior at the limit is particularly informative of the behavior in the real world. Consider that in the limit as your adversary's available computing power approaches infinity, if you have a 1,000,000 byte message, and you encrypt it with a 4096 bit RSA key that you keep to yourself, and you hand the encrypted message to your adversary, they have 999,488 bytes of information about what your message was. But in practice your adversary actually has ~0 bits of information about the contents of the message.

I agree that even adaptation can be successfully adapted to by an adversary. My claim is merely that adaptive agents (e.g. consequentialists) will eventually outcompete agents that operate according to fixed rules (consequentialists). In your example, the adversaries are adaptive. If they followed fixed rules, they would be poor adversaries.

I think there are probably environments where consequentialists outcompete deontologists (specifically ones where the effects of your actions fall within a known and at least somewhat predictable distribution), and other environments where deontologists outcompete consequentialists (the ones where certain actions are on average good given certain observations, or where acting predictably leads to good outcomes). And there are yet other environments where having a policy of blindly doing things similar to ones that have worked in the past will outperform both of those principled approaches.

And then there are adversarial environments where there may not even be a single strategy that dominates all other strategies within that environment (e.g. you may have a situation with policies A, B, and C, where A > B, B > C, C > A, or even more cursed scenarios where how well a strategy does depends on how many other players are playing that strategy).

My point is not "deontology > consequentialism", it's "whether a strategy is useful depends on the environment, and consequentialism-in-practice is not the most useful strategy across all environments".