{"id":113,"date":"2017-12-29T05:13:28","date_gmt":"2017-12-29T05:13:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sinceriously.fyi\/?p=113"},"modified":"2017-12-29T21:31:37","modified_gmt":"2017-12-29T21:31:37","slug":"schelling-reach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sinceriously.fyi\/schelling-reach\/","title":{"rendered":"Schelling Reach"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the beginning of an attempt to give a reductionist account of a certain fragment of morality in terms of Schelling points. To divorce it from the halo effect and show its gears for what they are and are not. To show what controls it and what limits and amplifies its power.<\/p>\n

How much money would you ask for, if you and I were both given this offer: “Each of you name an amount of money without communicating until both numbers are known. If you both ask for the same amount, you both get that amount. Otherwise you get nothing. You have 1 minute to decide.”?<\/p>\n

Now would be a good time to pause in reading, and actually decide.<\/p>\n

My answer is the same as the first time I played this game. Two others decided to play it while I was listening, and I decided to join in and say my answer afterward.<\/p>\n

Player 1 said $1 million.
\nPlayer 2 said $1 trillion.
\nI said $1 trillion.<\/p>\n

Here was my reasoning process for picking $1 trillion.<\/p>\n

Okay, how do I maximize utility?
\nBig numbers that are Schelling points…
\n3^^^3, Graham’s number, BB(G), 1 googolplex, 1 googol…
\n3^^^3 is a first-order Schelling point among this audience because it’s quick to spring to mind, but looks like it’s not a Schelling point, because it’s specific to this audience. Therefore it’s not a Schelling point.
\nHold on, all of these would destroy the universe.
\nFurthermore, at sufficiently large amounts of money, the concept of the question falls apart, as it then becomes profitable for the whole world to coordinate against you and grab it if necessary. What does it even mean to have a googol dollars?
\nOkay, normal numbers.
\nmillion, billion, trillion, quadrillion…
\nThose are good close to Schelling numbers, but not quite.
\nThere’s a sort of force pushing toward higher numbers. I want to save the world. $1 million is enough for an individual to not have to work their whole life. It is not enough to make saving the world much easier though. My returns are much less diminishing than normal. This is the community where we pretend to want to save the world by engaging with munchkinny thought experiments about that. This should be known to the others.
\nThe force is, if they have more probability of picking a million than of picking a billion, many of the possible versions of me believing that pick a billion anyway. And the more they know that, the more they want to pick a billion… this process terminates at picking a billion over a million, a trillion over a billion …
\nThe problem with ones bigger than a million is that, you can always go one more. Which makes any Schelling point locating algorithm have to depend on more colloquial and thus harder to agree on reliably things.
\nThese are both insights I expect the others to be able to reach.
\nThe computation in figuring just how deep that recursive process goes is hard, and “hard”. Schelling approximation: it goes all the way to the end.
\nTrillion is much less weird than Quadrillion. Everything after that is obscure.
\nChances of getting a trillion way more than a quadrillion, even contemplating going for a quadrillion reduces ability to go for anything more than a million.
\nBut fuck it, not stopping at a million. I know what I want.
\n$1 trillion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All that complicated reasoning. And it paid off; the other person who picked a trillion had a main-line thought process with the same load bearing chain of thoughts leading to his result.<\/p>\n

I later asked another person to play against my cached number. He picked $100.<\/p>\n

Come on, man.<\/p>\n

Schelling points determine everything. They are a cross-section of the support structure for the way the world is. Anything can be changed by changing Schelling points. I will elaborate later. Those who seek the center of all things and the way of making changes should pay attention to dynamics here, as this is a microcosm of several important parts of the process.<\/p>\n

There’s a tradeoff axis between, “easiest Schelling point to make the Schelling point and agree on, if that’s all we cared about” (which would be $0), and “Schelling point that serves us best”, a number too hard to figure out, even alone.<\/p>\n

The more thought we can count on from each other, the more we can make Schelling points serve us.<\/p>\n

My strategy is something like:<\/p>\n