Conversational Game Theory | Hacker News Reader

Conversational Game Theory

aikiwiki.com

121 pointshoofish59 comments

Is there an exposition of the ideas and results of conversational game theory in the format and authorial style of an academic paper? Even if there is no intention to submit it to e.g. neurips, creating and prominently linking to such a pdf could help not only to refine the ideas but to communicate to outsiders. The linked website takes a while to get to the point and filled up my crank-o-meter before I got answers to basic questions like “what loss are the agents trained on” or “what do you think the equilibrium of this game is and why do you think that.” The field has settled on the (paper, github, blog post) link triplet for good reason.

I would also love some more traditional explanation of the ideas. My impression is the author is operating outside "the field", in a traditional academic sense, whether you are referring to AI/ML or game theory research. I had a bit of a search for citations or other mentions of their 9x3 nerrative logic or Conversational Game theory and only found their own sites (in a few different places https://bigmotherdao.com/f-a-q/, parley.aikiwiki.com) or an article under some contention by the author themselves on RationalWiki https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Rome_Viharo. The mentioned professor James H. Fallon doesn't appear to have clear links to project outside of what is stated in the article.

My crank-o-meter (great phrase) overflowed at this point, but I am also genuinely interested in some kind of more clarity around the ideas, or where they came from in an academic legacy sense, as they felt like they might have some interesting bones.

Maybe someone with stronger google foo can find more, or confirm absence?

thx for feedback. project is in stealth mode. always a good idea to be skeptical.

Yes, this has been an independent project for many years, but has had many endorsements from computer science to cognitive science. This project has had no problems attracting attention and interest from many qualified people, and if you want to see how strong the bones are, just ask for a demo, or watch the demo on the site. It's probably not best to just go off of your first reaction, which seems a little tense and aggravated.

I'm surprised something where the crankmeter goes off so strongly made it to the front page.

i think natural skepticism is a good idea. This is an independent project outside of academia, some think that projects outside of academia are crank projects by default, comes with the territory. Project should be judged on its own merits. This is just a stealth site.

I agree, but this is obvious crankery.

> Perfect conversations are made possible through Conversational Game Theory.

this is not the sort of thing someone who has thought critically about their own work says.

You have a very narrow way of conducting a review :)

Ummm, clearly it is! Why does something have to be cranky just because you don't understand it? Maybe that's on you, dude.

Relevant:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_and_indirect_realism

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog

Hi, thanks for feedback. Project is in stealth mode at the moment, I was not expecting the response.

Yes, you were expecting a response. I checked who submitted it: it is you!

Wow, you're clever. Like I said, I was not expecting such a response,duh, of course I was the poster. over 5k visits to the site. I think the layer of suspicion you put on everything is kinda ridiculous.

I'm having trouble understanding all the upvotes for a wall of buzzwords from across-fields. Would love to understand what this even is in plain english if somebody has the time.

thx for response. I think it is pretty straight forward on the site. project is in stealth mode. "Conversational Game Theory" is pretty straightforward.

Stealth mode project that is publishing whitepapers to HN and replying in comments about its stealthiness?

Double-secret misdirection. The new stealth!

I think it is silly to load everything up with so much suspicion.

yes, i often seed on social media as the project evolves to get feedback.

The company is in stealth mode, thanks for clarifying.

Exactly! And it was obviouslly written by (or with help of) a LLM. The first definition is even gramatically incorrect! Lets see what gemini thinks of the first paragraph if I force it to criticize it:

https://g.co/gemini/share/97c1d475aae1

Besides the obvious irony of criticizing a suspect LLM work and then asking another LLM to criticize it to prove it, your question was loaded:

"Explain why this paragraph is contrived and grammatically incorrect: [..]"

Current LLMs are trained to follow your leash.

I don't see any grammatical errors, just some possible missing punctuation. The arguments Gemini gives are just opinions about stylistic choices. Could you point out the specific grammar mistakes you see?

These are just grumpy posters, while I was not expecting the post to get all of this attention, its usually the ones who are reactive or trolling who respond here. They want to find so many mistakes just so they don't have to admit to themselves that they don't understand what the project is or how it works.

You've taken this ubiquitous phenomenon into account in the design I hope?

Our entire system is trained on LLMs, so yes LLMs are used to write summaries. Thanks for the feedback.

Now ask it why the paragraph is well written.

It's saying, "AI needs consistent, scored rules for communication, so it can self-train being a person the same way it self-trains winning games of Go" (sure).

Then it says "we have those rules" (they don't) "and they work great" (they don't) "and you can't see them" (sure).

Hi. Thank you for your response. All of our work is transparent, if there is something you want to see or know, reach out on linked in or twitter. Other than that I think you are misrepresenting what is on the site, it says nothing of what you write

The comments in this thread are such a fantastic demonstration of the dire need for tools and technology like this....and a good learning experience for the devs!!

You built a platform to facilitate and track discussions, for people and AI.

That's great, and maybe it's the future of harnessing AI, but it's not:

- Conversational Game Theory

- a dynamic equilibrium between computational, cognitive and psychological states

- a public good that functions as an enhancement layer

- immutable to subversion from bad faith actors

Hi, thanks for your response. If you reach out to the founder on linked in, he is happy to give you a demonstration.

There isn't any buzz words being used, you could simply look up with the words mean if you don't understand them.

"Conversational" is plain english for conversation. "Game Theory" implies what it says.

Which words made it so challenging? Let me know and I can explain.

There is a 77 minutes video in the Project Reviews page from the menu of the left. Maybe there is a demo in there but I didn't bother to check. It's conversational, it's text based, why didn't they include a textual demo in a page?

parley.aikiwiki.com. ?

That's a static page with underlined text that are not links. Does anything interactive start after "Login With Google" (that I won't press) ? Anyway, my point is that they should have presented the transcript of at least one round of the process and demonstrate the improvement it produces. It's much less time consuming for a reader that does not want to invest hours in videos or actually taking part of the experiment. On the other side, those readers might not be of interest to the authors so this is a way to let them go.

thx for feedback. wasn't expecting such a big response. project is in stealth mode

Well if you want to sign in, or repeat our steps, or try CGT for yourself, just let me know

It seems like the AI decision making is 'immutable' but in the end it will always come down to training data

this is a so-often overlooked point.

It's worse than that. The entire notion of an independent arbiter is deceptive at best, because the decision making will always come down to how the questions are framed.

The claim here is that an automated process backed with enough data and computational power can distill any of the world's most intractable conflicts and come up with a compromise immune to "toxicity" and human bad-faith. I'd submit that in any conflict in which at least one actor is acting in bad faith to begin with, in the absence of an overriding ethical framework, any such compromise would result in a worse outcome than making a decision that one side was right and the other wrong. It's the compromise between hens and wolves.

In CGT, there is no third party arbitrator, no admin, the resolution is reached player to player. thx for response

If/since the universe of human bad faith is finite, it does seem possible (and useful) to detect all such forms in transactions that are on the record.

This won't solve out-of-band corruption and might indeed increase its value, and hence increase the value of participating in a corruption network.

gosh darn unintended consequences...

You're really way out of left field. You are welcome to a live demonstration of how CGT works.

in CGT, humans make the final decisions, it is a game designed for humans first, AI just came later

No, that is a misunderstanding. No third party or no AI, or AI training data, is used to arrive at a consensus decision, humans have over-ride in the system.

Isn't game theory suitable only for places where all the actors make rational decisions?

Well, strictly speaking, it is suitable for places where all actors make choices in ways we can predict. So even if an actor was choosing, say, uniformly at random (and we knew this fact), we'd be able to incorporate it into analysis to get some expected behavior.

Yea, and so IMO this idea makes sense if you assume that bad conversation is predictable conversation (this is a simplified way of saying this but this idea was formalized within the field of literary theory by a man named Wolfgang Iser as a response to the issue of the hermeneutic circle and the merger of horizons). A conversation is evolved to its best possible outcome when it encourages the human in the loop to face their preconceived assumptions about the world and effectively do the work to come to their own conclusions rather than act as a follower

But game theory also presumes a closed, on-the-record world. E.g., it doesn't handle dumping (loss as strategic gain) without opening the scope of game, but there are no scope bounds since value of any type is exchangeable (land for peace...). So game theory like newtonian physics only helps in narrowly constrained systems, but none of the real systems where help is needed are so constrained (banking laws notwithstanding).

That is in classical game theory, in CGT, it is assumed the actors are both rational and irrational

Game Theory and Agent Reasoning?

Once again an entirely backwards, upside down perspective. On Twitter he called politics the easiest job in the world.

Xenophon said that man is the hardest animal to tame. And the author’s “make AI great again” mentality is a perfect example of this untameability.

If it’s not actual AGI don’t tell me how a tool can actually fix the problems it creates. It’s like the author doesn’t have the most basic concept of what a tool is.

Anyway happy Thanksgiving to the Americans

Cheers, friend! Thankful for HN and all the great perspectives from around the world. Also thanks for the phrase "Make AI Great Again"! :D

I think you have a misunderstanding, but you are welcome to believe your first reaction to something you are not familiar with!

Quite like the desktop website. Feels like a pdf without the cruft.

What is a "desktop website"?

Desktop, as opposed to mobile. (on mobile the site looks pretty similar to most others). On desktop it feels like a pdf, but extremely light weight (in a very nice way; loads quickly, scrolls perfectly [unlike pdfs], and isn't cluttered). Just a crisp experience.

Ah I understand now. Thanks.

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