Blackmail, continued: communal blackmail, uncoordinated responses

It's quite common for elderly patients' relatives to threaten me with all kinds of time consuming or reputation hurting bullshit like complaints involving a lot of paperwork or bad press in the local newspaper unless I wedge their relatively healthy granpa straight from the hospital past the line to a nursing home as fast as possible, instead of sending them back home where they'd do just fine. I haven't caved in and so far nothing bad has happened except some relatively harmless badmouthing. It's common for doctors to be blackmailed to do all kinds of stuff like unnecessary investigations or treatments.

You could say that in the US there have been enough trials and press gone badly for doctors that blackmailing often works. I'm glad that this isn't the case in Finland and we're still practicing cost effective medicine instead of covering our asses from all angles out of fear. The flip side of this is that incompetent doctors roam a bit too freely.

In a couple of cases I've made decisions that I've been blackmailed to make, not because of the blackmailing but because the blackmailer's interests happened to coincide with my medical reasoning. I find this problematic for signalling reasons.

I have made a prosecutor pale in the face by suggesting that courthouses should be places where people with plea bargains shop their offers around with each other so that they know what's a good deal and a bad deal.

what if the blackmail is being used against a whole group, not just against one person?

If the group is made up of UDT agents, then they clearly coordinate. If CDT agents are a small fraction of the group (assuming that transaction costs make perfect bargaining non-feasible for CDT agents, as usual), then UDT agents' (meta)-incentive to reject blackmail will be muted to some degree, depending on the fraction of CDT agents. The opposite consideration applies to the blackmailer's side: when faced with rejection, she has to expend resources on a costly punishment that will only affect the fraction of agents that's CDT. So her incentive to engage in blackmail in the first place rises as the fraction of UDT agents drops.

On a different note, assuming that the informational environment is favorable, the best response to "group blackmail" is probably not for each agent to reject blackmail individually, but for all agents to coordinate on incenting whomever can reject blackmail at lowest cost. Under this assumption, UDT agents will have an (meta-)incentive to incent rejection by any agents in their group, including CDT agents. But still, the main result is unchanged; as the fraction of UDT agents falls, the resources expended in providing such incentives will drop proportionally.

If this is a communal setting the logical step for the UDT agents is to coordinate and build a mutual blackmail prevention fond and clearly signal their membership. And I'd guess such a thing exists.

I was thinking about this question in regards to whether CDT agents might have a simply bayesian reason to mimic UDT agents, not only in any pre-decision signaling, but also in the actual decision. And I realized an important feature of these problems is that the game ends precisely when the agent submits a decision, which highlights the feature of UDT that distinguishes its cooperation from simple bayesian reasoning: A distinction that becomes important when you start adding qualifiers that include unknowns about other agents' source codes. The game may have as many confounders and additional decision steps before the final step, but UDT is exclusively the feature that allows cooperation on that final step.

A UDT+ agent would clearly communicate her resistance to blackmail and cause the blackmailer to pick an easier target.

Politics is the mindkiller.

Can you find an example that's less political to make the same point?