Crosspost from my blog.

In the classic Prisoner's Dilemma (https://www.lesswrong.com/w/prisoner-s-dilemma), there are two agents with the same beliefs and decision theory, but with different values. To get the best available outcome, they have to help each other out (even if they don't intrinsically care about the other's values); and they have to do so even though, if the one does not help the other, there's no way for the other to respond with a punishment afterward.

A classic line of reasoning, from the perspective of one of the prisoners, goes something like this: I and my collaborator each only cares about himself. So it seems logical that we will defect against each other. However, there's some kind of symmetry at play here. If you abstract away the details of which specific prisoner I am, really I'm in exactly the same situation as my collaborator. So it's almost as though our decisions are logically bound to each other: Either my reasoning leads to me defecting, and therefore his reasoning also leads to him defecting, or else likewise I cooperate and he cooperates. We will make "the same choice" as each other, i.e. the symmetric / conjugate choice.

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