Spurious normativity enhances learning of compliance and enforcement behavior in artificial agents

#deepmind #rl #society This is an in-depth paper review, followed by an interview with the papers’ authors! Society is ruled by norms, and most of these norms are very useful, such as washing your hands before cooking. However, there also exist plenty of social norms which are essentially arbitrary, such as what hairstyles are acceptable, or what words are rude. These are called “silly rules“. This paper uses multi-agent reinforcement learning to investigate why such silly rules exist. Their results indicate a plausible mechanism, by which the existence of silly rules drastically speeds up the agents’ acquisition of the skill of enforcing rules, which generalizes well, and therefore a society that has silly rules will be better at enforcing rules in general, leading to faster adaptation in the face of genuinely useful norms. OUTLINE: 0:00 - Intro 3:00 - Paper Overview 5:20 - Why are some social norms arbitrary? 11:50 - Reinforcement learning environment setup 20:00 - What happens if we introduce a “silly“ r