One of the most interesting ideas that spring from game theory is that there’s value in signaling your commitment to acting in a certain way. In the prisoner’s dilemma, people want to cooperate with others who’ve strongly signaled that they’ll cooperate. But this can become a kind of signaling race where people punish each other for signaling the wrong thing or violating norms that don’t have much to do with cooperation. So, maladaptive behaviors are retained because people use them as signals of their trustworthiness.
What if we brought all of this silly subconscious/sub-perceptual silliness up into the realm of direct discussion, "shining a light on it" so to speak? Oh, all(!) people would howl in protest, but breaking out of the dream we all live in, if even for 5 minutes, would be good for people!
Thanks, good post! I had read plenty about the Prisoners' Dilemma, but not about the others. You gloss over what others treat as the most important point: Is the game one-shot, or repeated? (repeated how many times?) If it's repeated, then no fancy strategy has beaten the simple tit-for-tat strategy, I think, right? And if there's a society of players who will play each other in various combos multiple times, then you get "reputation" etc. etc., which you do delve into here in your post.
Anyway, thank you!
p.s. typo: The bottom right of the Matching Pennies matrix was 1,1 when I read this, but it should be 1,-1.
I think it depends what one means by beaten. For example, tit-for-tat is very unforgiving. Two tit-for-tatters will defect against each other forever if once they defect. In an environment where mistakes or misperceptions happen, you might want to tweak that strategy. But I'm not a serious student of the repeated games literature.
> Leadership in particular is a reason that social science has limits. If many things can happen in a society, but what actually happens depends on one person, then you can only predict things by knowing that person well. No scientific laws can substitute for an understanding of powerful people and their quirks.
Not science, but philosophy can perhaps - one must take into consideration that humans are (or seem to be):
a) be vulnerable to persuasion (particularly emotional exploitation)
b) have at least some abilities in self-awareness
A group of smart and well intentioned people could wreak havoc on the current system by simply playing close attention and exploiting the human's various well known weaknesses.
It's a nitpick though, otherwise this essay was solid 9/10 in my books.
I salute your persistence, pretty much all I ever got from game theory was a headache and the understanding that the overwhelming majority of the population doesn’t understand it.
Was using Chrome on M2 MacBook Pro! It’s up to date so I’m not sure why that keeps happening … issue replicates on incognito w/o any extensions or adblock
One of the most interesting ideas that spring from game theory is that there’s value in signaling your commitment to acting in a certain way. In the prisoner’s dilemma, people want to cooperate with others who’ve strongly signaled that they’ll cooperate. But this can become a kind of signaling race where people punish each other for signaling the wrong thing or violating norms that don’t have much to do with cooperation. So, maladaptive behaviors are retained because people use them as signals of their trustworthiness.
What if we brought all of this silly subconscious/sub-perceptual silliness up into the realm of direct discussion, "shining a light on it" so to speak? Oh, all(!) people would howl in protest, but breaking out of the dream we all live in, if even for 5 minutes, would be good for people!
Thanks, good post! I had read plenty about the Prisoners' Dilemma, but not about the others. You gloss over what others treat as the most important point: Is the game one-shot, or repeated? (repeated how many times?) If it's repeated, then no fancy strategy has beaten the simple tit-for-tat strategy, I think, right? And if there's a society of players who will play each other in various combos multiple times, then you get "reputation" etc. etc., which you do delve into here in your post.
Anyway, thank you!
p.s. typo: The bottom right of the Matching Pennies matrix was 1,1 when I read this, but it should be 1,-1.
I think it depends what one means by beaten. For example, tit-for-tat is very unforgiving. Two tit-for-tatters will defect against each other forever if once they defect. In an environment where mistakes or misperceptions happen, you might want to tweak that strategy. But I'm not a serious student of the repeated games literature.
Extremely helpful.
Great post!
A nitpick:
> Leadership in particular is a reason that social science has limits. If many things can happen in a society, but what actually happens depends on one person, then you can only predict things by knowing that person well. No scientific laws can substitute for an understanding of powerful people and their quirks.
Not science, but philosophy can perhaps - one must take into consideration that humans are (or seem to be):
a) be vulnerable to persuasion (particularly emotional exploitation)
b) have at least some abilities in self-awareness
A group of smart and well intentioned people could wreak havoc on the current system by simply playing close attention and exploiting the human's various well known weaknesses.
It's a nitpick though, otherwise this essay was solid 9/10 in my books.
I think the Groucho/Stalin photos are swapped?
😀
I salute your persistence, pretty much all I ever got from game theory was a headache and the understanding that the overwhelming majority of the population doesn’t understand it.
Nice article, but the latex tables for the games are a bit broken in formatting
Is that in email/mobile/the substack app?
Was broken on Substack website viewed from laptop!
What was wrong?
Here is a screenshot took just now:
https://imgur.com/a/Vr3q7pu
Maybe it's something with Substack's rendering?
Could I lastly ask what browser you are using? Substack thinks an older browser might be the issue.
Was using Chrome on M2 MacBook Pro! It’s up to date so I’m not sure why that keeps happening … issue replicates on incognito w/o any extensions or adblock
Thank you!