Comment on Why is so difficult to organize a strike
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks agoThe problem with game theory is that it assumes everyone involved is perfectly rational.
Comment on Why is so difficult to organize a strike
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks agoThe problem with game theory is that it assumes everyone involved is perfectly rational.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
On the contrary, game theory doesn’t assume rationality or irrationality whatsoever. Game theory looks at all possible outcomes and investigates different strategies that lead to those outcomes.
Rational strategies can lead to defection in games like the non-iterated prisoner’s dilemma, and this is a Nash equilibrium. However, the infinite iterated prisoner’s dilemma allows cooperation to emerge even with rational strategies.
The superrational strategy leads to cooperation even in a one-shot gang of prisoner’s dilemma
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
What? Players acting rationally is one of the core assumptions of game theory. Sure there are some models that attempt to amount for irrationality, but the conclusions are obviously much less definitive.
It can’t really be any other way, perfectly rational actors are predictable in a mathematical way. Irrational actors are irrational in many different ways. One irrational actor might betray a fellow prisoner purely out of spite, another might refuse to speak purely out of a sense of loyalty. Another might make a decision compulsively without any strategy at all.
Irrational players cannot be analyzed mathematically. You cannot find a dominant strategy playing against irrational players, at least not a non-trivial one. Sure you can try to analyze them, but then you’ve left math behind and have wandered into psychology or sociology.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You clearly have not studied game theory, as you are talking out of your ass. Go pick up a textbook and learn something.
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Sure, I can only go off what I’ve read. Would you like to recommend a textbook which goes into making predictions when playing a game with irrational players?
Signtist@bookwyr.me 2 weeks ago
I honestly know nothing about game theory, so I don’t doubt that there are aspects that account for irrational behavior like meaningless self sabotage, but I don’t recall the prisoner’s dilemma having allowing one of the prisoners to specifically choose to be imprisoned for the maximum sentence in exchange for the other prisoner to also be imprisoned that same amount. Is there a version that has that option, or something similar? Every version I’ve seen assumes they would never do something so completely against their own self-interest.
One of the most common reasons for people not coming together I’ve seen is the classic “Sure, this makes it harder for everyone, but we can weather it so long as we know it’s harder for those damn (insert innocent group here)!” which of course only makes things unnecessarily harder for both groups, and only benefits their shared enemies. If that’s not something that game theory would cover, then I don’t know how well it would be able to be applied to our inability to organize effective resistance to an oppressive government.
If it is something that’s covered, I’d love an example! I could use a bit of hope that we’ll rise up eventually.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I guess I should explain a bit more then.
The term “player” in game theory doesn’t mean a person, it means a collection of rows or columns in a payoff matrix. Basically just a table of numbers. One player is all the rows, one player is all the columns.
A strategy can be either a pure strategy (select one row or one column of the table) or a mixed strategy (assign percentages to every row or every column of the table, so that all percentages are non-negative and the total equals 100%).
In a 2x2 payoff matrix, each player has 2 possible pure strategies (pick column A or column B, row 1 or row 2) but infinite possible mixed strategies (e.g 33.186794% column A and 66.813206% column B) since an infinite number of pairs of percentages can add up to 100%.
Mixed strategies can be thought of as introducing probability into the situation. If you choose a mixed strategy of 50% column A and 50% column B you could think of it as using a coin toss to make the decision. But game theory itself doesn’t do the coin tossing, it just assumes the expected values of the percentage times the payoffs in those entries of the payoff matrix.
Signtist@bookwyr.me 2 weeks ago
So it’s just theoretical mathematics based on a given amount of assumed possible choices? Is there even a way to truly apply it to a real-world scenario as complicated as large-group human behavior?