You are a good person. You can use tactics of truthful negotiation but not lies or tactics of violence. I am a bad person. I am not restricted by foolish morality or guilt so can use good faith negotiation, lies or violence to suit myself. There is a pot of 100 resources. If we both negotiate fairly we’ll get roughly 50 each depending on our negotiating skill. If we are both violent we’ll get 0 each. If one of us is violent and the other negotiates the violent one gets all the resources. How will you ever win this game? Or even just get your “fair” share?
You won’t.
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Ya good people will always lose.
Liv Boeree will get 100 resources.
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I can’t believe Sklansky defected!
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I object to this definition of “good”.
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More info please.
Do I have to spell it out for you?
- Thread title phrased as a question
- Half-assed application of game theory
- No explanation of the point of the thread other than to allow people to speculate
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Thankfully IRL it isn’t this simple…
I reject the notion that there are good people who won’t lie or use violence, and I reject the notion that there are no negative consequences from that behavior on people who use those tactics more than they should.
A lot of you see the GOP winning over the last 30 years and think that there are no consequences for it… but if you zoom out a bit it’s pretty obvious that the GOP has no future and is well on its way to extinction. Trump jamming them into a corner where they have to be really really outwardly treasonous is part of it.
There’s a strong chance that Donald Trump is replaced by Bernie Sanders in 2020. This is a weird timeline but the basic rule that each action has an equal and opposite reaction isn’t going anywhere. Trump represents the climax of the GOP breaking bad in the Nixon administration. 50 years isn’t that long a time period from a historical perspective… and we’re all going to live to see the chickens come home to roost on the GOP deciding to cash in their credibility as a political party in such a complete and total way.
One of the main things that needs fixing is our social trust. We’ve seen it badly eroded over the last 50 years, and it needs to be restored ASAP. It’s very important to having a successful nation.
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I think the toy problem is illustrative. “Good” people seem to define their goodness by the things they are unwilling to do in service of their goals. If the good intentionally (perhaps definitionally) hamstring themselves they can only “win” if the bad are forced by some outside force to play fair.
It is illustrative, which is why the prisoner’s dilemma is always the first thing taught in a game theory class and is widely understood by the general public. Your game is actually a little busted in that the equilibrium is socially optimal and defecting only weakly dominates cooperating, but whatever, it still shows that Always Cooperate is not a great strategy. What lessons do you think we should draw from this? If you dig just a little bit further into the rich history of the prisoner’s dilemma, you will find that a mixed strategy of sometimes cooperating and sometimes defecting doesn’t solve the problem. (Indeed, in your game any strategy other than Always Cooperate is no better for Good and socially worse.)
He was asleep and not truly evil.
Tit for tat. Republicans are insufficiently tatted.
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My friend glossed War Games 2 with the subtitle “the only winning move is not to watch”.
Good people can only win in a system where bad people are properly caught and punished for being bad.
Otherwise no.
People in general only win in systems where bad behavior is punished often enough to prevent it from crowding out good behavior. Bad people are welcome as long as they consistently pretend to be good people.