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If you bluff in poker and are called, you lose your chips. That doesn't make it less of a bluff. Intention really doesn't matter here, and anthropomorphizing th
by jonahx 10y ago
If you bluff in poker and are called, you lose your chips. That doesn't make it less of a bluff. Intention really doesn't matter here, and anthropomorphizing the shrimp clouds the issue (or to paraphrase Wittgenstein, "If a mantis shrimp could talk, we couldn't understand him")
To say it another way, even if the shrimp were automata with nothing remotely like what we'd call consciousness or intention, it could still make sense to talk about "bluffing" in a game-theoretic sense.
What's important is that it occurs with something approaching an equilibrium frequency. If all weak shrimp always bluffed, strong shrimp would start to always fight, and the weak shrimp would be wiped out. But if they only bluff sometimes, the probability of losing a fight may still be high enough to prevent this from happening. The baseline frequencies of strong and weak shrimp in the population also matter here -- weak shrimp could afford to bluff more in a strong-shrimp-rich population, assuming physical characteristics couldn't reliably identify them as weak.
- knodi123 10y ago> If you bluff in poker and are called, you lose your chips. That doesn't make it less of a bluff. I'm not sure you understood my point at all. What if the shrimp genuinely thinks he can take the big guy, because he's just so angry he gets stupid? That's not a bluff, that's a suicidal threat. "Bluff" has a very specific definition, and it requires that the person bluffing knows they cannot successfully follow through on the bluff. And from reading this, I'm not sure the researchers accounted for that distinction.
- jonahx 10y ago> "Bluff" has a very specific definition, and it requires that the person bluffing knows they cannot successfully follow through on the bluff. From a game-theoretic perspective, this is incorrect (even though it accurately describes everyday use of the word). Think about a poker bot which bluffs. It makes no sense to talk about "knowing" here. The GTO strategy to poker is just a solution to a gigantic series of equations. My point was that talking about "thinking" and "knowing" is missing the deeper point. You can talk about bluffing without those concepts.