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When I was a kid and I read about the Prisoner's dilemma in the context of morality, I was always confused. Surely the moral thing is to confess if you're guilt
by thilmo 10y ago
When I was a kid and I read about the Prisoner's dilemma in the context of morality, I was always confused. Surely the moral thing is to confess if you're guilty. If you're guilty, and your accomplice is guilty, the right thing to do is confess to the police so that you can be rightfully punished.
As an adult I understand that this isn't the point of the story, and the police-and-prisoners aspect of the story is completely extraneous to the point trying to be made. Still, I can't help but think that the police-and-prisoners is a bad example of the broader point, since there's always a third set of interests (that of the police, and of society in general) which is callously (and immorally) tossed aside in the phrasing of the problem.
- Nomentatus 10y agoBut the problem has to explicitly exclude altruistic behavior; since if both subjects view the consequences to the other subject as being roughly as serious as consequences to themselves, there's no dilemma at all. They both shut up and help each other. The whole point is to show a situation exists in which two purely rational, purely selfish actors get an outcome that's actually worse for them from a selfish point of view than the outcome that two altruistic or irrational players would get. That they are criminals "establishes", to use the story-telling term, that these subjects are (unusually) not altruistic at all - the punchline is that being self-serving turns out not so well for them.