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True, but I think there’s more hope when you take superrationality[1] into account. Multiple actors can independently arrive at compatible cooperative solution

True, but I think there’s more hope when you take superrationality[1] into account. Multiple actors can independently arrive at compatible cooperative solutions to the survival-and-utility game (which is not zero-sum). Wikipedia says it assumes all other players are also superrational, but I think in practice a successful variant of this strategy is to identify whether other players are superrational and avoid them if not. There is sometimes the option of converting existing self-interested rational players into superrational ones, but that is another subject entirely. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality

ColanR 7y ago
It would be nice if we were all superrational, but that concept just explains away the entire problem of the prisoner's dillemma: the dilemma serves to highlight our mutual lack of trust, and superrationality simply says, 'what if we did trust each other'? Since the assumptions of superrationality would be naive and foolish for any of those prisoners to assume, it solves nothing.
- notduncansmith 7y ago
  The idea is not to assume that everyone will be superrational or trustworthy at the beginning of the game. I believe it’s possible for the superrational players in a game to become the majority by expressing the superrational strategy in terms that will appeal to rationally self-interested players and demonstrating a superrational strategy working at some non-trivial scale.
  - ColanR 7y ago
    Even so, that idea merely expresses the hope that the prisoners can be educated out of their mistrust - which still seems like saying, 'the dillemma doesn't exist, if we fix the prisoners'. (for the sake of argument, it looks like we're both assuming a n>2 group of prisoners.) Also, the point of the dillemma is that only one prisoner has to act selfishly. If a subset of the group does cooperate, it doesn't matter because the one left out will take advantage of them all...and that risk increases exponentially as the size of the group increases, and makes the decision to trust even a subset of the group irrational.
    - notduncansmith 7y ago
      In the prisoners’ dilemma, it is true that even a single bad actor has the ability to disrupt the rest. One limitation of that thought experiment is that it assumes defection is guaranteed to achieve a certain outcome. I think it’s reasonable to assume that any cooperative strategy has some computable “defection tolerance” and a variant on the prisoners’ dilemma that accounts for this could have very different outcomes than the classical formulation. Furthermore, once you start playing multiple times with the same players, you establish an algebra of trust that also drastically changes the game. The ability to influence other players between rounds also changes the game.
      - ColanR 7y ago
        > One limitation of that thought experiment is that it assumes defection is guaranteed to achieve a certain outcome. That's a premise, and it's what creates the dillema in the first place. > Furthermore, once you start playing multiple times with the same players, you establish an algebra of trust that also drastically changes the game. The ability to influence other players between rounds also changes the game. Actually, the wikipedia article on the dilemma discusses this. The nash equilibrium is actually for all players to defect. There is no engendered trust. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#The_iterated_prisoner's_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#The_itera...
        notduncansmith 7y ago
        > The nash equilibrium is actually for all players to defect. Only in games where players know the number of rounds (e.g. a suicide bomber defects because they’ve decided to cap the number of rounds they’re going to play). The same Wikipedia article describes that in studies where the number of rounds is unknown to players, superrational strategies are sustainable and that the “always defect” strategy becomes only one of several paths to Nash equilibrium.

ColanR 7y ago

It would be nice if we were all superrational, but that concept just explains away the entire problem of the prisoner's dillemma: the dilemma serves to highlight our mutual lack of trust, and superrationality simply says, 'what if we did trust each other'? Since the assumptions of superrationality would be naive and foolish for any of those prisoners to assume, it solves nothing.

notduncansmith 7y ago
The idea is not to assume that everyone will be superrational or trustworthy at the beginning of the game. I believe it’s possible for the superrational players in a game to become the majority by expressing the superrational strategy in terms that will appeal to rationally self-interested players and demonstrating a superrational strategy working at some non-trivial scale.
- ColanR 7y ago
  Even so, that idea merely expresses the hope that the prisoners can be educated out of their mistrust - which still seems like saying, 'the dillemma doesn't exist, if we fix the prisoners'. (for the sake of argument, it looks like we're both assuming a n>2 group of prisoners.) Also, the point of the dillemma is that only one prisoner has to act selfishly. If a subset of the group does cooperate, it doesn't matter because the one left out will take advantage of them all...and that risk increases exponentially as the size of the group increases, and makes the decision to trust even a subset of the group irrational.
  - notduncansmith 7y ago
    In the prisoners’ dilemma, it is true that even a single bad actor has the ability to disrupt the rest. One limitation of that thought experiment is that it assumes defection is guaranteed to achieve a certain outcome. I think it’s reasonable to assume that any cooperative strategy has some computable “defection tolerance” and a variant on the prisoners’ dilemma that accounts for this could have very different outcomes than the classical formulation. Furthermore, once you start playing multiple times with the same players, you establish an algebra of trust that also drastically changes the game. The ability to influence other players between rounds also changes the game.
    - ColanR 7y ago
      > One limitation of that thought experiment is that it assumes defection is guaranteed to achieve a certain outcome. That's a premise, and it's what creates the dillema in the first place. > Furthermore, once you start playing multiple times with the same players, you establish an algebra of trust that also drastically changes the game. The ability to influence other players between rounds also changes the game. Actually, the wikipedia article on the dilemma discusses this. The nash equilibrium is actually for all players to defect. There is no engendered trust. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#The_iterated_prisoner's_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#The_itera...
      - notduncansmith 7y ago
        > The nash equilibrium is actually for all players to defect. Only in games where players know the number of rounds (e.g. a suicide bomber defects because they’ve decided to cap the number of rounds they’re going to play). The same Wikipedia article describes that in studies where the number of rounds is unknown to players, superrational strategies are sustainable and that the “always defect” strategy becomes only one of several paths to Nash equilibrium.