7 ms·

I think a more accurate and more useful framing is: Game theory is inevitable. Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to

I think a more accurate and more useful framing is: Game theory is inevitable. Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives. The specific examples called out here may or may not be inevitable. It's true that the future is unknowable, but it's also true that the future is made up of 8B+ independent actors and that they're going to react to incentives. It's also true that you, personally, are just one of those 8B+ people and your influence on the remaining 7.999999999B people, most of whom don't know you exist, is fairly limited. If you think carefully about those incentives, you actually do have a number of significant leverage points with which to change the future. Many of those incentives are crafted out of information and trust, people's beliefs about what their own lives are going to look like in the future if they take certain actions, and if you can shape those beliefs and that information flow, you alter the incentives. But you need to think very carefully, on the level of individual humans and how they'll respond to changes, to get the outcomes you want.

cloogshicer 11mo ago
Your point of view is based on extreme reductionism.
- Terretta 11mo ago
  It's nature. Whether that word is reductionism is an exercise left to Chomsky?
  - rmah 11mo ago
    Game theory is no more a description of nature than Euclidian geometry is.
    - jlawson 11mo ago
      Sure, but go try to build a house while ignoring what Euclidean geometry tells you about it.
      - rmah 11mo ago
        I agree that both geometry and game theory are very useful tools.
  - shadowgovt 11mo ago
    Models are emphatically not nature. They are at best an attempt to use our tools of reason and observation to predict nature, and you can point to thousands of examples, from market crashes to election outcomes, to observe how they can be flawed and fail to predict.
    - Terretta 11mo ago
      > the future is made up of 8B+ independent actors and they're going to react to incentives = “nature”, if you're an evolutionist as for models, all models are wrong etc.
trgn 11mo ago
what i'm reading here then is that those 7.999999999B others are braindead morons. OP is 100% correct. either you accept that the vast majority are mindless automatons (not hard to get onboard with that honestly, but still, seems an overestimate), or there's some kind of structural unbalance, an asymmetry that's actively harmful and not the passive outcome of a 8B independent actors.
unformedelta 11mo ago
Perhaps you don't intend this, but I intuit that you imply that Game theory's inevitability leads to the inevitability of many claims the author's claims aren't inevitable. To me, this inevitability only is guaranteed if we assume a framing of non-cooperative game theory with idealized self-interested actors. I think cooperative game theory[1] better models the dynamics of the real world. More important than thinking on the level of individual humans is thinking about the coalitions that have a common interest to resist abusive technology. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_game_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_game_theory
- jasode 11mo ago
  >I think cooperative game theory[1] better models the dynamics of the real world. If cooperative coalitions to resist undesirable abusive technology models the real world better, why is the world getting more ads? (E.g. One of the author's bullet points was, "Ads are not inevitable.") Currently in the real world... - Ads frequency goes up : more ad interruptions in tv shows, native ads embedded in podcasts, sponsors segments in Youtube vids, etc - Ads spaces goes up : ads on refrigerator screens, gas pumps touch screens, car infotainment systems, smart TVs, Google Search results, ChatGPT UI, computer-generated virtual ads in sports broadcasts overlayed on courts and stadiums, etc What is the cooperative coalition that makes "ads not inevitable"?
  - ToucanLoucan 11mo ago
    I'll try and tackle this one. I think the world is getting more ads because Silicon Valley and it's Anxiety Economy are putting a thumb on the scale. For the entirety of the 2010's we had SaaS startups invading every space of software, for a healthy mix of better and worse, and all of them (and a number even today) are running the exact same playbook, boiled down to broad terms: burn investor money to build a massive network-effected platform, and then monetize via attention (some combo of ads, user data, audience reach/targeting). The problem is thus: despite all these firms collecting all this data (and tanking their public trust by both abusing it and leaking it constantly) for years and years, we really still only have ads. We have specifically targeted ads, down to downright abusive metrics if you're inclined and lack a soul or sense of ethics, but they are and remain ads. And each time we get a better targeted ad, the ones that are less targeted go down in value. And on and on it has gone. Now, don't misunderstand, a bunch of these platforms are still perfectly fine business-wise because they simply show an inexpressible, unimaginable number of ads, and even if they earn shit on each one, if you earn a shit amount of money a trillion times, you'll have billions of dollars. However it has meant that the Internet has calcified into those monolith platforms that can operate that way (Facebook, Instagram, Google, the usuals) and everyone else either gets bought by them or they die. There's no middle-ground. All of that to say: yes, on balance, we have more ads. However the advertising industry in itself has never been in worse shape. It's now dominated by those massive tech companies to an insane degree. Billboards and other such ads, which were once commonplace are now solely the domain of ambulance chasing lawyers and car dealerships. TV ads are no better, production value has tanked, they look cheaper and shittier than ever, and the products are solely geared to the boomers because they're the only ones still watching broadcast TV. Hell many are straight up shitty VHS replays of ads I saw in the fucking 90's, it's wild. We're now seeing AI video and audio dominate there too. And going back to tech, the platforms stuff more ads into their products than ever and yet, they're less effective than ever. A lot of younger folks I know don't even bother with an ad-blocker, not because they like them, but simply because they've been scrolling past ads since they were shitting in diapers. It's just the background wallpaper of the Internet to them, and that sounds (and is) dystopian, but the problem is nobody notices the background wallpaper, which means despite the saturation, ads get less attention then ever before. And worse still, the folks who don't block cost those ad companies impressions and resources to serve those ads that are being ignored. So, to bring this back around: the coalition that makes ads "inevitable" isn’t consumers or creators, it's investors and platforms locked into the same anxiety‑economy business model. Cooperative resistance exists (ad‑blockers, subscription models, cultural fatigue), but it’s dwarfed by the sheer scale of capital propping up attention‑monetization. That’s why we see more ads even as they get less effective.
flawn 11mo ago
I do partly disagree because Game Theory is based on an economic, (and also mentioned) reductionist view of a human, namely homo oeconomicus that does have some bold assumptions of some single men in history that asserted that we all act only with pure egoism & zero altruism which is nowadays highly critiqued and can be challenged. It is out of question that it is highly useful and simplifies it to an extent that we can mathematically model interactions between agents but only under our underlying assumptions. And these assumptions must not be true, matter of fact, there are studies on how models like the homo oeconomicus have led to a self-fulfilling reality by making people think in ways given by the model, adjusting to the model, and not otherwise, that the model ideally should approximate us. Hence, I don't think you can plainly limit or frame this reality as a product of game theory.
- littlecorner 11mo ago
  Hopefully without spoiling it, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time has an interesting take on game theory at the end
nathan_compton 11mo ago
I think its hubris to believe that you can formulate the correct game theoretic model to make significant statements about what is and is not inevitable.
- Aperocky 11mo ago
  I don't think OP claimed that. There is no conflict between not able to formulate the true model vs the existence of that actual model. Just because we weren't able to discover all of the law of physics, doesn't mean they don't apply to us.
  - nathan_compton 11mo ago
    I guess, but there are significant differences between the laws of physics and a game theoretic description of human behavior. Fundamentally, you cannot game theoretically predict the future without a model of the participants and, as you perhaps have noticed, there is no single model for the behavior of human beings because, fundamentally, human beings are an abstraction which covers ~9 billion distinct globs of cells with different genes, gene expressions, culture, personal experiences, etc. As a physicist I think people are more sure about what an electron is, for example, than they should be, given that there is no axiomatic formulation of quantum field theory that isn't trivial, but at least there we are in spitting distance of having something to talk about such that (in very limited situations, mind you) we can speak of the inevitable. But the OP rather casually suggested, implicitly, if not explicitly, that the submitted article was wrong because "game theory," which is both glib and just like technically not a conclusion one could reasonably come to with an honest appraisal of the limitations of these sorts of ways of thinking about the world.
Avicebron 11mo ago
I mean, in an ideal system we would have political agency greater than the sum of individuals who would put pressure/curtail the rise of abusive actors taking advantage of power and informational asymetry to try and gain more power (wealth) and influence (wealth) in order to gain more wealth
voidhorse 11mo ago
> Game theory is inevitable. Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives. That's not how mathematics works. "it's just math therefore it's a true theory of everything" is silly. We cannot forget that mathematics is all about models, models which, by definition, do not account for even remotely close to all the information involved in predicting what will actually occur in reality. Game Theory is a theory about a particular class of mathematical structures. You cannot reduce all of existence to just this class of structures, and if you think you can, you'd better be ready to write a thesis on it. Couple that with the inherent unpredictability of human beings, and I'm sorry but your Laplacean dreams will be crushed. The idea that "it's math so it's inevitable" is a fallacy. Even if you are a hardcore mathematical Platonist you should still recognize that mathematics is a kind of incomplete picture of the real, not its essence. In fact, the various incompleteness theorems illustrate directly, in Mathematic's own terms, that the idea that a mathematical perspective or any logical system could perfectly account for all of reality is doomed from the start.
_heimdall 11mo ago
Game theory is not inevitable, neither is math. Both are attempts to understand the world around us and predict what is likely to happen next given a certain context. Weather predictions are just math, for example, and they are always wrong to some degree.
- empressplay 11mo ago
  Because the models aren't sophisticated enough (yet). There's no voodoo here. I'm always surprised how many 'logical' tech people shy away from simple determinism, given how obvious a deterministic universe becomes the more time you spend in computer science, and seem to insist there's some sort of metaphysical influence out there somewhere we'll never understand. There's not. Math is almost the definition of inevitability. Logic doubly so. Once there's a sophisticated enough human model to decipher our myriad of idiosyncrasies, we will all be relentlessly manipulated, because it is human nature to manipulate others. That future is absolutely inevitable. Might as well fall into the abyss with open arms and a smile.
  - chunky1994 11mo ago
    But the world is not deterministic, inherently so. We know it's probabilistic at least at small enough scales. Most hidden variable theories have been disproven, and to the best of our current understanding the laws of the physical universe are probabsilitic in nature (i.e the Standard Model). So while we can probably come up with a very good probabilistic model of things that can happen, there is no perfect prediction, or rather, there cannot be
  - rando77 11mo ago
    There is strong reason to expect evolution to have found a system that is complex and changing for its control system, for this very reason so it can't get easily gamed (and eaten).
  - mirrir 11mo ago
    There is voodoo in begging the question though.
  - 11mo ago
darkmighty 11mo ago
Game theory is not inevitable, because we can change the rules of the game. > It's also true that you, personally, are just one of those 8B+ people Unless you communicate and coordinate!
wongarsu 11mo ago
In a world ruled by game theory alone marketing is pointless. Everyone already makes the most rational choice and has all the information, so why appeal to their emotions, build brand awareness or even tell them about your products. Yet companies spend a lot of money on marketing, and game theory tells us that they wouldn't do that without reason Game theory makes a lot of simplifying assumptions. In the real world most decisions are made under constraints, and you typically lack a lot of information and can't dedicate enough resources to each question to find the optimal choice given the information you have. Game theory is incredibly useful, especially when talking about big, carefully thought out decisions, but it's far from a perfect description of reality
- empressplay 11mo ago
  > Game theory makes a lot of simplifying assumptions. It does because it's trying to get across the point that although the world seems impossibly complex it's not. Of course it is in fact _almost_ impossibly complex. This doesn't mean that it's redundant for more complex situations, it only means that to increase its accuracy you have to deepen its depth.
stared 11mo ago
Game theory is also a model, with concrete assumptions, which are not universally followed. It is not a physics theory, that works regardless of our will.
trinsic2 11mo ago
One person has more impact than you think. Many times it's one person that is speaking what's on the mind of many and that speaking out can bring the courage to do what needs to be done for many people that sitting on the fence. The Andor TV series really taught me that. I'm working on a presentation of surveillance capitalism that I plan to show to my community. It's going to be an interesting future. Some will side with the Empire and others with side with the Rebellion.
- JuniperMesos 11mo ago
  You realize surveillance capitalism is what caused the Andor TV show (and more broadly the entire Star Wars franchise) to exist at all, right? Gigantic corporate entities have made a lot of money from monetizing the Star Wars franchise. I'll say frankly that I personally object to Star Wars on an aesthetic level - it is ultimately an artistically-flawed media franchise even if it has some genuinely compelling ideas sometimes. But what really bothers me is that Star Wars in its capacity as a modern culturally-important story cycle is also intellectual property owned by the Disney corporation. The idea that the problems of the world map neatly to a confict between an evil empire and a plucky rebellion is also basically propagandistic (and also boring). It's a popular storytelling frame - that's why George Lucas wrote the original Star Wars movies that way. But I really don't like seeing someone watch a TV series using the Star Wars intellectual property package and then using the story the writers chose to write - writers ultimately funded by Disney - as a basis for how they see themselves in the world poltically.
  - trinsic2 11mo ago
    We can't blink without involving some corporation into our creative process. I think Tony Gilroy has some interesting things to say about our world with-in the Andor TV series. Its not an easy map. The character arcs, when the are based on the truth of the situation can help people change their way of thinking. I never got anything out of the original Star Wars films except heroes and villains. Andor is on a completely different level then the original Star wars world IMHO. Some times you got to use whats available to you. I do think that we are living in an evil time and in order to change that story, we are going to have to envision something different. I think good stories can help us do that, regardless of how they are funded. Corporations will sell you the rope to hang themselves. They don't care what happens, only that they make money, and I think that will be there downfall at some point.
DarkNova6 11mo ago
Game theory is only as good as the model you are using. Now couple the fact that most people are terrible at modeling with the fact that they tend to ignore implicit constraints… the result is something less resembling science but something resembling religion.
- lesuorac 11mo ago
  I think you've missed the point. The concept of Game Theory is inevitable because it's studying an existing phenomenon. Whether or not the researchers of Game Theory correctly model that is irrelevant to whether the phenomenon exists or not. The models such as Prisoner's Dilemma are not inevitable though. Just because you have two people doesn't mean they're in a dilemma. --- To rephrase this, Technology is inevitable. A specific instance of it (ex. Generative AI) is not.
rmah 11mo ago
The statement "Game theory is inevitable. Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives." implies that the "actors" are humans. But that's not what game theory assumes. Game theory just provides a mathematical framework to analyze outcomes of decisions when parts of the system have different goals. Game theory does not claim to predict human behavior (humans make mistakes, are driven by emotion and often have goals outside the "game" in question). Thus game theory is NOT inevitable.
- hyperadvanced 11mo ago
  Yes, game theory is not a predictive model but an explanatory/general one. Additionally not everything is a game, as in statistics, not everything has a probability curve. They can be applied speculatively to great effect, but they are ultimately abstract models.
  - nostrademons 11mo ago
    You can use it for either predictive or explanatory purposes. In the early ('00s) years of Google it was common to diagram out the incentives of all the market participants; this led to such innovations like the use of the second-price VCG auction [1] for ad sales that now make over a third of a trillion dollars per year. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey%E2%80%93Clarke%E2%80%93Groves_auction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey%E2%80%93Clarke%E2%80%9...
    - nickff 11mo ago
      Google has now (mostly?) transitioned to using first-price, and more complicated (opaque) auction-style pricing for many of its advertising products. https://blog.google/products/admanager/simplifying-programmatic-first-price-auctions-google-ad-manager/ https://blog.google/products/admanager/simplifying-programma...
      - nostrademons 11mo ago
        > It’s important to note that our move to a single unified first price auction only impacts display and video inventory sold via Ad Manager. This change will have no impact on auctions for ads on Google Search, AdSense for Search, YouTube, and other Google properties, and advertisers using Google Ads or Display & Video 360 do not need to take any action.
VikingCoder 11mo ago
Hi, sure, you can say, "I will always view the world through the eyes of Game Theory." But don't forget, we discovered Nash Equilibrium, which changed how people behaved, in many interesting scenarios. Also, from a purely Game Theoretic standpoint... All kinds of atrocities are justifiable, if it propagates your genes...
nrclark 11mo ago
Game theory is a model that's sometimes accurate. Game theorists often forget that humans are bags of thinking meat, and that our thinking is accomplished by goopy electrochemical processes Brains can and do make straight-up mistakes all the time. Like "there was a transmission error"-type mistakes. They can't be modeled or predicted, and so humans can never truly be rational actors. Humans also make irrational decisions all the time based on gut feeling and instinct. Sometimes with reasons that a brain backfills, sometimes not. People can and do act against the own self interest all the time, and not for "oh, but they actually thought X" reasons. Brains make unexplainable mistakes. Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten what you went in there to do? That state isn't modelable with game theory, and it generalizes to every aspect of human behavior.
gmd63 11mo ago
The greatest challenge facing humanity is building a culture where we are liberated to cooperate toward the greatest goals without fear of another selfish individual or group taking advantage to our detriment. Yes, the mathematicians will tell you it's "inevitable" that people will cheat and "enshittify". But if you take statistical samplings of the universe from an outsider's perspective, you would think it would be impossible for life to exist. Our whole existence is built on disregard for the inevitable. Reducing humanity to a bunch of game-theory optimizing automatons will be a sure-fire way to fail The Great Filter, as nobody can possibly understand and mathematically articulate the larger games at stake that we haven't even discovered.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
cowpig 11mo ago
Game theory applied to the world is a useful simplification; reality is messy. In reality: * Actors have access to limited computation * The "rules" of the universe are unknowable and changing * Available sets of actions are unknowable * Information is unknowable, continuous, incomplete, and changes based on the frame of reference * Even the concept of an "Actor" is a leaky abstraction There's a field of study called Agent-based Computational Economics which explores how systems of actors behaving according to sets of assumptions behave. In this field you can see a lot of behaviour that more closely resembles real world phenomena, but of course if those models are highly predictive they have a tendency to be kept secret and monetized. So for practical purposes, "game theory is inevitable" is only a narrowly useful heuristic. It's certainly not a heuristic that supports technological determinism.
ivape 11mo ago
It feels like the only aspect of Game Theory at work here is opportunity cost. For example, why shouldn't you make AI porn generation software? There's moral reasons for it, but usually, most put it aside because someone else is going to get the bag first. That exhaustive list the author enumerated are all in some way byproducts of break-things-move-fast-say-sorry-later philosophy. You need ID for the websites because you did not give a shit and wanted to get the porn out there first and foremost. Now you need IDs. You need to track everyone and everything on the internet because you did not want to cap your wealth at a reasonable price for the service. You are willing to live with accumulated sins because "its not as bad as murder". The world we have today has way more to do with these things than anything else. We do not operate as a collective, and naturally, we don't get good outcomes for the collective.
LeifCarrotson 11mo ago
> if you can shape those beliefs and that information flow, you alter the incentives Selective information dissemination, persuasion, and even disinformation are for sure the easiest ways to change the behaviors of actors in the system. However, the most effective and durable way to "spread those lies" are for them to be true! If you can build a technology which makes the real facts about those incentives different than what it was before, then that information will eventually spread itself. For me, the canonical example is the story of the electric car: All kinds of persuasive messaging, emotional appeals, moral arguments, and so on have been employed to convince people that it's better for the environment if they drive an electric car than a polluting, noisy, smelly, internal-combustion gas guzzling SUV. Through the 90s and early 2000s, this saw a small number of early adopters and environmentalists adopting niche products and hybrids for the reasons that were persuasive to them, while another slice of society decided to delete their catalytic converters and "roll coal" in their diesels for their own reasons, while the average consumer was still driving an ICE vehicle somewhere in the middle of the status quo. Then lithium battery technology and solid-state inverter technology arrived in the 2010s and the Tesla Model S was just a better car - cheaper to drive, more torque, more responsive, quieter, simpler, lower maintenance - than anything the internal combustion engine legacy manufacturers could build. For the subset of people who can charge in their garage at home with cheap electricity, the shape of the game had changed, and it's been just a matter of time (admittedly a slow process, with a lot of resistance from various interests) before EVs were simply the better option. Similarly, with modern semiconductor technology, solar and wind energy no longer require desperate pleas from the limited political capital of environmental efforts, it's like hydro - they're just superior to fossil fuel power plants in a lot of regions now. There are other negative changes caused by technology, too, aided by the fact that capitalist corporations will seek out profitable (not necessarily morally desirable) projects - in particular, LLMs are reshaping the world just because the technology exists. Once you pull a new set of rules and incentives out of Pandora's box, game theory results in inevitable societal change.
throwaway20174 11mo ago
When they coined the term "influencer" it was a perfect definition for what that is. It's not a question about the one who cannot influence the 7.9B. The question is disparity, which is like income disparity. What happens when fewer and fewer people influence greater and greater numbers. Understanding the risk in that.
hermitcrab 11mo ago
Game theory assumes that all the players agree on the pay-offs. However this is often not the case in real world situations. Robert MacNamara (the ex US secretary of defence) said that he realized after the Vietnam war the US and the Vietnamese saw the war completely differently, even years after war had ended (see the excellent documentary 'Fog of War').
upboundspiral 11mo ago
This argument has the unspoken premise that in large part, people's core identity is reacting to external influences. I believe that while responding to influences is part of human existence, the richness of the individual transcends such an explanation for all their actions. The phrase "game theory is inevitable" reads like the perspective of an aristocrat looking down on the masses - enough vision to see the interplay of things, and enough arrogance to assume they can control it.
cameldrv 11mo ago
Yes it's one thing to say that game theory is inevitable, but defection is not inevitable. In fact, if you consider all levels of the organization of life, from multicellularity to large organisms, to families, corporations, towns, nations, etc, it all exists because entities figured out how to cooperate and prevent defection. If you want to fix these things, you need to come up with a way to change the nature of the game.
clydethefrog 11mo ago
"in formal experiments the only people who behaved exactly according to the mathematical models created by game theory are economists themselves, and psychopaths" [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(television_documentary_series) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(television_documentar...

cloogshicer 11mo ago

Your point of view is based on extreme reductionism.

Terretta 11mo ago
It's nature. Whether that word is reductionism is an exercise left to Chomsky?
- rmah 11mo ago
  Game theory is no more a description of nature than Euclidian geometry is.
  - jlawson 11mo ago
    Sure, but go try to build a house while ignoring what Euclidean geometry tells you about it.
    - rmah 11mo ago
      I agree that both geometry and game theory are very useful tools.
- shadowgovt 11mo ago
  Models are emphatically not nature. They are at best an attempt to use our tools of reason and observation to predict nature, and you can point to thousands of examples, from market crashes to election outcomes, to observe how they can be flawed and fail to predict.
  - Terretta 11mo ago
    > the future is made up of 8B+ independent actors and they're going to react to incentives = “nature”, if you're an evolutionist as for models, all models are wrong etc.

trgn 11mo ago

what i'm reading here then is that those 7.999999999B others are braindead morons. OP is 100% correct. either you accept that the vast majority are mindless automatons (not hard to get onboard with that honestly, but still, seems an overestimate), or there's some kind of structural unbalance, an asymmetry that's actively harmful and not the passive outcome of a 8B independent actors.

unformedelta 11mo ago

Perhaps you don't intend this, but I intuit that you imply that Game theory's inevitability leads to the inevitability of many claims the author's claims aren't inevitable. To me, this inevitability only is guaranteed if we assume a framing of non-cooperative game theory with idealized self-interested actors. I think cooperative game theory[1] better models the dynamics of the real world. More important than thinking on the level of individual humans is thinking about the coalitions that have a common interest to resist abusive technology. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_game_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_game_theory

jasode 11mo ago
>I think cooperative game theory[1] better models the dynamics of the real world. If cooperative coalitions to resist undesirable abusive technology models the real world better, why is the world getting more ads? (E.g. One of the author's bullet points was, "Ads are not inevitable.") Currently in the real world... - Ads frequency goes up : more ad interruptions in tv shows, native ads embedded in podcasts, sponsors segments in Youtube vids, etc - Ads spaces goes up : ads on refrigerator screens, gas pumps touch screens, car infotainment systems, smart TVs, Google Search results, ChatGPT UI, computer-generated virtual ads in sports broadcasts overlayed on courts and stadiums, etc What is the cooperative coalition that makes "ads not inevitable"?
- ToucanLoucan 11mo ago
  I'll try and tackle this one. I think the world is getting more ads because Silicon Valley and it's Anxiety Economy are putting a thumb on the scale. For the entirety of the 2010's we had SaaS startups invading every space of software, for a healthy mix of better and worse, and all of them (and a number even today) are running the exact same playbook, boiled down to broad terms: burn investor money to build a massive network-effected platform, and then monetize via attention (some combo of ads, user data, audience reach/targeting). The problem is thus: despite all these firms collecting all this data (and tanking their public trust by both abusing it and leaking it constantly) for years and years, we really still only have ads. We have specifically targeted ads, down to downright abusive metrics if you're inclined and lack a soul or sense of ethics, but they are and remain ads. And each time we get a better targeted ad, the ones that are less targeted go down in value. And on and on it has gone. Now, don't misunderstand, a bunch of these platforms are still perfectly fine business-wise because they simply show an inexpressible, unimaginable number of ads, and even if they earn shit on each one, if you earn a shit amount of money a trillion times, you'll have billions of dollars. However it has meant that the Internet has calcified into those monolith platforms that can operate that way (Facebook, Instagram, Google, the usuals) and everyone else either gets bought by them or they die. There's no middle-ground. All of that to say: yes, on balance, we have more ads. However the advertising industry in itself has never been in worse shape. It's now dominated by those massive tech companies to an insane degree. Billboards and other such ads, which were once commonplace are now solely the domain of ambulance chasing lawyers and car dealerships. TV ads are no better, production value has tanked, they look cheaper and shittier than ever, and the products are solely geared to the boomers because they're the only ones still watching broadcast TV. Hell many are straight up shitty VHS replays of ads I saw in the fucking 90's, it's wild. We're now seeing AI video and audio dominate there too. And going back to tech, the platforms stuff more ads into their products than ever and yet, they're less effective than ever. A lot of younger folks I know don't even bother with an ad-blocker, not because they like them, but simply because they've been scrolling past ads since they were shitting in diapers. It's just the background wallpaper of the Internet to them, and that sounds (and is) dystopian, but the problem is nobody notices the background wallpaper, which means despite the saturation, ads get less attention then ever before. And worse still, the folks who don't block cost those ad companies impressions and resources to serve those ads that are being ignored. So, to bring this back around: the coalition that makes ads "inevitable" isn’t consumers or creators, it's investors and platforms locked into the same anxiety‑economy business model. Cooperative resistance exists (ad‑blockers, subscription models, cultural fatigue), but it’s dwarfed by the sheer scale of capital propping up attention‑monetization. That’s why we see more ads even as they get less effective.

flawn 11mo ago

I do partly disagree because Game Theory is based on an economic, (and also mentioned) reductionist view of a human, namely homo oeconomicus that does have some bold assumptions of some single men in history that asserted that we all act only with pure egoism & zero altruism which is nowadays highly critiqued and can be challenged. It is out of question that it is highly useful and simplifies it to an extent that we can mathematically model interactions between agents but only under our underlying assumptions. And these assumptions must not be true, matter of fact, there are studies on how models like the homo oeconomicus have led to a self-fulfilling reality by making people think in ways given by the model, adjusting to the model, and not otherwise, that the model ideally should approximate us. Hence, I don't think you can plainly limit or frame this reality as a product of game theory.

littlecorner 11mo ago
Hopefully without spoiling it, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time has an interesting take on game theory at the end

nathan_compton 11mo ago

I think its hubris to believe that you can formulate the correct game theoretic model to make significant statements about what is and is not inevitable.

Aperocky 11mo ago
I don't think OP claimed that. There is no conflict between not able to formulate the true model vs the existence of that actual model. Just because we weren't able to discover all of the law of physics, doesn't mean they don't apply to us.
- nathan_compton 11mo ago
  I guess, but there are significant differences between the laws of physics and a game theoretic description of human behavior. Fundamentally, you cannot game theoretically predict the future without a model of the participants and, as you perhaps have noticed, there is no single model for the behavior of human beings because, fundamentally, human beings are an abstraction which covers ~9 billion distinct globs of cells with different genes, gene expressions, culture, personal experiences, etc. As a physicist I think people are more sure about what an electron is, for example, than they should be, given that there is no axiomatic formulation of quantum field theory that isn't trivial, but at least there we are in spitting distance of having something to talk about such that (in very limited situations, mind you) we can speak of the inevitable. But the OP rather casually suggested, implicitly, if not explicitly, that the submitted article was wrong because "game theory," which is both glib and just like technically not a conclusion one could reasonably come to with an honest appraisal of the limitations of these sorts of ways of thinking about the world.

Avicebron 11mo ago

I mean, in an ideal system we would have political agency greater than the sum of individuals who would put pressure/curtail the rise of abusive actors taking advantage of power and informational asymetry to try and gain more power (wealth) and influence (wealth) in order to gain more wealth

voidhorse 11mo ago

> Game theory is inevitable. Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives. That's not how mathematics works. "it's just math therefore it's a true theory of everything" is silly. We cannot forget that mathematics is all about models, models which, by definition, do not account for even remotely close to all the information involved in predicting what will actually occur in reality. Game Theory is a theory about a particular class of mathematical structures. You cannot reduce all of existence to just this class of structures, and if you think you can, you'd better be ready to write a thesis on it. Couple that with the inherent unpredictability of human beings, and I'm sorry but your Laplacean dreams will be crushed. The idea that "it's math so it's inevitable" is a fallacy. Even if you are a hardcore mathematical Platonist you should still recognize that mathematics is a kind of incomplete picture of the real, not its essence. In fact, the various incompleteness theorems illustrate directly, in Mathematic's own terms, that the idea that a mathematical perspective or any logical system could perfectly account for all of reality is doomed from the start.

_heimdall 11mo ago

Game theory is not inevitable, neither is math. Both are attempts to understand the world around us and predict what is likely to happen next given a certain context. Weather predictions are just math, for example, and they are always wrong to some degree.

empressplay 11mo ago
Because the models aren't sophisticated enough (yet). There's no voodoo here. I'm always surprised how many 'logical' tech people shy away from simple determinism, given how obvious a deterministic universe becomes the more time you spend in computer science, and seem to insist there's some sort of metaphysical influence out there somewhere we'll never understand. There's not. Math is almost the definition of inevitability. Logic doubly so. Once there's a sophisticated enough human model to decipher our myriad of idiosyncrasies, we will all be relentlessly manipulated, because it is human nature to manipulate others. That future is absolutely inevitable. Might as well fall into the abyss with open arms and a smile.
- chunky1994 11mo ago
  But the world is not deterministic, inherently so. We know it's probabilistic at least at small enough scales. Most hidden variable theories have been disproven, and to the best of our current understanding the laws of the physical universe are probabsilitic in nature (i.e the Standard Model). So while we can probably come up with a very good probabilistic model of things that can happen, there is no perfect prediction, or rather, there cannot be
- rando77 11mo ago
  There is strong reason to expect evolution to have found a system that is complex and changing for its control system, for this very reason so it can't get easily gamed (and eaten).
- mirrir 11mo ago
  There is voodoo in begging the question though.
- 11mo ago

darkmighty 11mo ago

Game theory is not inevitable, because we can change the rules of the game. > It's also true that you, personally, are just one of those 8B+ people Unless you communicate and coordinate!

wongarsu 11mo ago

In a world ruled by game theory alone marketing is pointless. Everyone already makes the most rational choice and has all the information, so why appeal to their emotions, build brand awareness or even tell them about your products. Yet companies spend a lot of money on marketing, and game theory tells us that they wouldn't do that without reason Game theory makes a lot of simplifying assumptions. In the real world most decisions are made under constraints, and you typically lack a lot of information and can't dedicate enough resources to each question to find the optimal choice given the information you have. Game theory is incredibly useful, especially when talking about big, carefully thought out decisions, but it's far from a perfect description of reality

empressplay 11mo ago
> Game theory makes a lot of simplifying assumptions. It does because it's trying to get across the point that although the world seems impossibly complex it's not. Of course it is in fact _almost_ impossibly complex. This doesn't mean that it's redundant for more complex situations, it only means that to increase its accuracy you have to deepen its depth.

stared 11mo ago

Game theory is also a model, with concrete assumptions, which are not universally followed. It is not a physics theory, that works regardless of our will.

trinsic2 11mo ago

One person has more impact than you think. Many times it's one person that is speaking what's on the mind of many and that speaking out can bring the courage to do what needs to be done for many people that sitting on the fence. The Andor TV series really taught me that. I'm working on a presentation of surveillance capitalism that I plan to show to my community. It's going to be an interesting future. Some will side with the Empire and others with side with the Rebellion.

JuniperMesos 11mo ago
You realize surveillance capitalism is what caused the Andor TV show (and more broadly the entire Star Wars franchise) to exist at all, right? Gigantic corporate entities have made a lot of money from monetizing the Star Wars franchise. I'll say frankly that I personally object to Star Wars on an aesthetic level - it is ultimately an artistically-flawed media franchise even if it has some genuinely compelling ideas sometimes. But what really bothers me is that Star Wars in its capacity as a modern culturally-important story cycle is also intellectual property owned by the Disney corporation. The idea that the problems of the world map neatly to a confict between an evil empire and a plucky rebellion is also basically propagandistic (and also boring). It's a popular storytelling frame - that's why George Lucas wrote the original Star Wars movies that way. But I really don't like seeing someone watch a TV series using the Star Wars intellectual property package and then using the story the writers chose to write - writers ultimately funded by Disney - as a basis for how they see themselves in the world poltically.
- trinsic2 11mo ago
  We can't blink without involving some corporation into our creative process. I think Tony Gilroy has some interesting things to say about our world with-in the Andor TV series. Its not an easy map. The character arcs, when the are based on the truth of the situation can help people change their way of thinking. I never got anything out of the original Star Wars films except heroes and villains. Andor is on a completely different level then the original Star wars world IMHO. Some times you got to use whats available to you. I do think that we are living in an evil time and in order to change that story, we are going to have to envision something different. I think good stories can help us do that, regardless of how they are funded. Corporations will sell you the rope to hang themselves. They don't care what happens, only that they make money, and I think that will be there downfall at some point.

DarkNova6 11mo ago

Game theory is only as good as the model you are using. Now couple the fact that most people are terrible at modeling with the fact that they tend to ignore implicit constraints… the result is something less resembling science but something resembling religion.

lesuorac 11mo ago
I think you've missed the point. The concept of Game Theory is inevitable because it's studying an existing phenomenon. Whether or not the researchers of Game Theory correctly model that is irrelevant to whether the phenomenon exists or not. The models such as Prisoner's Dilemma are not inevitable though. Just because you have two people doesn't mean they're in a dilemma. --- To rephrase this, Technology is inevitable. A specific instance of it (ex. Generative AI) is not.

rmah 11mo ago

The statement "Game theory is inevitable. Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives." implies that the "actors" are humans. But that's not what game theory assumes. Game theory just provides a mathematical framework to analyze outcomes of decisions when parts of the system have different goals. Game theory does not claim to predict human behavior (humans make mistakes, are driven by emotion and often have goals outside the "game" in question). Thus game theory is NOT inevitable.

hyperadvanced 11mo ago
Yes, game theory is not a predictive model but an explanatory/general one. Additionally not everything is a game, as in statistics, not everything has a probability curve. They can be applied speculatively to great effect, but they are ultimately abstract models.
- nostrademons 11mo ago
  You can use it for either predictive or explanatory purposes. In the early ('00s) years of Google it was common to diagram out the incentives of all the market participants; this led to such innovations like the use of the second-price VCG auction [1] for ad sales that now make over a third of a trillion dollars per year. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey%E2%80%93Clarke%E2%80%93Groves_auction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey%E2%80%93Clarke%E2%80%9...
  - nickff 11mo ago
    Google has now (mostly?) transitioned to using first-price, and more complicated (opaque) auction-style pricing for many of its advertising products. https://blog.google/products/admanager/simplifying-programmatic-first-price-auctions-google-ad-manager/ https://blog.google/products/admanager/simplifying-programma...
    - nostrademons 11mo ago
      > It’s important to note that our move to a single unified first price auction only impacts display and video inventory sold via Ad Manager. This change will have no impact on auctions for ads on Google Search, AdSense for Search, YouTube, and other Google properties, and advertisers using Google Ads or Display & Video 360 do not need to take any action.

VikingCoder 11mo ago

Hi, sure, you can say, "I will always view the world through the eyes of Game Theory." But don't forget, we discovered Nash Equilibrium, which changed how people behaved, in many interesting scenarios. Also, from a purely Game Theoretic standpoint... All kinds of atrocities are justifiable, if it propagates your genes...

nrclark 11mo ago

Game theory is a model that's sometimes accurate. Game theorists often forget that humans are bags of thinking meat, and that our thinking is accomplished by goopy electrochemical processes Brains can and do make straight-up mistakes all the time. Like "there was a transmission error"-type mistakes. They can't be modeled or predicted, and so humans can never truly be rational actors. Humans also make irrational decisions all the time based on gut feeling and instinct. Sometimes with reasons that a brain backfills, sometimes not. People can and do act against the own self interest all the time, and not for "oh, but they actually thought X" reasons. Brains make unexplainable mistakes. Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten what you went in there to do? That state isn't modelable with game theory, and it generalizes to every aspect of human behavior.

gmd63 11mo ago

The greatest challenge facing humanity is building a culture where we are liberated to cooperate toward the greatest goals without fear of another selfish individual or group taking advantage to our detriment. Yes, the mathematicians will tell you it's "inevitable" that people will cheat and "enshittify". But if you take statistical samplings of the universe from an outsider's perspective, you would think it would be impossible for life to exist. Our whole existence is built on disregard for the inevitable. Reducing humanity to a bunch of game-theory optimizing automatons will be a sure-fire way to fail The Great Filter, as nobody can possibly understand and mathematically articulate the larger games at stake that we haven't even discovered.

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]

cowpig 11mo ago

Game theory applied to the world is a useful simplification; reality is messy. In reality: * Actors have access to limited computation * The "rules" of the universe are unknowable and changing * Available sets of actions are unknowable * Information is unknowable, continuous, incomplete, and changes based on the frame of reference * Even the concept of an "Actor" is a leaky abstraction There's a field of study called Agent-based Computational Economics which explores how systems of actors behaving according to sets of assumptions behave. In this field you can see a lot of behaviour that more closely resembles real world phenomena, but of course if those models are highly predictive they have a tendency to be kept secret and monetized. So for practical purposes, "game theory is inevitable" is only a narrowly useful heuristic. It's certainly not a heuristic that supports technological determinism.

ivape 11mo ago

It feels like the only aspect of Game Theory at work here is opportunity cost. For example, why shouldn't you make AI porn generation software? There's moral reasons for it, but usually, most put it aside because someone else is going to get the bag first. That exhaustive list the author enumerated are all in some way byproducts of break-things-move-fast-say-sorry-later philosophy. You need ID for the websites because you did not give a shit and wanted to get the porn out there first and foremost. Now you need IDs. You need to track everyone and everything on the internet because you did not want to cap your wealth at a reasonable price for the service. You are willing to live with accumulated sins because "its not as bad as murder". The world we have today has way more to do with these things than anything else. We do not operate as a collective, and naturally, we don't get good outcomes for the collective.

LeifCarrotson 11mo ago

> if you can shape those beliefs and that information flow, you alter the incentives Selective information dissemination, persuasion, and even disinformation are for sure the easiest ways to change the behaviors of actors in the system. However, the most effective and durable way to "spread those lies" are for them to be true! If you can build a technology which makes the real facts about those incentives different than what it was before, then that information will eventually spread itself. For me, the canonical example is the story of the electric car: All kinds of persuasive messaging, emotional appeals, moral arguments, and so on have been employed to convince people that it's better for the environment if they drive an electric car than a polluting, noisy, smelly, internal-combustion gas guzzling SUV. Through the 90s and early 2000s, this saw a small number of early adopters and environmentalists adopting niche products and hybrids for the reasons that were persuasive to them, while another slice of society decided to delete their catalytic converters and "roll coal" in their diesels for their own reasons, while the average consumer was still driving an ICE vehicle somewhere in the middle of the status quo. Then lithium battery technology and solid-state inverter technology arrived in the 2010s and the Tesla Model S was just a better car - cheaper to drive, more torque, more responsive, quieter, simpler, lower maintenance - than anything the internal combustion engine legacy manufacturers could build. For the subset of people who can charge in their garage at home with cheap electricity, the shape of the game had changed, and it's been just a matter of time (admittedly a slow process, with a lot of resistance from various interests) before EVs were simply the better option. Similarly, with modern semiconductor technology, solar and wind energy no longer require desperate pleas from the limited political capital of environmental efforts, it's like hydro - they're just superior to fossil fuel power plants in a lot of regions now. There are other negative changes caused by technology, too, aided by the fact that capitalist corporations will seek out profitable (not necessarily morally desirable) projects - in particular, LLMs are reshaping the world just because the technology exists. Once you pull a new set of rules and incentives out of Pandora's box, game theory results in inevitable societal change.

throwaway20174 11mo ago

When they coined the term "influencer" it was a perfect definition for what that is. It's not a question about the one who cannot influence the 7.9B. The question is disparity, which is like income disparity. What happens when fewer and fewer people influence greater and greater numbers. Understanding the risk in that.

hermitcrab 11mo ago

Game theory assumes that all the players agree on the pay-offs. However this is often not the case in real world situations. Robert MacNamara (the ex US secretary of defence) said that he realized after the Vietnam war the US and the Vietnamese saw the war completely differently, even years after war had ended (see the excellent documentary 'Fog of War').

upboundspiral 11mo ago

This argument has the unspoken premise that in large part, people's core identity is reacting to external influences. I believe that while responding to influences is part of human existence, the richness of the individual transcends such an explanation for all their actions. The phrase "game theory is inevitable" reads like the perspective of an aristocrat looking down on the masses - enough vision to see the interplay of things, and enough arrogance to assume they can control it.

cameldrv 11mo ago

Yes it's one thing to say that game theory is inevitable, but defection is not inevitable. In fact, if you consider all levels of the organization of life, from multicellularity to large organisms, to families, corporations, towns, nations, etc, it all exists because entities figured out how to cooperate and prevent defection. If you want to fix these things, you need to come up with a way to change the nature of the game.

clydethefrog 11mo ago

"in formal experiments the only people who behaved exactly according to the mathematical models created by game theory are economists themselves, and psychopaths" [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(television_documentary_series) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(television_documentar...