Project idea: an iterated prisoner's dilemma competition/game

post by Adam Zerner (adamzerner) · 2024-02-26T23:06:20.699Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

Contents

No comments

Epistemic effort: mostly just thinking out loud. I spend a few dozen minutes thinking about this myself, and then decided to write this up.

After watching this video by Veritasium about game theory I am wondering whether more people having an understanding of game theory -- iterated prisoners dilemmas in particular -- would lead to more prosocial behavior in the real world.

Here's an example of where I'm coming from. The video talks about a failure mode where retaliatory strategies like tit-for-tat stumble upon a terrible situation where they endlessly defect against one another. Both are "nice" in the sense that they don't intend to defect first, but in the real world there are errors. You intend to cooperate but maybe you screw up and accidentally defect instead. Or maybe the other person screws up and misjudges your cooperation as defection. Then they defect in retaliation. Then you defect in retaliation. So on and so forth.

You need a way out of this vicious cycle. One approach would be, instead of retaliating after every defection, you only retaliate 9 out of 10 times.

I think this sort of thing happens in the real world. For example, maybe your partner does something to you that made you unhappy. You feel wronged. So you retaliate by being cold towards them. After all, you don't want to be a pushover and let such behavior go unpunished.

But your partner never intended to upset you. They don't realize they did anything wrong. But they notice you being cold towards them. And they don't want to let that go unpunished. So they retaliate by being cold towards you. Which you notice, and retaliate against by extending the duration for which you're cold towards them. So on and so forth. This sort of thing can lead to bitterness amongst people that lasts for an embarrassingly long period of time. It can happen amongst not just romantic partners, but amongst friends, family, co-workers, business partners, acquaintances, and more.

Now imagine that you've studied game theory. You understand the downsides of endlessly retaliating. Of sliding the "forgiveness" slider all the way to the left until it hits 0. You understand that this strategy is a poor one. It's obvious to you. You've played in iterated prisoner's dilemma competitions and explored numerous simulations, and it's just very clear how dumb it is to slide that slider all the way to the left. It seems plausible to me -- no, likely -- that for such a person, this understanding would translate to real life and lead to more prosocial behavior and better outcomes.

I haven't thought about it too deeply, but here's my first approximation of how the game would work:

I think the best case scenario for this project would be if it somehow raised the sanity waterline [LW · GW], brought us closer to a dath ilanian [? · GW] world, and affected important things like arms races in nuclear weapons and AI. I'm definitely not optimistic about this happening, but it does seem possible.

  1. ^

    There's a good joke in here somewhere...

0 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.