Maybe we're not doomed

Game theory is not the best way to think about the tragedy of the commons.

Elinor Ostrom got in 2009 the "nobel prize" in economics for her work of studying how people actually deal in the real world with the tragedy of the commons. It makes much more sense to go to her empirically derived work than to think in terms of game theory.

She suggests 8 principles:

1. Clearly defined boundaries (effective exclusion of external un-entitled parties);
2. Rules regarding the appropriation and provision of common resources that are adapted to local conditions;
3. Collective-choice arrangements that allow most resource appropriators to participate in the decision-making process;
4. Effective monitoring by monitors who are part of or accountable to the appropriators;
5. A scale of graduated sanctions for resource appropriators who violate community rules;
6. Mechanisms of conflict resolution that are cheap and of easy access;
7. Self-determination of the community recognized by higher-level authorities; and
8. In the case of larger common-pool resources, organization in the form of multiple layers of nested enterprises, with small local CPRs at the base level.

There are a few ways we might not be doomed. The first and less likely is that people will just decide not to go to their doom, even though it's the Nash equilibrium. To give a totally crazy example, suppose there were two countries playing a game where the first one to launch missiles had a huge advantage. And neither country trusts the other, and there are multiple false alarms - thus pushing the situation to the stable Nash equilibrium of both countries trying to launch first. Except imagine that somehow, through some heroic spasm of insanity, these two countries just decided not to nuke each other. That's the sort of thing it would take.

This would be true if the game being played were, say, Prisoner's Dilemma, but in the actual nuclear arms race the game was that if either side launched their weapons the other side would retaliate, resulting in large losses on both sides. (In general, I think LW overuses PD in game theory discussions, when games like Chicken or Stag Hunt would be better.) Wikipedia on mutually assured destruction:

The strategy is a form of Nash equilibrium in which neither side, once armed, has any incentive to initiate a conflict ... neither side will dare to launch a first strike because the other side will launch on warning (also called fail-deadly) or with secondary forces (a second strike), resulting in unacceptable losses for both parties. The payoff of the MAD doctrine is expected to be a tense but stable global peace.

That said, the US didn't pre-emptively obliterate the USSR, or later all the other countries, and this does support your point, since obliterating the USSR would have been positive-expected-utility for the US, for some dubious values of utility. Which may or may not have been the prudent thing to do - we can't judge decisions only on their actual outcomes. Maybe there was a 90% chance of us dying, and we just got lucky, or maybe there are very few people around to discuss this in worlds that weren't lucky. (This is anthropics though, which is confusing.) Incidentally, von Neumann advocated for a pre-emptive strike on the USSR, and later the USSR advocated for a pre-emptive strike on China.

Re your actual point, that cooperation often arises not in spite of but because of self-interest, and that we might be able to cooperate to preserve our value: I agree with you, and Scott seems to agree that it's possible though he considers it unlikely. Our society already does this to some extent - witness the social sanctions imposed on people who achieve enough that their peers look bad by comparison. Essentially we just need to impose enough social costs to make it negative-expected-utility to sacrifice your children to Moloch. (And impose social costs on people who don't impose social costs in accordance with this rule and the preceding rule.) But this might be too hard, especially when there are instabilities, e.g. when the first brain emulations arrive.

The second and most already-implemented way is to jump outside the system and change the game to a non-doomed one. If people can't share the commons without defecting, why not portion it up into private property? Or institute government regulations? Or iterate the game to favor tit-for-tat strategies? Each of these changes has costs, but if the wage of the current game is 'doom,' each player has an incentive to change the game.

This is cooperation. The hard part is in jumping out, and getting the other person to change games with you, not in whether or not better games to play exist.

Moloch has discovered reciprocal altruism since iterated prisoner's dilemmas are a pretty common feature of the environment, but because Moloch creates adaptation-executors rather than utility maximizers, we fail to cooperate across social, spatial, and temporal distance, even if the payoff matrix stays the same.

Even if you have an incentive to switch, you need to notice the incentive before it can get you to change your mind. Since many switches require all the players to cooperate and switch at the same time, it's unlikely that groups will accidentally start playing the better game.

Convincing people that the other game is indeed better is hard when evaluating incentives is difficult. Add too much complexity and it's easy to imagine that you're hiding something. This is hard to get past since moving past it requires trust, in a context where we maybe are correct to distrust people -- i.e. if only lawyers know enough law to write contracts, they should probably add loopholes that lawyers can find, or at least make it complicated enough that only lawyers can understand it, so that you need to continue to hire lawyers to use your contracts. In fact contracts are generally complicated and full of loopholes and basically require lawyers to deal with.

Also, most people don't know about Nash equilibria, economics, game theory, etc., and it would be nice to be able to do things in a world with sub-utopian levels of understanding incentives. Also, trying to explain game theory to people as a substep of getting them to switch to another game runs into the same kind of justified mistrust as the lawyer example -- if they don't know game theory and you're saying that game theory says you're right, and evaluating arguments is costly and noisy, and they don't trust you at the start of the interaction, it's reasonable to distrust you even after the explanation, and not switch games.

Incentives for government employees sometimes don't match the needs of the people.

Sometimes?

Financial security, status, power, dominance. The inherent lack of knowledge and accountability of bureaucracies. The Road to Serfdom. The Iron Law of Bureaucracy. Controlling other people's lives , and other people's money. When the problem you're supposed to fix gets worse, you don't get fired, you get a bigger budget.

Thomas Sowell, arch conservative, was a communist when he started graduate school at the University of Chicago. He was a communist after a year under Milton Friedman. He repudiated communism after one summer as an intern at the Department of Labor, and seeing how the government bureaucracy actually worked.

This year, the IRS targeting political opponents. The NSA spying on all citizens. The CIA spying on on the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation of the CIA. That's pretty sweet, spying on your supposed overseers in their attempts to oversee you. The CIA is also spying on internal whistle blowers when they contact Congress.

And when "called to account" by Congress, they show up, crack jokes, lie through their teeth, and piss in the face of the supposed representatives of the people, while telling them it's raining.

The apparatchiks are in power, and increasingly don't feel the need to even pretend otherwise. My impression of the EU from afar is similar.

For 'prisoner's dilemma', substitute 'N-person prisoners' dilemma' and see how the terrain looks. In appropriate places of course. But also, on a more optimistic note, beware over use of the PD model. (Edited to add link)

Scott's post proves too much. In particular it proves that early multicellular organisms would inevitably revert back to micro-organisms.

Edit: This is a bit too opaque. Scott argues that agents that sacrifice the common good for individual gains in reproduction and survival sill survival will outcompete agents that do not make these sacrifices. However, cells within early multicellular organisms could have done this, yet multicellular organisms nevertheless exist.

I suspect that there is some mathematical formalism which describes how the tragedy of the commons turns into an iterated PD, where virtues such as fairness and honesty emerge naturally, but I cannot find anything relevant online.

Does anyone have any good recommendations for a book on the subject of: Quantum Mechanics/Physics discoveries and what it tells us about Spirituality, if anything. I am curious to learn more on how these subjects could potentially be connected. Please, does anyone know of a good book you'd recommend? Thank you a lot.