Comment by savanaly
8 years ago
This doesn't add up to me. I can be one of the two people in a prisoner's dilemma scenario and fully acknowledge the reality that I might be heading to jail while still playing the selfish strategy of snitching.
Just because you recognize that your personal actions won't affect the outcome as it pertains to you doesn't mean you can't recognize that the personal actions of a large number of other people will affect the outcome as it pertains to you.
This isn't prisoner's dilemma though - everyone has a full ability to communicate with each other. That breaks a pretty basic assumption.
To stretch your analogy, you are playing prisoners dilemma with someone who is swearing he will snitch, has a lawyer who is saying "my client will cooperate fully with the police" and who has signed a document explaining the facts.
In the classical prisoner's dilemma it doesn't matter whether the prisoners can fully communicate with each other or not as long as it hold that they cannot change their move after seeing what the other guy moved. And it's perverse because they both have a strategy A that strictly dominates B but if they both play A then they're worse off than if they both played B.
This thread is already insane in that the metaphor is getting more complicated than what it was trying to explain, but...
...trying to minimise one's carbon footprint is, quite obviously, an iterated prisoner's dilemma: you can observe other's behaviour every day (and vice versa) and react accordingly.
The problem is that nobody plays it with a single other person, but with "all of humanity" instead. Any change in others' behaviour will almost certainly be only gradual, and not accessible to daily perception.
That is equivalent to not communicating. In the classical prisoner's dilemma, you do assume that the other person will make their decision independently of you. (Which is also equivalent to not communicating.) Real humans don't do what the classical case says they do, because humans can empathize with each other and work together even without explicitly communicating. Political organizations, though? Not as much.