Comment by nosuchthing
24 days ago
The Tragedy of the Commons has long been discredited by the noble winning game theorist Elinor Ostrom and her research of numerous case studies on the commons, and how people coordinate for collective resilence and prosperity (through rules and by auditing and retaliating against abusers and selfish exploiters)
The infamous "tragedy of the commons" rational resource optimization game is often cited as justification for machiavellian exploitation, but humans being social creatures are subject to reputations, and have sophisticated methods of communication, cooperation, reputation, trust, accountability, auditing, and retaliation capabilities. [1] [2]
Elinor Ostrom's "Rules, games, and common-pool resources" and Robert Axelrod's work "The Evolution of Cooperation" both explain game theory in the context of human scale realities. Of particular interest to the hacker community would be Ostrom's Common Pool Resource principles, which are totally applicable to the way we form communities anywhere. Decenteralized or in any form.
At the core of game theory and human civilization is communication and trust. The abuse of mass media to manipulate populations knows the power of communication and cultural narratives, and we're in a new enclosure [3] [4] of the commons and as media communication networks are being used to exploit through "hypernormalization" and "accelerationism" [5][6][7][8]
For a better applicable human scale game theory primer, check out Bruce Schneier's (yes, the same legendary cryptographer Bruce), "Liars and Outliers"
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#Design_principle...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything
[5] on Cybernetics and the 20th century "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" by Adam Curtis https://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-lov...
[6] on propaganda and 20th century culture "The Century of the Self" by Adam Curtis https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-century-of-the-self/
[7] on the hyperreal news and the use of crisis to manipulate populations and normalize a polycrisis - "Hypernormalization" by Adam Curtis https://thoughtmaybe.com/hypernormalisation/
> At the core of game theory and human civilization is communication and trust.
No and no. Game theory is game theory. When Nash says: "Optimal move for non-cooperative participants" there is no communication and no trust. And it is still game theory. The Wikipedia page on the Nash equilibrium mentions game theory 42 times.
I'm not saying what you're mentioning ain't also game theory.
But you're putting an ideological/political motive to freaking maths to then reframe what "game theory" means in your own view of the world.
As a side note I'll point that humans do play games: from toddler to grown up adults. Game theory also applies to something called "games": be it poker or chess or Go or whatever.
Not everything has to be seen through the lens of exploitation / evil capitalism / gentle communism (collective resilience) / etc.
OK, the OP you replied to conflated game theory and human behavior.
But the GP they were responding to incorrectly conflated game theory and Tragedy of the Commons (which is human behavior).
And my side note is that humans playing games don't follow game theory, because they aren't the actors presumed by that math field. When I play a child in a game, I want them to win a few and lose a few. When I play in Vegas for money, I only want to win (but even playing there proves I'm not rational...).
(My side-side note: this isn't limited to humans. My previous dog met a puppy on a walk, and invited him to play Tug of War. Dexter let the puppy win 5 out of 10 matches...!)
>humans playing games don't follow game theory
The problem here is game theory is actually a huge set of different games/formulas based on cooperative and non-cooperative games.
The base tragedy of the commons is what happens in a winner take all non-cooperative game. Humans over time figured out that this behavior generally sucks and leads to less than optimal outcomes for most of the entities in the game. The tragedy of the commons is then overcome by forming a cooperative game (think tit-for-tat) where defectors are punished.
The problem then arises again, not at an individual level but at things like state/nation level where two non-cooperative entities, even though they individually don't want to incorrectly use a resource, will incorrectly use said resource to prevent the other entity from having it.
The tragedy of the commons is in fact modeled as a game in the game-theoretic sense. It's called the CC–PP Game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CC%E2%80%93PP_game.
bob1029 wrote that "You can have 100% of participants operating in a locally-ideal way while still creating problems in aggregate", and the tragedy of the commons is exactly an instance of this. SaltyBackendGuy is right.
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Game theory is made up of political ideologies, and very often applied to justify politcal ideologies the most obvious being when game theory is cited to justify economic ideologies through synthetic policies like bail outs or stock buy backs.
> But you're putting an ideological/political motive to freaking maths to then reframe what "game theory" means in your own view of the world.
Figures don't lie but liars figure.
"The contemporary era constantly proclaims itself as post-ideological, but this denial of ideology only provides the ultimate proof that we are more than ever embedded in ideology. Ideology is always a field of struggle - among other things, the struggle for appropriating past traditions." - Žižek
“At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn't.” ― Paul Graham