> 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...!)
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.
CC-PP is disproven directly from Elinor Ostrom's research studies in her book "Governing the Commons".
Elinor literally won a Nobel Prize for disproving the tragedy of the commons.
> It was long unanimously held among economists that natural resources that were collectively used by their users would be over-exploited and destroyed in the long-term. Elinor Ostrom disproved this idea by conducting field studies on how people in small, local communities manage shared natural resources, such as pastures, fishing waters, and forests. She showed that when natural resources are jointly used by their users, in time, rules are established for how these are to be cared for and used in a way that is both economically and ecologically sustainable.
> Ostrom showed that many real-world “commons dilemmas” are not fixed one-shot prisoner’s dilemmas but repeated interactions where people can communicate, build trust, and design rules, impose retaliation to rule breakers, and redefine the rules of the underlying game structure as time goes on.
No, Ostrom's law doesn't disprove anything. No, that's not why she was awarded the prize.
Ostrom accepted that there's a real problem, and that historically it has led to catastrophe. Her contribution was to see that in practice these catastrophes have been relatively infrequent, and why. This turns out to be an interesting story because previous work tended toward centralized control (government takeover or privatization) as a cure (global optimization), while most real-world cases have been dealt with effectively by community organization (local optimization). In other words, Ostrom didn't disprove the problem. She found alternative solutions.
But the dynamic of the tragedy of the commons is real. The Newfoundland cod fisheries did collapse. And there are many active catastrophes playing out at different scales and speeds as we speak.
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.
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
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.