this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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The way the Prisoner's Dilemma works is the idea that multiple players in a game choosing what is individually rational for them does not actually result in the best outcome for them as a group.
The whole point is that from the perspective of a single prisoner, ratting out the other guy is the best option, independent of what that other guy does.
So, with two prisoners unable to coordinate their strategies (isolated), they go with what is individually the most rational strategy, even though the is suboptimal, whereas if they were not isolated and could coordinate their moves, they would choose an absolutely optimal outcome for themselves as a group.
If one prisoner rats the other out, and the other does not, the rat gets a superficially better outcome, whereas the trusting one that was betrayed gets absolutely screwed.
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If you did a game theory version of a Revolution, this problem is worse by orders of magnitude.
Sure, yes, if millions of people actually overthrow a broken system and establish a more equitable one, almost every one (non billionaires) are better off.
But if only one person revolts, they are jailed or die.
Add to that that the planning and coordination of trying to organize a million 'prisoners' to all revolt is itself a crime, and it is no wonder that such things rarely happen.
The idea is basically that for an individual, expecting, assuming, hoping for cooperation from the other players is individually risky, likely to be costly, thus, it is less likely to occur.
If your plan only works if millions go along with you, and if millions don't, you end up dead or in jail, and you have no real way of knowing that millions will go along with you... then for most people the shitty status quo is preferable to death or jail.
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There are situations in real life and in game theory where styles of cooperation, or of testing loyalty in a repeated series of games that can lead to cooperation, do exist, but the studies on this are basically fancy math showing how difficult trust and cooperation are to achieve, and how easily trust is lost and never regained once betrayed.