I think the disagreement is that I think the traditional approach to the prisoners’ dilemma makes it more useful as a tool for understanding and teaching about the world. Any miscommunication is probably my fault for my failing to sufficiently engage with your arguments, but it FEELS to me like you are either redefining rationality or creating a game that is not a prisoners’ dilemma because I would define the prisoners’ dilemma as a game in which both parties have a dominant strategy in which they take actions that harm the other player, yet both parties are better off if neither play this dominant strategy than if both do, and I would define a dominant strategy as something a rational player always plays regardless of what he things the other player would do. I realize I am kind of cheating by trying to win through definitions.
Yeah, I think that sort of presentation is anti-useful for understanding the world, since it’s picking a rather arbitrary mathematical theory and just insisting “this is what rational people do”, without getting people to think it through and understand why or if that’s actually true.
The reason a rational agent will likely defect in a realistic prisoner’s dilemma against a normal human is because it believes the human’s actions to be largely uncorrelated with its own, since it doesn’t have a good enough model of the human’s mind to know how it thinks. (And the reason why humans defect is the same, with the added obstacle that the human isn’t even rational themselves.)
Teaching that rational agents defect because that’s the Nash equilibrium and rational agents always go to the Nash equilibrium is just an incorrect model of rationality, and agents that are actually rational can consistently win against Nash-seekers.
I think the disagreement is that I think the traditional approach to the prisoners’ dilemma makes it more useful as a tool for understanding and teaching about the world. Any miscommunication is probably my fault for my failing to sufficiently engage with your arguments, but it FEELS to me like you are either redefining rationality or creating a game that is not a prisoners’ dilemma because I would define the prisoners’ dilemma as a game in which both parties have a dominant strategy in which they take actions that harm the other player, yet both parties are better off if neither play this dominant strategy than if both do, and I would define a dominant strategy as something a rational player always plays regardless of what he things the other player would do. I realize I am kind of cheating by trying to win through definitions.
Yeah, I think that sort of presentation is anti-useful for understanding the world, since it’s picking a rather arbitrary mathematical theory and just insisting “this is what rational people do”, without getting people to think it through and understand why or if that’s actually true.
The reason a rational agent will likely defect in a realistic prisoner’s dilemma against a normal human is because it believes the human’s actions to be largely uncorrelated with its own, since it doesn’t have a good enough model of the human’s mind to know how it thinks. (And the reason why humans defect is the same, with the added obstacle that the human isn’t even rational themselves.)
Teaching that rational agents defect because that’s the Nash equilibrium and rational agents always go to the Nash equilibrium is just an incorrect model of rationality, and agents that are actually rational can consistently win against Nash-seekers.