Prisioner’s Dilemma

A brilliant post at Overcoming Bias: The True Prisoner’s Dilemma. It’s a bit geeky, but here are some highlights:

The classic visualization of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is as follows: you are a criminal, and you and your confederate in crime have both been captured by the authorities.

Independently, without communicating, and without being able to change your mind afterward, you have to decide whether to give testimony against your confederate (D) or remain silent (C).

Both of you, right now, are facing one-year prison sentences; testifying (D) takes one year off your prison sentence, and adds two years to your confederate’s sentence.

Or maybe you and some stranger are, only once, and without knowing the other player’s history, or finding out who the player was afterward, deciding whether to play C or D, for a payoff in dollars matching the standard chart.

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We fixate instinctively on the (C, C) outcome and search for ways to argue that it should be the mutual decision: “How can we ensure mutual cooperation?” is the instinctive thought. Not “How can I trick the other player into playing C while I play D for the maximum payoff?”

For someone with an impulse toward altruism, or honor, or fairness, the Prisoner’s Dilemma doesn’t really have the critical payoff matrix – whatever the financial payoff to individuals. (C, C) > (D, C), and the key question is whether the other player sees it the same way.

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To construct the True Prisoner’s Dilemma, the situation has to be something like this: [...]

Let’s suppose that four billion human beings – not the whole human species, but a significant part of it – are currently progressing through a fatal disease that can only be cured by substance S.

However, substance S can only be produced by working with a paperclip maximizer from another dimension – substance S can also be used to produce paperclips. The paperclip maximizer only cares about the number of paperclips in its own universe, not in ours, so we can’t offer to produce or threaten to destroy paperclips here. We have never interacted with the paperclip maximizer before, and will never interact with it again.

Both humanity and the paperclip maximizer will get a single chance to seize some additional part of substance S for themselves, just before the dimensional nexus collapses; but the seizure process destroys some of substance S.

The payoff matrix is as follows:

1: C	1: D
2: C (2 billion lives, 2 paperclips gained)	(+3 billion lives, +0 paperclips)
2: D (+0 lives, +3 paperclips)	(+1 billion lives, +1 paperclip)

[...]

We would vastly rather live in a universe where 3 billion humans were cured of their disease and no paperclips were produced, rather than sacrifice a billion human lives to produce 2 paperclips. It doesn’t seem right to cooperate, in a case like this. It doesn’t even seem fair – so great a sacrifice by us, for so little gain by the paperclip maximizer? [...]

What do you do then? Do you cooperate when you really, definitely, truly and absolutely do want the highest reward you can get, and you don’t care a tiny bit by comparison about what happens to the other player? When it seems right to defect even if the other player cooperates?

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So if you’ve ever prided yourself on cooperating in the Prisoner’s Dilemma… or questioned the verdict of classical game theory that the “rational” choice is to defect… then what do you say to the True Prisoner’s Dilemma above?

A brilliant post at Overcoming Bias: The True Prisoner's Dilemma. It's a bit geeky, but here are some highlights: The classic visualization of the Prisoner's Dilemma is as follows: you are a criminal, and you and your confederate in crime have both been captured by the authorities. Independently, without communicating, and without being able to change ...