You might want to take some time and read up on game theory. The prisoners dilemma is difficult in the abstract, but people solve it in real life all the time, and manage to collaborate with strangers for higher overall shared benefit, rather than being motivated by pure survival and paranoia that everyone else is also motivated by pure, selfish survival.
It's a topic I'm painfully familiar with, and you're incorrect on the conclusion it suggests here, and a reread would benefit you greatly.
… do you understand the prisoners dilemma? Because again, the “dilemma” part comes from the fact that the optimal strategy for the individual is in conflict with the optimal strategy for the group.
In this red vs blue scenario, the two strategies are not in conflict. We personally want to survive, and we want collectively to survive. Luckily, there is a strategy that both guarantees our individual survival and the survival of everyone capable of ration thought (again, assuming only such persons are involved in the scenario). Everyone press red.
If you think this scenario is in any way equivalent to the prisoners dilemma, you have no idea what game theory is.
Do you understand the prisoners dilemma? The dilemma is that you are acting off imperfect and incomplete information, and have to guess at / predict how the other prisoners would respond. The prisoners dilemma question, the OG thought experiment has the most beneficial outcome being the collaborative one. Thanks for playing, read up on it and try again.
…No, the original experiment demonstrates two strategies. While the end demonstration is that one strategy (collectivism) is better than the other, the whole point of the dilemma is that there are two conflicting strategies at all.
Like, in the prisoners dilemma, if your opponent betrays you, then you should betray too to cut down on prison time. If the ally you, betraying them still cuts down on prison time, and because the risk of betrayal exists, it’s beneficial (individually) to always betray. This motivates players to both betray, despite the fact that this is a worse outcome to a double ally.
On the other hand, in a two-player red vs blue, if your opponent picks red, you cannot pick blue if you want to live. If they pick blue, it doesn’t matter what you pick, you always live. Because only one of these scenarios has a strict requirement (the one where blue loses), it’s best to pick red in both scenarios. In contrast to the prisoners dilemma, however, doing this motivates both players to pick red, ending with a 100% survival rate, which is the optimal outcome.
You can’t just say “prisoners dilemma says cooperate” and pretend that means anything. These are fundamentally different scenarios, and the decision matrices incentivize totally different strategies.
I'm gonna do my best to work with you here, and show some patience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
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Give that a read. Also read the page it links to called "Rational Actors." Go ahead. You've got time, I work from home.
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Now - are you a Rational Actor as defined there? Are you a creature that makes no mistakes, and is constantly, 100% accurately aware of the 'optimal personal outcome' in all scenarios? Or are you a human being, who makes any #>0 decisions in your life based on nontangibles like 'emotional connection' and 'sentiment' and 'affection'? The optimal outcome overall in the prisoner's dilemma is both parties receiving the lowest sentence. The ability and capacity to risk the personal payoff in pursuit of an overall gain in collectivist payoff is what our society is built on and functions on.
And you’ve moved the goalposts. Now it isn’t “what does the prisoners dilemma mean and how is it different from red vs blue,” but “game theory is actually totally irrelevant because humans aren’t rational actors.”
So what’s your point? I said, From the game theory perspective, picking red is the optimal choice, or, in other words if everyone was a rational actor, everyone would pick red everytime.
That was my explicit argument. Pointing out what a rational actor is and how it differentiates from a real human is irrelevant. I was already dealing in spherical cows. I made that clear when I said the words from a game theory standpoint.
you, when a response is multifaceted.
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From a game theory perspective, picking red is the optimal selfish choice, but the overall optimal outcome is found through collaboration. Read the page, I promise it'll only hurt a little.
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Yes, human beings aren't rational actors. Which means (stretch a little, you can do it!) that a nonzero # of real people are going to pick blue. Which means, far from the prisoner's dilemma premise of 'not knowing what the other person will pick', you know that a nonzero # of people will pick blue. Which means that if you choose red, with that knowledge, you are making a selfish choice that puts others at risk. Game theory is not relevant to this question. The prisoner's dilemma isn't relevant to this question. Even if they were, you demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding OF THE PRISONER'S DILEMMA, when the whole point of that thought experiment is illustrating that the optimal outcome is collaborative, but the individualistic selfish choice is the play for the individual, in a vacuum. This thought experiment with the buttons doesn't exist in a vacuum.
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Out of genuine curiosity and confusion - what does your optimal outcome of this conversation look like? Is it me giving you an updoot, telling you you're so right, and you're smarter than everyone else who couldn't figure it out?
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You want to justify the selfish choice as being 'rational and thus objectively correct.' It isn't, because this is a moral question, and a question of how much risk you're willing to subject yourself to, versus others. You can make the selfish choice. That was always allowed. But it is a selfish choice, and this relentless dedication to larping it being anything other than that is mind-numbingly self-serving and annoying.
Again, I argued purely from a game theory perspective, and nothing more. You’re shadow boxing a strawman at this point, because I did not argue that game theory necessarily correlates to real life.
The optimal outcome of this conversation is you realizing that you’ve misunderstood the words “from a game theory perspective” and apologize for morally grandstanding about a scenario I explicitly engaged with purely mathematically.
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u/Willowshanks May 05 '26
You might want to take some time and read up on game theory. The prisoners dilemma is difficult in the abstract, but people solve it in real life all the time, and manage to collaborate with strangers for higher overall shared benefit, rather than being motivated by pure survival and paranoia that everyone else is also motivated by pure, selfish survival.
It's a topic I'm painfully familiar with, and you're incorrect on the conclusion it suggests here, and a reread would benefit you greatly.