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unformedelta commented on This is not the future   blog.mathieui.net/this-is... · Posted by u/ericdanielski
nostrademons · 20 hours ago
I think a more accurate and more useful framing is:

Game theory is inevitable.

Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives.

The specific examples called out here may or may not be inevitable. It's true that the future is unknowable, but it's also true that the future is made up of 8B+ independent actors and that they're going to react to incentives. It's also true that you, personally, are just one of those 8B+ people and your influence on the remaining 7.999999999B people, most of whom don't know you exist, is fairly limited.

If you think carefully about those incentives, you actually do have a number of significant leverage points with which to change the future. Many of those incentives are crafted out of information and trust, people's beliefs about what their own lives are going to look like in the future if they take certain actions, and if you can shape those beliefs and that information flow, you alter the incentives. But you need to think very carefully, on the level of individual humans and how they'll respond to changes, to get the outcomes you want.

unformedelta · 20 hours ago
Perhaps you don't intend this, but I intuit that you imply that Game theory's inevitability leads to the inevitability of many claims the author's claims aren't inevitable.

To me, this inevitability only is guaranteed if we assume a framing of non-cooperative game theory with idealized self-interested actors. I think cooperative game theory[1] better models the dynamics of the real world. More important than thinking on the level of individual humans is thinking about the coalitions that have a common interest to resist abusive technology.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_game_theory

u/unformedelta

KarmaCake day21April 30, 2025View Original