game theory
Article
game theory is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between July 13, 2022 and November 18, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “The fields of game theory and cellular automata”; “at this point nobody except von Neumann and a few of his friends had even heard of game theory”; “argumentation about game theory”. It most often appears alongside Russia, 1890s, 2012.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: July 13, 2022
- Last seen: November 18, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Russia (2 shared issues)
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- 1890s (1 shared issues)
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- 2012 (1 shared issues)
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- Adam Smith (1 shared issues)
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- Alan Turing (1 shared issues)
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- Albert Einstein (1 shared issues)
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- America (1 shared issues)
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- Ananyo Bhattacharya (1 shared issues)
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- ancient Greek (1 shared issues)
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- Arya (1 shared issues)
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- As I Lay Dying (1 shared issues)
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- Ashkenazi Jews (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
John von Neumann invented the digital computer. The fields of game theory and cellular automata. Important pieces of modern economics, set theory, and particle physics. A substantial part of the technology behind the atom and hydrogen bombs. Several whole fields of mathematics I hadn’t previously heard of, like “operator algebras”, “continuous geometry”, and “ergodic theory”.
This bothered me enough that I turned to a second von Neumann biography, Norman MacRae’s John Von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered The Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, And Much More. I was delighted to find that MacRae had a completely straightforward explanation I had never heard before.
Inline links: John Von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered The Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, And Much More
Granting that von Neumann was not a nerd, was he a psychopath? This has been a matter of more debate. His detractors called him “cold”, “calculating”, and “ruthless”, and pointed out that his game theory work, while brilliant, tended to focus on the most cutthroat scenarios (it was he who invented the term “zero-sum game”). While some of his Manhattan Project collaborators came to regret or at least agonize over their role in inventing the Bomb, von Neumann was disinclined to waste time questioning past decisions. Instead, he goaded the government to get to work building bigger, deadlier hydrogen bombs before the Russians managed the same.
His “Durkheimian Utilitarianism” is utilitarianism but with an understanding of sociology and game theory. In its conception of what is fundamentally right and wrong, it’s just pure and simple care foundation, just like Bentham would have it, but Haidt then attempts to justify heuristics based around the other foundations by showing how following them, in aggregate, can often lead to better utilitarian outcomes than naive utilitarianism.
This back-and-forth runs throughout the whole book, and made it a frustrating read. I would regularly find myself feeling mocked and panned for believing things that, a few pages earlier or later, Haidt himself would explicitly endorse. There’s quite an intense whiplash involved in being told at one point that only an autistic nerd would be cringe enough to think morality boiled down to one axis, only to then read an attempt to boil morality down to one axis involving a bunch of extremely nerdy argumentation about game theory, group selection, and sociology a few pages later.
To get from identification of conservative forms of morality as the product of group selection to where Haidt seems to think he’s ended up (more sympathetic to these claims either as normative claims about morality or instrumental claims about what really actually produces the best utilitarian results – again it’s tough that he can’t seem to tell the difference), you need to talk about reduction in cognitive overhead and how the average person has some combination of neither the ability, inclination, or resources to reason everything out in utilitarian terms. You need to go into robustness to extremely bad outcomes. You need to chat game theory and how conservative norms might make a better approximation to optimal play in situations where naive causal decision theory leads to defect/defect equilibria or to two-boxing predictably in Newcomb problems and thus poor results.
2: I started my discussion of the Early Christian strategy with the story of the TIT-FOR-TAT bot. But G2F4E6E7E8 on the subreddit says that the science of game theory has moved on; TIT-FOR-TAT was defeated in certain evolution-like noisy prisoner dilemmas by a strategy called WIN-STAY LOSE-SHIFT: