Rational Suckers

http://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/rational_suckers-99998

by KC8ZKF • 14 years ago

32 15 14 years ago

science20.com

jstanley• 14 years ago

Very interesting read. I wonder if there are any concreate examples of this situation happening in the real world?

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

Highway 101 and 280 on the Peninsula in the Bay Area? :-)

It was a great read, I haven't seen a lot of work that talks about the extended Prisoner's Dilemma situations.

jQueryIsAwesome• 14 years ago

The very same thing happens around the world in many political elections; because people think that voting for a candidate perceived as unpopular is wasting their vote; so some candidates remain unpopular not for their ideas but for their perceived unpopularity.

People when are free to make decisions individually usually assume everyone else doesn't have group mentality so they themselves decide not to have one, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

elpool2• 14 years ago

In Seattle there are many people who commute across Lake Washington to get to work, where you have the 520 bridge, the I-90 bridge, or you can just drive around the lake. After reading this article I wonder if it would be effective to divide everyone who makes this commute into two groups. On even numbered days group A can use the bridge while group B must drive around the lake. On odd numbered days they would switch. Could such a scenario effectively reduce the overall time spent commuting for all drivers?

kaonashi• 14 years ago

Most 'free markets'.

amirhirsch• 14 years ago

it's interesting that if you replace the cars with electrons and change the graph to its electronic analogs, the electrons would do the super-rational thing and go along separate paths.

nene• 14 years ago

The same would happen with cars if the drivers didn't care of getting to their destination faster, just enjoying the ride for the ride's sake.

bo10242• 14 years ago

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_of_anarchy. A way of analyzing the difference between the "optimal" outcome and the "rational" one. Common in the computer science literature, slowly infiltrating the economics literature I think.

bcoates• 14 years ago

I think economics got there first; that looks like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm : companies form, even in an efficient market, because they can potentially globally optimize groups of individuals into more efficient interactions than the individuals themselves could in any market.

The other side of it is that such optimization doesn't scale and a sufficiently large firm will be unable to find practical solution at all.

bo10242• 14 years ago

Cool, seems interesting and related, but also very different and more specific. The point of price of anarchy is to take any game and quantify the "loss" due to selfishness or lack of cooperation.

josscrowcroft• 14 years ago

> "Altruism, evolutionary driven cooperative behaviors, and mystical concepts like super-rationality are put forward as missing features in game theory."

Is Superrationality considered "mystical"?

stcredzero• 14 years ago

1) Someone posts something about game theory

2) Someone comments that the scenario is unrealistic or contrived, then makes clever points bringing in nuances of real world behavior/situations.

3) [Optional] Original poster responds explaining why the situation reductively captures some underlying mechanism or why the commenter is mistaken

waps• 14 years ago

4) Somebody posts how this means communism is the solution

Actually 4) should probably be 1).

xyzzy123• 14 years ago

I see your communism and raise you self-driving cars.

hcarvalhoalves• 14 years ago

> Asking these questions is admitting to the wishful thinking that competitive optimization should lead to an optimum. Such is not the case, competitive optimization leads to an equilibrium and not to an optimum.

Well, that explains a lot about capitalism and social inequality.

Rational Suckers

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