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Academian comments on Blackmail, Nukes and the Prisoner's Dilemma - Less Wrong
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Comments (16)
Marriage as nukes (a fun analogy): Consider a man and a woman in a relationship. The man says "I love my freedom, but it hurts so much to see her with another man..." That is, suppose that the opportunity to cheat on the woman without too much consequence offers the man less utility than he loses when the woman cheats on him. Suppose the woman feels similarly. This is precisely a prisoner's dilemma: self interest harms the "opponent" more than it benefits the player.
Solution: you each sacrifice a little utility to buy a marriage license which ensures sufficient punishment for infidelity to prevent either of you from doing it. You lose your freedom, but you gain the more valuable asset of partner's fidelity. I.e., you buy nukes :)
(I once used this to argue against someone who said "Marriage is always pointless.")
This is not properly analogous to buying nukes. It's changing the payoff matrix - the expected payoff of "cheat" becomes negative. The same mechanism where the victim must trigger massive negative utility for both parties is not present, or at least is not made present simply by a better contract. The mechanism of punishment would (almost certainly) transfer assets or rights from the cheater to the wronged partner. This would be done through a prenuptial agreement, not a marriage license; the former is a binding contract, the latter is basically just a piece of paper you need to get stamped before getting married.
This is not an unusual arrangement, as one can easily write into a prenuptial agreement an infidelity clause so that, upon divorce, the wronged partner is entitled to a greater share of community property, or to a fixed-sum payment per incident/extra partner. This means that each partner knows that cheating will give their partner a strong incentive to divorce them, and the cost of divorce will increase dramatically. One could actually specify a lot in such contracts (though not child custody); I remember hearing of a pro athlete who had a contract in his prenup such that if his wife gained more than thirty pounds, he could divorce her and she would get nothing/almost nothing - though whether the court would uphold that is anyone's guess. The failure of people to actually use prenuptial agreements is itself a fascinating study in real human decision theory.
Certainly, what you describe is not analogous to a weapon, because of the transfer of utility. The analogy fits better in a society where either 1) adultery is a huge disgrace to the offender, possibly involving punishment (the nuke only harms one side), or 2) adultery is a huge shame to both sides (the nuke harms everyone, like in the scenario posted). Though clearly not universal, the existence of this analogy is enough for me to call it "fun" ... Just in case you had any doubt, I surely do think this is a terrible view of marriage, for both societal and game theoretic reasons!
It does?
Heheh, in response, I have edited out the comma in that sentence :)
The rule is that nonrestrictive relative clauses are separated by a comma, while restrictive relative clauses are not. There is an additional "rule" that which is only used in non-restrictive clauses and that only used in restrictive clauses, which is probably the source of the rule you learned. But this rule is the same sort of nonsense as not separating infinitives and not ending sentences with a preposition, that is it is based on someones idea how the language should work rather than any observation how it does work and hence it does not match the intuitions of a native speaker.
In German the difference between a restrictive and a nonrestrictive clause is not defined the presence or absence of the comma and there appears to be no easy and straightforward rule. (Faustregel: Bestimmtes Bezugsnomen -> erläuternder Relativsatz, unbestimmtes Bezugsnomen -> einschränkender Relativsatz)
Compare:
Sie streben ein Eherecht an, das eine hinreichende Abschreckung gegen Ehebruch darstellt. [restrictive]
Unser Eherecht, das eine hinreichende Abschreckung gegen Ehebruch darstellt, findet seinen Ursprung in dem Bestreben... [nonrestrictive]
And that that is used only in restrictive clauses. Geoff Pullum describes this as "overwhelmingly complied with by everyone".
Example:
The banana, which is my favorite fruit, is yellow.
*The banana, that is my favorite fruit, is yellow.
Ah, I thought that was the case and couldn't think of any counter examples, but I wasn't completely sure and since the clause that started this sub-thread used which and I definitely knew the reverse was not true I didn't mention it.
The quoted version says something about a marriage license, and explains that marriage licenses ensure punishments... . The corrected version (without commas) says something about a marriage license which ensures such punishment, but makes no general statements about marriage licenses.
If syntax didn't affect semantics, it'd be useless.
Up-vote for the Epic Grammar Nazi! >D