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pengvado comments on Open Thread: April 2010 - Less Wrong
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So if one prisoner cooperates and the other defects, then the defector goes free and the cooperator doesn't? That doesn't sound very effective for keeping conniving cheating greedy bastards in prison.
I figure one would probably have to modify the dilemma to give sub-escape rewards to the defector. (I realize this inversion destroys the specific logical structure, but that's artistic license for you.)
Four possible outcomes: stay in prison (maintain status quo), be released, be (mind)raped by a Dementor, or receive some chocolate.
Distribute in the payoff matrix according to whatever Æsop you’re pushing to :-)
Competitor gets chocolate, cooperator gets indirect dementor exposure.
Both compete, both severely dementor'd.
Both cooperate, both released, but bound together somehow.
What about making the prison a hedge-maze sort of area, with lots of controllable access-points? Points earned by interactions can be spent to give yourself temporary access through a specific gate, any given pair of prisoners can only play the game a certain number of times per day, and unspent points decay - say, 5% loss per day. To earn enough points to pay your way out the front door, you effectively have to have access to the whole interior, and be on good terms with most of the people there.
The problem is that with 'currency' and iterated interactions like that, you start to approximate a concentration or POW camp, with considerable mingling and freedom, which allows bad'uns to thrive. At least, if my reading of literature about said camps (like World of Stone or King Rat) is anything to go by.
In that case, the points would have to be associated with a task rather than simply cooperation.
Edit: also http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20070727
Sure, that's reasonable. And it makes the prison/maze much more general - there could be all sorts of rationalist/moral traps in it, and then one could make the pure prisoner's dilemma the final obstacle before escape.
I suppose the hard part is justifying in-universe the master rationalists who could create such a prison/maze - EY has clearly set Harry up in the fanfic as being the first master rationalist, and we can hardly postulate a hidden master when EY went to such pains with Draco to demonstrate the wizarding world's general moral bankruptcy (a hidden master would, one think, manage to bring the wizarding world up to at least muggle levels, if maybe not past it).
Why would one think that? This hidden master could be a total jerk-face.
Presumably Harry himself will be bringing about some drastic reforms.
There's also the issue that wizards of the distant past might have been better rationalists than the current crop, but had less to work with, and the arts have simply been lost over time.
That's not a bad idea. It actually works well - the general loss of wizarding power is then due not to any genetic dilution by mudbloods, but because they're ignorant or lazy. It goes a little against the LW grain (we despise Golden Age myths), but since Rowling insists on a wizarding Golden Age, it's a good subversion.
They don't have systems or habits for preserving knowledge reliably, and there's enough competition between wizards that a lot of the best spells (not to mention methods for developing powerful spells) won't be recorded, and might not even be taught.
Actually, genetic dilution might still be a factor... if the rationalism of the founders was imperfect, and they didn't know much about heredity, the inability of most people to duplicate magical feats might have been interpreted as the result of an error in those finicky incantations. Emphasis on rote memorization of reliable effects would then come at the expense of higher-level invention and item creation techniques.
There are some possibly-relevant discussions of a history of magic in Tales of MU.
You'll have to link them, then (unless you mean the very funny section about the science cultists); I read a bit of Tales of MU, but got weirded out after a while.
The reference to King Rat I can identify with an Internet search - what's World of Stone?
Try "Tadeusz Borowski". Sample quotes:
A (nonfiction) quote I sometimes think of in connection with World of Stone, though it's actually from The Captive Mind, is: