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whpearson comments on "Playing to Win" - Less Wrong
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Comments (16)
I would prefer to see more about people who win in ill defined situations and when they are trying to do something for society, not just win a status contest.
I am a game player, but I generally play to have a laugh and test my brain a bit, the actual winning is not so important.
Concentrating too much on competitive game skews the mind sets we develop.
This statement seems a lot easier to assert than defend.
How so? If we only learn about how to win competitive games, then we have fewer tools for dealing with cooperative situations.
The situations that we are least good at are cooperative situations, e.g. figuring our whether there is something to global warming and if there is what should be done.
Really? I tend to see competitive ability as a necessary foundation for productive cooperation. This is getting pretty vague, though.
This seems difficult to conclude. Can you explain why you think this is true?
I would assert there are many competitive elements to this issue.
What do you mean by competitive ability? The things he is talking about in the book is bluffing and psychological warfare. Are these useful skills when trying get something done cooperatively or do they harm the process if used?
Possibly we mean different things by cooperative situations. I'm talking about situations where people have to work together to win, you can't just wipe out or ignore everyone else. This means balancing your goals with others, Competitive situations, especially the types of games talked about here, you know what needs to be done, This makes them simpler and easier to deal with.
You can treat solving global warming as having competitive elements, but then you will be less efficient at actually solving the problem by having to spend resources on competing, which could have been used for solving the problem.
You need to be extremely good at the game to be able to not play it. ie. Have the ability to detect and punish defection if necessary while conveying both a credible threat and the preference to leave the threats idle.
Once you've learned to groin kick and eye gouge you are perfectly equipped to master hugs and back claps.
That may be, but you said:
Which, to me, is about more than just bluffing and psychological warfare.
I don't know. I could easily imagine the answer being both, depending on circumstance, thus making as simple a characterization of them as you seem to implying pretty difficult.
This makes the point that cooperative scenarios are harder than purely competitive scenarios, not that we're particularly bad at them. "Balancing your goals with others" is in the end just another way of saying that your goals positively correlate with theirs. Most big problems (and yes, even Magic) contain agents with goals both positively and negatively correlated with yours, so "cooperative or competitive" is not, in general, a binary proposition. Do you think we're particularly bad at planning in the presence of others with positively correlated goals?
If it has competitive elements, then I certainly want to treat it as though it has competitive elements, regardless of my final strategy. But you also seem to be suggesting that approaching an objective competitively is inherently less efficient than approaching it cooperatively. Surely you don't mean that.
Take my comments in light of the context.
I can't really get a handle on where you are coming from. Are you saying that it is often useful to bluff the people you are cooperating with, or would it be a once in the blue moon kind of situation? Give an example of it helping?
Only if you have total knowledge of the situation... Consider the human body, the places where competition help it to achieve objectives, (the brain possibly and the immune system) are the portions trying to gain knowledge about the outside world. Can you tell me how competition would help the human body apart from in these situations?
Drivers often slow down or stop far ahead of time for pedestrians, wasting more of their time to do so than it costs the pedestrian to wait for the car. When I'm on foot and anticipate this, I often bluff the driver by looking away or pretending to change direction. It's minor, but effective and quite frequent.
What about perfect knowledge of a prisoner's dilemma involving non-cooperative agents?
Could you do it by signaling openly?
What do you mean by non-cooperative agents, that they always defect, or don't communicate? And do the agents have perfect knowledge or is there a third party?