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army1987 comments on Problematic Problems for TDT - Less Wrong
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I don't think MAD is a prisoner dilemma: in the prisoner dilemma, if I know you're going to cooperate no matter what, I'm better off defecting, and if I know you're going to defect no matter what, I'm better off defecting. This doesn't seem to be the case here: bombing you doesn't make me better off all things being equal, it just makes you worse off. If anything, it's a game of Chicken where bombing the opponent corresponds to going straight and not bombing them corresponds to swerving. And CDTists don't always go straight in Chicken, do they?
Hm, I disagree - if nuking the Great Enemy never made you any better off, why was anyone ever afraid of anyone getting nuked in the first place? It might not grow your crops for you or buy you a TV, but gains in security and world power are probably enough incentive to at least make people worry.
Still better modelled by Chicken (where the utility of winning is assumed to be much smaller than the negative of the utility of dying, but still non-zero) than by PD.
(edited to add a link)
I don't understand what you mean by "modeled better by chicken" here.
I expect army1987's talking about Chicken, the game of machismo in which participants rush headlong at each other in cars or other fast-moving dangerous objects and whoever swerves first loses. The payoff matrix doesn't resemble the Prisoner's Dilemma all that much: there's more than one Nash equilibrium, and by far the worst outcome from either player's perspective occurs when both players play the move analogous to defection (i.e. don't swerve). It's probably most interesting as a vehicle for examining precommitment tactics.
The game-theoretic version of Chicken has often been applied to MAD, as the Wikipedia page mentions.
I was. I should have linked to it, and I have now.