Maybe we're not doomed

Manfred

This is prompted by Scott's excellent article, Meditations on Moloch.

I might caricature (grossly unfairly) his post like this:

Map some central problems for humanity onto the tragedy of the commons.
Game theory says we're doomed.

Of course my life is pretty nice right now. But, goes the story, this is just a non-equilibrium starting period. We're inexorably progressing towards a miserable Nash equilibrium, and once we get there we'll be doomed forever. (This forever loses a bit of foreverness if one expects everything to get interrupted by self-improving AI, but let's elide that.)

There are a few ways we might not be doomed. The first and less likely is that people will just decide not to go to their doom, even though it's the Nash equilibrium. To give a totally crazy example, suppose there were two countries playing a game where the first one to launch missiles had a huge advantage. And neither country trusts the other, and there are multiple false alarms - thus pushing the situation to the stable Nash equilibrium of both countries trying to launch first. Except imagine that somehow, through some heroic spasm of insanity, these two countries just decided not to nuke each other. That's the sort of thing it would take.

Of course, people are rarely able to be that insane, so success that way should not be counted on. But on the other hand, if we're doomed forever such events will eventually occur - like a bubble of spontaneous low entropy spawning intelligent life in a steady-state universe.

The second and most already-implemented way is to jump outside the system and change the game to a non-doomed one. If people can't share the commons without defecting, why not portion it up into private property? Or institute government regulations? Or iterate the game to favor tit-for-tat strategies? Each of these changes has costs, but if the wage of the current game is 'doom,' each player has an incentive to change the game.

Scott devotes a sub-argument to why we're still doomed to things be miserable if we solve coordination problems with government:

Incentives for government employees sometimes don't match the needs of the people.
This has costs, and those costs help explain why some things that suck, suck.

I agree with this, but not all governments are equally costly as coordination technologies. Heck, not all governments even are a technology for improving peoples' lives - look at North Korea. My point is that there's no particular reason that costs can't be small, with sufficiently advanced cultural technology.

More interesting to me than government is the idea of iterating a game to to encourage cooperation. In the normal prisoner's dilemma game, the only Nash equilibrium is defect-defect and so the prisoners are doomed. But if you have to play the prisoner's dilemma game repeatedly, with a variety of other players, the best strategy turns out to be a largely cooperative one. This evasion of doom gives every player an incentive to try and replace one-shot dilemmas with iterated ones. Could Scott's post look like this?

Map some central problems for humanity onto the iterated prisoner's dilemma.
Evolutionary game theory says we're not doomed.

In short, I think this idea of "if you know the Nash equilibrium sucks, everyone will help you change the game" is an important one. Though given human irrationality, game-theoretic predictions (whether of eventual doom or non-doom) should be taken less than literally.

This is prompted by Scott's excellent article, Meditations on Moloch.

I might caricature (grossly unfairly) his post like this:

Map some central problems for humanity onto the tragedy of the commons.
Game theory says we're doomed.

Scott devotes a sub-argument to why we're still doomed to things be miserable if we solve coordination problems with government:

Incentives for government employees sometimes don't match the needs of the people.
This has costs, and those costs help explain why some things that suck, suck.

Map some central problems for humanity onto the iterated prisoner's dilemma.
Evolutionary game theory says we're not doomed.

I'm not an anarchist. I never said government can't do good things. The particular issue I addressed was:

Incentives for government employees sometimes don't match the needs of the people.

Which I don't really see you addressing at all.

Your one example of an actual government agency was the fire department, which has many of the characteristics of what the government would best focus on.

Low probability, high risk, emergency situation, with potential for large externalities, on an agreed upon problem (Burning Building Bad) with an agreed upon solution (put out the fire).

Note that people managed to have fire departments without government employees forever, and still do in many places. I've got a friend living in the burbs in New Jersey who is a volunteer firefighter.

That reminds me of another government act - the thirteenth amendment.

When the government banned what it had been previously enforcing. If you're trying to show the unbridled wonders of government power, that really isn't the best example.

The various environmental regulatory regimes are appropriate areas of government action, since they are largely dealing with issues of commons, but even there, there are large problems with regulatory capture and perverse institutional and personal incentives, leading to waste and outright destruction.

Take the ethanol mandates, which have had huge downsides in environmental and humanitarian costs, and no real upside except for the ethanol manufacturers. Though it's probably fairer to attribute that to congressional incentives rather than the apparatchik incentives.

But the apparatchik incentives generally diverge from sensible and consistent cost benefit analysis. Sure, if you spend enough money, you can produce some good.

But at what cost? Thalidomide, thalidomide! Yeah, if the regulatory process is obstructive enough, eventually it will obstruct something that would have been harmful. But what we don't see are the tens of thousands of yearly deaths from the regulatory obstruction.

(And what people should see but don't: a captive population shaken down for the benefit of the entire protected medical/insurance/regulatory industrial complex.)

The FDA just forced 23andme to shut down the medical information they were giving me, tailored to my genome. What's the cost in lives of delaying the genomic revolution in health care 5 to 10 years?

But delay they do, because they deal in power, and exercising that power swells their testicles and benefits the medical industrial mafia.

The FDA just forced 23andme to shut down the medical information they were giving me, tailored to my genome. What's the cost in lives of delaying the genomic revolution in health care 5 to 10 years?

It's not clear that the results of 23andMe where much better than chance:

For the seven diseases analyzed by the researchers, only about half of the risk factors provided by 23andme and Navigenics agreed for the five patients. For instance, for lupus and type 2 diabetes, three of the five subjects received conflicting results.

23andme market their product i... (read more)

6AlexSchell12y

Interestingly, FDA will have achieved this obstruction by merely adding a trivial inconvenience to personal genomics. A consumer can still get essentially the same health info through free tools (which interpret your data file with info from sites like SNPedia), except they have to spend an extra 1-2 hours on this extra step. Of course, this more than suffices to decimate 23andme's sales.

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