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.

The FDA seems to say that 23andMe is supposed to provide some evidence...

No, that's not what they say. They're not asking for "some evidence", they're asking 23andme to jump through their hoops. Dance for me, peasant.

23andme provides plenty of evidence in terms of peer reviewed papers as citations to their customers. Evidence isn't lacking, freedom is.

As far as the timing goes Google Health got shut down before the FDA got 23andMe to stop giving diagnoses.

This strikes me as yet another dishonest debating point. Are you unaware that the regulatory regime controlling the right to "practice medicine", and thereby the right to give a diagnosis, predated the latest FDA attack on 23andme and Google Health by decades?

You can bring the doctor to a fancy all expensive paid vacation where he get's lectured on all the great benefits.

How horrible, allowing doctors to hear information. We're much better off having the Ministry of Truth vetting all communications on medical information.

I rather have a group of experts in a government department...

That is indeed the bottom line for most all these questions.

Ronald Reagan

This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite, in a far distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

I'd note for people lacking the historical context, that self government meant what it said - governing your self.

I'm aware that the view expressed here is a minority one, certainly in the world, and even in the US. You, and people who think like you on this question have the numbers, and have the guns.

It's somehow less violence if the whole process goes through a jury than when it's government regulators doing their job?

Enormously less.

Most market transactions are perfectly satisfactory to the market participants involved. Free people exchange because they perceive mutual benefit in the exchange.

I'd prefer threats of violence to be the exception, and not the rule. I'd prefer to be free to choose. I understand your preference goes the other way.

This strikes me as yet another dishonest debating point. Are you unaware that the regulatory regime controlling the right to "practice medicine", and thereby the right to give a diagnosis, predated the latest FDA attack on 23andme and Google Health by decades?

Look, don't make me out as a defender of the status quo. I did sit down with someone making government regulations in this space because of my QS-media credentials and told him that we QS folks don't really need his help.

Plenty of people do manage to create products that don't get shut d... (read more)

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