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I would like to see sequences of top level postings providing semi-technical tutorials on topics of interest to rationalists.
As one example of a topic: Game Theory
Actually, there is material here for several sequences, dealing with several sub-topics. We need a sequence on games with incomplete information, on iterated games, on two-person cooperative games (we have a couple articles already, but we haven't yet covered Nash's 1953 paper with threats), and on multi-person cooperative games (Shapley value, Core, Nucleolus, and all that).
I've studied game theory and rationality, and I don't use game theory even when applying rationality to game design! I've used some of the nontechnical results (threats, from Shelling's book) to negotiate and precommit but that's about it. Has someone else used game theory in real life?
Unless someone else responds to this comment, my guess is that this topic is of greater interest to readers than it is of any use.
I'm reading Tom Slee's book No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart, and it applies game theory to some dressed-up toy examples (prisoner's dilemma, coordination games, etc.) to demonstrate why agents making individual decisions to maximize their utility (representing consumers using the power of individual choices) can fail to maximize their total utility (representing the failure of individual consumer choice to secure optimal outcomes for consumers).
[Edit: I should note that Slee's book isn't very technical, so maybe it's more evidence against needing the full-blown mathematical machinery of game theory? I'm about 100 pages in and it hasn't gotten much more hardcore than tabulating the results of games in a payoff matrix and an informal explanation of Nash equilibrium.]
The machinery is still there, even if you can't see it.
Good point. What I mean is that lots of readers could still get some mileage out of game theory without having to know the rigorous mathematics underlying it (although as you say the mathematics is still there even if someone doesn't know it's there). For example, I don't need to know how to use a fixed point theorem to prove the existence of Nash equilibria for all finite games to be aware of why the prisoner's dilemma is a sticky situation.
It is indeed quite surprising that there wasn't systematic posting on this, given the amount of interest in prisoner's dilemmas and such things. It is maybe because the traditional game theory is bound to traditional causal decision theory which is not much popular here, but nevertheless I would be interested to learn more about it.
I found these Yale lectures on Game Theory to be a wonderful introduction to the topic. I think they cover all the basic points and lay a very good foundation. Perhaps we can find good resources like this and vote on them, taking the best and adding them along-side the Sequences.