I spoke yesterday of the epistemic prisoner's dilemma, and JGWeissman wrote:

I am having some difficulty imagining that I am 99% sure of something, but I cannot either convince a person to outright agree with me or accept that he is uncertain and therefore should make the choice that would help more if it is right, but I could convince that same person to cooperate in the prisoner's dilemma. However, if I did find myself in that situation, I would cooperate.

To which I said:

Do you think you could convince a young-earth creationist to cooperate in the prisoner's dilemma?

And lo, JGWeissman saved me a lot of writing when he replied thus:

Good point. I probably could. I expect that the young-earth creationist has a huge bias that does not have to interfere with reasoning about the prisoner's dilemma.

So, suppose Omega finds a young-earth creationist and an atheist, and plays the following game with them. They will each be taken to a separate room, where the atheist will choose between each of them receiving $10000 if the earth is less than 1 million years old or each receiving $5000 if the earth is more than 1 million years old, and the young earth creationist will have a similar choice with the payoffs reversed. Now, with prisoner's dilemma tied to the young earth creationist's bias, would I, in the role of the atheist still be able to convince him to cooperate? I don't know. I am not sure how much the need to believe that the earth is around 5000 years would interfere with recognizing that it is in his interest to choose the payoff for earth being over a million years old. But still, if he seemed able to accept it, I would cooperate.

I make one small modification. You and your creationist friend are actually not that concerned about money, being distracted by the massive meteor about to strike the earth from an unknown direction. Fortunately, Omega is promising to protect limited portions of the globe, based on your decisions (I think you've all seen enough PDs that I can leave the numbers as an excercise).

It is this then which I call the true epistemic prisoner's dilemma. If I tell you a story about two doctors, even if I tell you to put yourself in the shoes of one, and not the other, it is easy for you to take yourself outside them, see the symmetry and say "the doctors should cooperate".  I hope I have now broken some of that emotional symmetry.

As Omega lead the creationist to the other room, you would (I know I certainly would) make a convulsive effort to convince him of the truth of evolution. Despite every pointless, futile argument you've ever had in an IRC room or a YouTube thread, you would struggle desperately, calling out every half-remembered fragment of Dawkins or Sagan you could muster, in hope that just before the door shut, the creationist would hold it open and say "You're right, I was wrong. You defect, I'll cooperate -- let's save the world together."

But of course, you would fail. And the door would shut, and you would grit your teeth, and curse 2000 years of screamingly bad epistemic hygiene, and weep bitterly for the people who might die in a few hours because of your counterpart's ignorance. And then -- I hope -- you would cooperate.

Let us say you are a doctor, and you are dealing with a malaria epidemic in your village. You are faced with two problems. First, you have no access to the drugs needed for treatment. Second, you are one of two doctors in the village, and the two of you cannot agree on the nature of the disease itself. You, having carefully tested many patients, being a highly skilled, well-educated diagnostician, have proven to yourself that the disease in question is malaria. Of this you are >99% certain. Yet your colleague, the blinkered fool, insists that you are dealing with an outbreak of bird flu, and to this he assigns >99% certainty.

Well, it need hardly be said that someone here is failing at rationality. Rational agents do not have common knowledge of disagreements etc. But... what can we say? We're human, and it happens.

So, let's say that one day, OmegaDr. House calls you both into his office and tells you that he knows, with certainty, which disease is afflicting the villagers. As confident as you both are in your own diagnoses, you are even more confident in House's abilities. House, however, will not tell you his diagnosis until you've played a game with him. He's going to put you in one room and your colleague in another. He's going to offer you a choice between 5,000 units of malaria medication, and 10,000 units of bird-flu medication. At the same time, he's going to offer your colleague a choice between 5,000 units of bird-flu meds, and 10,000 units of malaria meds.

Previously in series:  Beware of Other-Optimizing
Followup to:  Bystander Apathy

Yesterday I convered the bystander effect, aka bystander apathy: given a fixed problem situation, a group of bystanders is actually less likely to act than a single bystander.  The standard explanation for this result is in terms of pluralistic ignorance (if it's not clear whether the situation is an emergency, each person tries to look calm while darting their eyes at the other bystanders, and sees other people looking calm) and diffusion of responsibility (everyone hopes that someone else will be first to act; being part of a crowd diminishes the individual pressure to the point where no one acts).

Which may be a symptom of our hunter-gatherer coordination mechanisms being defeated by modern conditions.  You didn't usually form task-forces with strangers back in the ancestral environment; it was mostly people you knew.  And in fact, when all the subjects know each other, the bystander effect diminishes.

So I know this is an amazing and revolutionary observation, and I hope that I don't kill any readers outright from shock by saying this: but people seem to have a hard time reacting constructively to problems encountered over the Internet.

Perhaps because our innate coordination instincts are not tuned for:

• Being part of a group of strangers.  (When all subjects know each other, the bystander effect diminishes.)
• Being part of a group of unknown size, of strangers of unknown identity.
• Not being in physical contact (or visual contact); not being able to exchange meaningful glances.
• Not communicating in real time.
• Not being much beholden to each other for other forms of help; not being codependent on the group you're in.
• Being shielded from reputational damage, or the fear of reputational damage, by your own apparent anonymity; no one is visibly looking at you, before whom your reputation might suffer from inaction.
• Being part of a large collective of other inactives; no one will single out you to blame.
• Not hearing a voiced plea for help.