It's clear that in the "true" prisoner it is better to defect. The frustrating thing about the other prisoner's dilemma is that some people use it to imply that it is better to defect in real life. The problem is that the prisoner's dilemma is a drastic oversimplification of reality. To make it more realistic you'd have to make it iterated amongst a person's social network, add a memory and a perception of the other player's actions, change the payoff matrix depending on the relationship between the players etc etc.
This versions shows cases in which defection has a higher expected value for both players, but it's more contrived and unlikely to come into existence than the other prisoner's dilemma.
I'm sorry I haven't commented here earlier, I've been getting the emails but I think blog comment threads are a poor way of communications, here are some points that I wished I had made earlier but may still have some validity.
I don't like Saturday for the following reasons: 1) It will be easy to round up a bunch of people for dinner and discussion after the summit is over without any online correspondance. Last year I hung around (whatever the hosting building was) for a while after the event had died down and Peter Voss, Sam Adams and about 10 other peo... (read more)