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Comment by Jach | Hacker News Reader

Learning some basic game theory (lots of online sources accessible from Google) will probably go at least as far. The prisoner's dilemma is also a nice metaphor for a lot of human behavior. In various experiments, even without iterations and such, humans tend to cooperate with each other. But if you're ever dealing with a lawyer, a sociopath, an economics professor, or anyone else really who's determined to optimize their share of the chips on the table, you need to know how they will think and game theory's a nice way of letting you know, which lets you know how you should reply so that you're not made into a sure loser.

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Making a decision is one aspect of negotiating, but it isn't the most important one.

Establishing the scope of the negotiation (ie. what does each side care about?) is what inexperienced negotiators typically miss.

Smart legislators understand this, and use time to defeat opponents. That's why you see so many 11th hour deals.

Isn't that like learning fluid dynamics as a precursor to learning to swim? It should get your there with a deal of hard work but there's better ways to do it.

Now once you've got the basics and want to understand more fully the how and why of swimming/negotiating then learning fluid dynamics/game theory may provide some insight but I very much doubt that knowledge of either is really going to give you much edge over someone who concentrates on learning the practice itself.

> I very much doubt that knowledge of either is really going to give you much edge over someone who concentrates on learning the practice itself.

But then you get an insight and create these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swimfin - and win without much effort.

It of course wouldn't help you much in a swimming contest, where the priority is for the whole game to look 'fair' to viewers, not to Just Win. But in real life, you're not always artificially limited by a set of rules that disallow using advanced knowledge for your advantage.

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