Game Theory Explained: Why The Joker and Not Batman is Our Savior
thisorthat.com
thisorthat.com
In the Volunteer's Dilemma a group is faced with an inevitable negative, and the only way prevent it is for one member to assume the negative unto himself. The classic example is jumping on the grenade. Nobody wants to do it, but somebody has to or everyone dies.
1) Assume Cooperators and Defectors only. Cooperators will eventually volunteer, Defectors never will. There can be a balance where Cooperators significantly outnumber Defectors, but if this balance is disturbed the population will eventually end.
2) Add Jokers. Jokers in this case would be like Defectors and never volunteer. Worse, however, is that Jokers would probably be so interested in the destruction that they would actively prevent volunteering. There can be no balance in a group with even one Joker still alive, and the population will end.
3) Add Batmen. Batmen neutralize the Jokers' ability to prevent volunteers, and are willing to volunteer themselves. The balance is restored as long as there are enough of these individuals to restore moral and put the group first.
So now in my thought experiment, Jokers are harbingers of the end while Batmen are necessary for survival.
But the overall arc of the movie -- concluding with Batman's needing to sacrifice himself for the greater good -- seems pretty Volunteery.
1) Joker pushed another Joker or Cooperator. Which might be uncomfortable for a time, but would pass.
2) Joker pushed a Defectors, in which case some Defectors would want some form justice.
I have no numbers to prove this, just my feeling for the archetypes.
Scenario 3 includes a population of Jokers. That is the difference.
So your assertion... is that Batmen only provide a benefit where there exist Jokers in the population. At least in the Volunteer's Dilemma.
...I believe the author is saying that if you have jokers, you need batmans to neutralize their effect.
I can't pin my finger on what makes post-9/11 US different. Were the jokers not destructive enough? Does the model not account for power structure, or psychological needs (i.e. security) and exploitation thereof? Is the effect of a single joker short-lived (which would correspond to the outpouring of national unity post-9/11)? Did the 9/11 attacks actually increase the cooperator/defector ratio in the long term in a way that is not apparent to me?
So who are the jokers in this picture? The socially excluded psychopaths and sociopaths who sit in prison. I think that the proportion of real jokers (completely destructive agents) is extremely small and their effect is vastly overstated. I think that in real life, significant jokers tend to be forces of nature like hurricanes and tsunamis, not people.
And actually, as katovatzschyn kind of points out, this setup (citizens / military-industrial complex / terrorists) may not actually map very well at all to the cooperator / defector / joker model.
Also, defectors want the maximum gain for least effort, so can reasonably decide to act as cooperators for the minimum time required to keep their preferred level of sloth going.
Jokers could also decide, if they trusted this model, that to increase overall destruction they act always as defectors, as otherwise they are just ushering in a new round of cooperation.
Jokers achieve greatest absolute destruction when the lifetime of the system is indefinite--you have to have sand castles before you can kick them over. So, it would seem to me that they'd be more likely to become cooperators for the sole purpose of building things back up to burn them down again.
Loki: likes eternal chaos, so fits your model.
Ice Giants: likes Ragnarök, so only sleeps or destroys.
However, both Loki and the Ice Giants could conceivably decide to act as cooperators if they suspect that there are a large number of defectors who are currently acting as cooperators, with the aim of overwhelming the cooperators by switching back to being jokers when the other fake cooperators switch back to being defectors.
[edit] Also, 'Loki and the Ice Giants' would make a really good band name, or possibly a tumblr site (nod to the xkcd enthusiasts).
Hm....
Ice Giants would seem to suggest a fourth state, one of pure inactivity.
I would almost say that you could model these modes (as the paper does) by changing the damage value to be 0 (dormant, effectively, Ice Giants) for some chosen system conditions. Were you to assign a negative damage, you might be able to model jokers-as-cooperator.
The interesting (perhaps most interesting) thing about the Jokers is that they have no stake in the system. So, I wonder how to account/model that in a Jokers-can-become-Coopearators system. Hm.
Somewhat thankfully, true destroy-all-the-things thinking writ large and competently executed seems to be a very rare thing in the species.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(television_documentar...
In the first episode, Curtis examines the rise of game theory during the Cold War. It discusses John Nash's paranoid schizophrenia and shows footage Nash in his later years acknowledging that his paranoid views of other people at the time were false.
Game theory remains popular because people can easily take the underlying math and apply it with their own assumptions. Of course, if you make too many simplifications you risk achieving a near-useless comic-book view of reality (literally, as in the blog post here).
For a moment there, I thought you were going to invoke Rorschach as an example.
Joker does not need to be a person; it could be anything that destroys benefits with some good success. You get where I am going with this; Joker is any disaster that causes loss. For living things, death does the job pretty well. However, in real life, people are not the only entities which gather benefits, there are organizations that live beyond the lifetime of an individual. In that case, the Joker could be paradigm shifts, weariness, anti-trust cases, scientific theory, or the occasional market crash (you get 1 point for finding each entity these destroy).
So I'd be interested to read a serious analysis of the new Batman films since it wouldn't surprise me if Nolan has something up his sleeve here at this point. That said, this post is not it, so if anyone has any recommendations please share.
Running a simulation of simple, unchanging people doesn't produce much useful information for the real world. Real life cooperation relationships are a lot more intricate and complex.
The problem is that a few well positioned people who behave in a way that is not predictable, or larger forces that the model cannot anticipate (socio-economic, the weather, etc.) can distrupt the model.
Not that the model doesn't 1. Do a good job of explaining a concept and 2. Possibly fits into a larger, more complex model.
In our society most people must perform work to earn money, that money is taxed, to provide public services to all of us regardless of if we work or not. Therefore, the people paying taxes have a cost and get a benefit of the public services which fits his definition: "Cooperators generate a benefit, shared by all, but they pay a cost to do so." If someone pays taxes that must make them a cooperator. Of course we can have shades of cooperation based on how much is paid because no one give all of their money to the IRS. We do have the other extreme where no money is paid.
Now, there are people who pay less taxes or none at all as much or at all can enjoy those same services less cost or no cost all. That's his definition: "[Defectors] sit back and enjoy the group benefit without paying the costs."
In the sliding scale we are all both cooperators and defectors, but to what degree our role alters the equilibrium of the system (ie causing more cooperators or defectors).
That seems pretty straightforward, but he seems have flipped even the definitions: not just the joker/batman role.
It was hard to understand the role of the joker and how it creates an equilibrium, but if the joker is random destroyer then he destroys the cooperator AND the defector equally. If defectors out pace cooperators then the likelihood a defector will be wiped out is greater. By wiping out a defector that shifts the balance (ie the defector dies, or the defector turns to a cooperator from the joker's actions). That's the only way I can understand the joker as a force of "good". And jokers turn out to be a better solution to the problem of equilibrium.
who are the jokers of our time?
Their result (that jokers, defectors, and cooperators will cycle) depends on some bizarre features of the joker:
- Jokers don't damage other jokers. This is why jokers drive out defectors.
- Jokers don't benefit from public goods. This is why jokers don't arise when there are lots of cooperators.
- The public good benefits that jokers forgo are redistributed back onto the cooperators. This is why cooperators flourish in joker populations: they produce a benefit for a large population, which then gets focused back on their small population.
This last feature is the really weird one. No public good I can think of can be redistributed this way [1]; indeed, goods that _can_ be efficiently reallocated like this tend to be naturally modeled as private goods.
Consider a public good: say, clean air. In this model we would have cooperators, who go out of their way to keep the air clean; defectors, who prefer air to be cleaner, but save effort by polluting; and jokers, who are indifferent to air pollution, produce a large amount of pollution, and somehow transfer the health benefits of clean air back onto the cooperators. Thus, if we added a single cooperator to a population of jokers, the cooperator would get a massive health benefit from not polluting, because of all the jokers "not consuming" the benefit. This is clearly nonsensical.
In short, the paper's conclusions follow from its premises, but its premises have nothing to do with any real situation that I can think of [2].
[1] There are a lot of public goods that degrade as more people use them, but not in a way that matches the math in this paper. Can anyone think of an example where this paper's conclusion would hold?
[2] Of course one can say that all game theory is an abstraction, which is true, but it still proceeds from a simplified model of reality, rather than totally arbitrary assumptions. This paper in particular would be getting no attention if the "joker" strategy didn't have a compelling real-world analogue. Furthermore, the problem here is not that their model is too simple, but that it adds weird, artificial features without explanation or justification.
(EDIT: Changed "small amount of pollution" to "large amount of pollution", as jokers do more damage than defectors.)
What is really the relation between good writing and exploiting automatisms of human minds?
From the discussion it seems like the article may be interesting but based off of the definition of tragedy of the commons it seems like madness lies ahead. If the tragedy of the commons definition is indicative of what is to come reading the rest does not seem like a good choice for leisure reading.
I genuinely am interested in knowing if the definition of tragedy of the commons is indicative of the rest of the work? (Sorry the edit button is gone from my original post)
There was a great article recently on being a good reader. I can't seem to find it again, but the general point was that you have to assume some level of good faith and try to see through inevitably fuzzy wording to assess the fundamental points that constitute real value and insight. In reading, you win if you learn something, not if you defeat an argument.
(Or maybe there's a broader problem if an article making the front page of HN doesn't count as sufficient endorsement in itself...?)
Fixed roles and actions with a narrowly defined intents seem to be very common in these kind of thought experiments, mainly, I suspect, because it makes them easier to model. However I think it robs them of any real utility, and worse can give an illusion of insight that is entirely based on flawed assumptions.