Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

I think a more accurate and more useful framing is:

Game theory is inevitable.

Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives.

The specific examples called out here may or may not be inevitable. It's true that the future is unknowable, but it's also true that the future is made up of 8B+ independent actors and that they're going to react to incentives. It's also true that you, personally, are just one of those 8B+ people and your influence on the remaining 7.999999999B people, most of whom don't know you exist, is fairly limited.

If you think carefully about those incentives, you actually do have a number of significant leverage points with which to change the future. Many of those incentives are crafted out of information and trust, people's beliefs about what their own lives are going to look like in the future if they take certain actions, and if you can shape those beliefs and that information flow, you alter the incentives. But you need to think very carefully, on the level of individual humans and how they'll respond to changes, to get the outcomes you want.

View on HN

The statement "Game theory is inevitable. Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives." implies that the "actors" are humans. But that's not what game theory assumes.

Game theory just provides a mathematical framework to analyze outcomes of decisions when parts of the system have different goals. Game theory does not claim to predict human behavior (humans make mistakes, are driven by emotion and often have goals outside the "game" in question). Thus game theory is NOT inevitable.

Yes, game theory is not a predictive model but an explanatory/general one. Additionally not everything is a game, as in statistics, not everything has a probability curve. They can be applied speculatively to great effect, but they are ultimately abstract models.

You can use it for either predictive or explanatory purposes. In the early ('00s) years of Google it was common to diagram out the incentives of all the market participants; this led to such innovations like the use of the second-price VCG auction [1] for ad sales that now make over a third of a trillion dollars per year.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey%E2%80%93Clarke%E2%80%9...

Google has now (mostly?) transitioned to using first-price, and more complicated (opaque) auction-style pricing for many of its advertising products.

https://blog.google/products/admanager/simplifying-programma...

> It’s important to note that our move to a single unified first price auction only impacts display and video inventory sold via Ad Manager. This change will have no impact on auctions for ads on Google Search, AdSense for Search, YouTube, and other Google properties, and advertisers using Google Ads or Display & Video 360 do not need to take any action.

This is a good point, and I’m willing to concede that I may be wrong here, that predictive power can be gained from (possibly mis-) applications of abstractions onto a real space, which is what one of the real reasons to favor abstract thinking in business in the first place.

A practical formula:

1) Identify coordination failures that lock us into bad equilibria, e.g. it's impossible to defect from the online ads model without losing access to a valuable social graph

2) Look for leverage that rewrites the payoffs for a coalition rather than for one individual: right-to-repair laws, open protocols, interoperable standards, fiduciary duty, reputation systems, etc.

3) Accept that heroic non-participation is not enough. You must engineer a new Schelling point[1] that makes a better alternative the obvious move for a self-interested majority

TLDR, think in terms of the algebra of incentives, not in terms of squeaky wheelism and moral exhortation

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)

As a recent example, Jon Haidt seems to have used this kind of tactic to pull off a coup with the whole kids/smartphones/social media thing [0]. Everybody knew social media tech was corrosive and soul-rotting, but nobody could move individually to stand up against its “inevitability.”

Individual families felt like, if they took away or postponed their kids’ phones, their kid would be left out and ostracized—which was probably true as long as all the other kids had them. And if a group of families or a school wanted to coordinate on something different, they’d have to 1) be ok with seeming “backwards,” and 2) squabble about how specifically to operationalize the idea.

Haidt framed it as “four simple norms,” which offered specific new Schelling points for families to use as concrete alternatives to “it’s inevitable.” And in shockingly little time, it’s at the point where 26 states have enshrined the ideas into legislation [1].

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/19/jonathan-haidt-on-smartphone...

[1] https://apnews.com/article/cellphones-phones-school-ban-stat...

He didn't cause that, he is just riding the wave. The call to ban them has been going on for years, it was just put on pause during the pandemic.

Great.

Now let's do the same to AI slop, what many (including Haidt and co., Australia, etc) have done to lessen kids social media usage.

FWIW, I gave up on FB/Twttr crap a while ago... Unfortunately, I'm still stuck with WhatsApp and LI (both big blights) for now.

YMMV

AI slop is self-limiting. The new game-theoretic equilibrium is that nobody trusts anything they read online, at which point it will no longer be profitable to put AI slop out there because nobody will read it.

Unfortunately, it's going to destroy the Internet (and possibly society) in the process.

That’s my sense too. I wonder where the new foca are starting to form, as far as where people will look to serve the purposes that this slop’s infiltrating. What the inevitable alternatives to the New Inevitable start to look like.

At the risk of dorm-room philosophizing: My instincts are all situated in the past, and I don’t know whether that’s my failure of imagination or whether it’s where everybody else is ending up too.

Do the new information-gathering Schelling points look like the past—trust in specific individual thinkers, words’ age as a signal of their reliability, private-first discussions, web of trust, known-human-edited corpora, apprenticeship, personal practice and experience?

Is there instead no meaningful replacement, and the future looks like people’s “real” lives shrinking back to human scale? Does our Tower of Babel just collapse for a while with no real replacement in sight? Was it all much more illusory than it felt all along, and the slop is just forcing us to see that more clearly?

Did the Cronkite-era-television—>cable transition feel this way to people before us?

> AI slop is self-limiting. The new game-theoretic equilibrium is that nobody trusts anything they read online, at which point it will no longer be profitable to put AI slop out there because nobody will read it.

AI slop, unfortunately, is just starting.

It is true that nobody trusts anything online... esp the Big Media and the backlash against it in the last decade+ or so. But that's exactly where AI slop is coming in. Note the crazier and crazier conspiracy theories that are taking hold all around, and not just in the MAGA-verse. And there's plenty of takers for AI slop - both consumers of it, and producers of it.

And there's plenty of profit all around. (see crypto, NFTs, and all manners of grifting)

So no, I dont think "nobody will read it". It's more like "everybody's reading it"

But I do agree on the denouement... it's destroying the internet and society along with it

'defect' only applies to prisoners dilemma type problems. that is just one, very limited class of problem, and I would argue not very relevant to discussing AI inevitability.

Game theory is still inevitable. Its application to humans may be non-obvious.

In particular, the "games" can operate on the level of non-human actors like genes, or memes, or dollars. Several fields generate much more accurate conclusions when you detach yourself from an anthrocentric viewpoint, eg. evolutionary biology was revolutionized by the idea of genes as selfish actors rather than humans trying to pass along their genes; in particular, it explains such concepts as death, sexual selection, and viruses. Capitalism and bureaucracy both make a lot more sense when you give up the idea of them existing for human betterment and instead take the perspective of them existing simply for the purpose of existing (i.e. those organizations that survive are, well, those organizations that survive; there is nothing morally good or bad about them, but the filter that they passed is simply that they did not go bankrupt or get disbanded).

But underneath those, game theory is still fundamental. You can use it to analyze the incentives and selection pressures on the system, whether they are at sub-human (eg. viral, genetic, molecular), human, or super-human (memetic, capitalist, organizational, bureaucratic, or civilizational) scales.

Perhaps you don't intend this, but I intuit that you imply that Game theory's inevitability leads to the inevitability of many claims the author's claims aren't inevitable.

To me, this inevitability only is guaranteed if we assume a framing of non-cooperative game theory with idealized self-interested actors. I think cooperative game theory[1] better models the dynamics of the real world. More important than thinking on the level of individual humans is thinking about the coalitions that have a common interest to resist abusive technology.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_game_theory

I'll just take the very first example on the list, Internet-enabled beds.

Absolutely a cooperative game - nobody was forced to build them, nobody was forced to finance them, nobody was forced to buy them. this were all willing choices all going in the same direction. (Same goes for many of the other examples)

There's a slight caveat here that you are sometimes forced to effectively buy and use internet-connected smart devices if you live in rented housing and the landlord of your unit provides it. This is probably not an issue for an internet-connected bed, because conventionally a bed isn't something a landlord provides, but you might get forced into using a smart fridge, since that's typically a landlord-provided item.

I lived in a building some years ago there where the landlord bragged about their Google Nest thermostat as an apartment amenity - I deliberately never connected it to my wifi while I lived there (and more modern smart devices connect to ambient cell phone networks in order to defeat this attack). In the building I currently live in, there are a bunch of elevators and locks that can be controlled by a smartphone app (so, something is gonna break when AWS goes down). I noticed this when I was initially viewing the apartment and I considered it a downside - and ultimately chose to move there anyway because every rental unit has downsides and ultimately you have to pick a set of compromises you can live with.

I view this as mostly a problem of housing scarcity - if housing units are abundant, it's easier for a person to buy thier own home and then not put internet-managed smart furniture in it; or at least have more leverage against landlords. But the region I live in is unfortunately housing-constrained.

>I think cooperative game theory[1] better models the dynamics of the real world.

If cooperative coalitions to resist undesirable abusive technology models the real world better, why is the world getting more ads? (E.g. One of the author's bullet points was, "Ads are not inevitable.")

Currently in the real world...

- Ads frequency goes up : more ad interruptions in tv shows, native ads embedded in podcasts, sponsors segments in Youtube vids, etc

- Ads spaces goes up : ads on refrigerator screens, gas pumps touch screens, car infotainment systems, smart TVs, Google Search results, ChatGPT UI, computer-generated virtual ads in sports broadcasts overlayed on courts and stadiums, etc

What is the cooperative coalition that makes "ads not inevitable"?

I'll try and tackle this one. I think the world is getting more ads because Silicon Valley and it's Anxiety Economy are putting a thumb on the scale.

For the entirety of the 2010's we had SaaS startups invading every space of software, for a healthy mix of better and worse, and all of them (and a number even today) are running the exact same playbook, boiled down to broad terms: burn investor money to build a massive network-effected platform, and then monetize via attention (some combo of ads, user data, audience reach/targeting). The problem is thus: despite all these firms collecting all this data (and tanking their public trust by both abusing it and leaking it constantly) for years and years, we really still only have ads. We have specifically targeted ads, down to downright abusive metrics if you're inclined and lack a soul or sense of ethics, but they are and remain ads. And each time we get a better targeted ad, the ones that are less targeted go down in value. And on and on it has gone.

Now, don't misunderstand, a bunch of these platforms are still perfectly fine business-wise because they simply show an inexpressible, unimaginable number of ads, and even if they earn shit on each one, if you earn a shit amount of money a trillion times, you'll have billions of dollars. However it has meant that the Internet has calcified into those monolith platforms that can operate that way (Facebook, Instagram, Google, the usuals) and everyone else either gets bought by them or they die. There's no middle-ground.

All of that to say: yes, on balance, we have more ads. However the advertising industry in itself has never been in worse shape. It's now dominated by those massive tech companies to an insane degree. Billboards and other such ads, which were once commonplace are now solely the domain of ambulance chasing lawyers and car dealerships. TV ads are no better, production value has tanked, they look cheaper and shittier than ever, and the products are solely geared to the boomers because they're the only ones still watching broadcast TV. Hell many are straight up shitty VHS replays of ads I saw in the fucking 90's, it's wild. We're now seeing AI video and audio dominate there too.

And going back to tech, the platforms stuff more ads into their products than ever and yet, they're less effective than ever. A lot of younger folks I know don't even bother with an ad-blocker, not because they like them, but simply because they've been scrolling past ads since they were shitting in diapers. It's just the background wallpaper of the Internet to them, and that sounds (and is) dystopian, but the problem is nobody notices the background wallpaper, which means despite the saturation, ads get less attention then ever before. And worse still, the folks who don't block cost those ad companies impressions and resources to serve those ads that are being ignored.

So, to bring this back around: the coalition that makes ads "inevitable" isn’t consumers or creators, it's investors and platforms locked into the same anxiety‑economy business model. Cooperative resistance exists (ad‑blockers, subscription models, cultural fatigue), but it’s dwarfed by the sheer scale of capital propping up attention‑monetization. That’s why we see more ads even as they get less effective.

> Billboards and other such ads, which were once commonplace are now solely the domain of ambulance chasing lawyers and car dealerships. TV ads are no better, production value has tanked, they look cheaper and shittier than ever, and the products are solely geared to the boomers because they're the only ones still watching broadcast TV.

This actually strikes me as a good thing. The more we can get big dumb ads out of meatspace and confine everything to devices, the better, in my opinion (though once they figure out targeted ads in public that could suck).

I know this is an unpopular opinion here, but I get a lot more value out of targeted social media ads than I ever did billboards or TV commercials. They actually...show me niche things that are relevant to my interests, that I didn't know about. It's much closer to the underlying real value of advertising than the Coca-Cola billboard model is.

> A lot of younger folks I know don't even bother with an ad-blocker, not because they like them, but simply because they've been scrolling past ads since they were shitting in diapers. It's just the background wallpaper of the Internet to them, and that sounds (and is) dystopian...

Also this. It's not dystopian. It's genuinely a better experience than sitting through a single commercial break of a TV show in the 90s (of which I'm sure we all sat through thousands). They blend in. They are easily skippable, they don't dominate near as much of your attention. It's no worse than most of the other stuff competing for your attention. It doesn't seem that difficult to me to navigate a world with background ad radiation. But maybe I'm just a sucker.

> This actually strikes me as a good thing. The more we can get big dumb ads out of meatspace and confine everything to devices, the better, in my opinion (though once they figure out targeted ads in public that could suck).

I mean the issue is the billboards aren't going away, they're just costing less and less which means you get ads for shittier products (see aforementioned lawyers, reverse mortgages and other financial scams, dick pills, etc.). If they were getting taken down I'd heartily agree with you.

> I know this is an unpopular opinion here, but I get a lot more value out of targeted social media ads than I ever did billboards or TV commercials. They actually...show me niche things that are relevant to my interests, that I didn't know about. It's much closer to the underlying real value of advertising than the Coca-Cola billboard model is.

Perhaps they work for you. I still largely get the experience that after I buy a toilet seat for example on Amazon, Amazon then regularly shows me ads for additional toilet seats, as though I've taken up throne collecting as a hobby or something.

> Also this. It's not dystopian. It's genuinely a better experience than sitting through a single commercial break of a TV show in the 90s (of which I'm sure we all sat through thousands). They blend in. They are easily skippable, they don't dominate near as much of your attention. It's no worse than most of the other stuff competing for your attention.

I mean, I personally loathe the way my attention is constantly being redirected, or attempted to be, by loud inane bullshit. I tolerate it, of course, what other option does one have, but I certainly wouldn't call it a good or healthy thing. I think our society would leap forward 20 years if we pushed the entirety of ad-tech into the ocean.

> If they were getting taken down I'd heartily agree with you.

At some point it won't be worth it to maintain them, hopefully.

> I still largely get the experience that after I buy a toilet seat for example on Amazon, Amazon then regularly shows me ads for additional toilet seats, as though I've taken up throne collecting as a hobby or something.

This is definitely a thing, I feel like it's getting better though and stuff like that drops off pretty quickly. But it still doesn't bother me nearly as much as watching the same 30 second TV commercial for the 100th time, I just swipe or scroll past, and overall it's still much better than seeing the lowest common denominator stuff.

> I mean, I personally loathe the way my attention is constantly being redirected, or attempted to be, by loud inane bullshit. I tolerate it, of course, what other option does one have, but I certainly wouldn't call it a good or healthy thing. I think our society would leap forward 20 years if we pushed the entirety of ad-tech into the ocean.

I hear you, the attention economy is a brave new world, and there will probably be some course corrections. I don't think ads are really the problem though, in some ways everything vying for your attention is an ad now. Through technology we democratized the means of information distribution, and I would rather have it this way than having four TV channels, but there are some growing pains for sure.

> This is definitely a thing, I feel like it's getting better though and stuff like that drops off pretty quickly. But it still doesn't bother me nearly as much as watching the same 30 second TV commercial for the 100th time, I just swipe or scroll past, and overall it's still much better than seeing the lowest common denominator stuff.

I'll second the absolute shit out of that. My only exposure to TV anymore is hotels and I cannot fathom why anyone would spend ANY money on it as a service, let alone what I know cable costs. The ads are so LOUD now and they repeat the same like 4 or 5 of them over and over. Last business trip I could lipsync a Wendy's ad like I'd done it my whole life.

> I hear you, the attention economy is a brave new world, and there will probably be some course corrections. I don't think ads are really the problem though, in some ways everything vying for your attention is an ad now.

See I don't like the term attention economy, I vastly prefer anxiety economy. An attention economy implies at least some kind of give and take, where a user's attention is rewarded rather than simply their lack of it is attempted to be punished. The constant fomenting of FOMO and blatant use of psychological torments does not an amicable relationship make. It makes it feel like a constant back and forth of blows, disabling notifications, muting hashtags, unsubscribing from emails because you simply can't stand the NOISE anymore.

You are describing two different advertising strategies that have differing goals. The billboard/tv commercial is a blanket type that serves to foster a default in viewers minds when they consider a particular want/need. Meanwhile, the targeted stuff tries to identify a need you might be likely to have and present something highly specific that could trigger or refine that interest.

Yes, I'm saying, as a consumer, I much prefer the latter, and I get more value from it. And it's only enabled by modern individualized data collection.

Both cooperative and non-cooperative games are relevant. Actually, I think that one of the most intriguing parts of game theory is understanding under what conditions a non-cooperative game becomes a cooperative one [1] [2].

The really simple finding is that when you have both repetition and reputation, cooperation arises naturally. Because now you've changed the payoff matrix; instead of playing a single game with the possibility of defection without consequences, defection now cuts you off from payoffs in the future. All you need is repeated interaction and the ability to remember when you've been screwed, or learn when your counterparty has screwed others.

This has been super relevant for career management, eg. you do much better in orgs where the management chain has been intact for years, because they have both the ability and the incentive to keep people loyal to them and ensure they cooperate with each other.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation

> Game theory is inevitable. Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives.

That's not how mathematics works. "it's just math therefore it's a true theory of everything" is silly.

We cannot forget that mathematics is all about models, models which, by definition, do not account for even remotely close to all the information involved in predicting what will actually occur in reality. Game Theory is a theory about a particular class of mathematical structures. You cannot reduce all of existence to just this class of structures, and if you think you can, you'd better be ready to write a thesis on it.

Couple that with the inherent unpredictability of human beings, and I'm sorry but your Laplacean dreams will be crushed.

The idea that "it's math so it's inevitable" is a fallacy. Even if you are a hardcore mathematical Platonist you should still recognize that mathematics is a kind of incomplete picture of the real, not its essence.

In fact, the various incompleteness theorems illustrate directly, in Mathematic's own terms, that the idea that a mathematical perspective or any logical system could perfectly account for all of reality is doomed from the start.

Game theory is not inevitable, neither is math. Both are attempts to understand the world around us and predict what is likely to happen next given a certain context.

Weather predictions are just math, for example, and they are always wrong to some degree.

Because the models aren't sophisticated enough (yet). There's no voodoo here.

I'm always surprised how many 'logical' tech people shy away from simple determinism, given how obvious a deterministic universe becomes the more time you spend in computer science, and seem to insist there's some sort of metaphysical influence out there somewhere we'll never understand. There's not.

Math is almost the definition of inevitability. Logic doubly so.

Once there's a sophisticated enough human model to decipher our myriad of idiosyncrasies, we will all be relentlessly manipulated, because it is human nature to manipulate others. That future is absolutely inevitable.

Might as well fall into the abyss with open arms and a smile.

>Because the models aren't sophisticated enough (yet). There's no voodoo here.

Idk if that's true.

Navier–Stokes may yet be proven Turing-undecidable, meaning fluid dynamics are chaotic enough that we can never completely forecast them no matter how good our measurement is.

Inside the model, the Navier–Stokes equations have at least one positive Lyapunov exponent. No quantum computer can out-run an exponential once the exponent is positive

And even if we could measure every molecule with infintesimal resolution, the atmosphere is an open system injecting randomness faster than we can assimilate it. Probability densities shred into fractal filaments (butterfly effect) making pointwise prediction meaningless beyond the Lyapunov horizon

It's funny because a central tenet of quantum mechanics, that I find deeply frustrating, is "No determinism, sorry."

So even as you chastise people for shying away from logically concluding the obvious, you're trusting your intuition over the scientific consensus. Which is fine, I've absolutely read theories or claims about quantum mechanics and said "Bullshit," safe in the knowledge that my belief or disbelief won't help or hinder scientific advancement or the operation of the universe, but I'd avoid being so publicly smug about it if I were you.

> I'm always surprised how many 'logical' tech people shy away from simple determinism, given how obvious a deterministic universe becomes the more time you spend in computer science, and seem to insist there's some sort of metaphysical influence out there somewhere we'll never understand. There's not.

You might be conflating determinism with causality. Determinism is a metaphysical stance too because it asserts absence of free will.

Regardless of the philosophical nuance between the two, you are implicitly taking the vantage point of "god" or Laplace's Demon: infinite knowledge AND infinite computability based on that knowledge.

Tech people ought to know that we can't compute our way out of combinatorial explosion. That we can't even solve for a simple 8x8 game called chess algorithmically. We are bound with framing choices and therefore our models will never be a lossless, unbiased compression of reality. Asserting otherwise is a metaphysical stance, implicitly claiming human agency can sum up to a "godlike", totalizing compute.

In sum, models will never be sophisticated enough, claiming otherwise has always ended up being a form of totalitarianism, willful assertion one's favorite "framing", which inflicted a lot of pain in the past. What we need is computational humility. One good thing about tech interviews that it teaches people resource complexity of computation.

But the world is not deterministic, inherently so. We know it's probabilistic at least at small enough scales. Most hidden variable theories have been disproven, and to the best of our current understanding the laws of the physical universe are probabsilitic in nature (i.e the Standard Model). So while we can probably come up with a very good probabilistic model of things that can happen, there is no perfect prediction, or rather, there cannot be

Modeling will never be sophisticated enough to model the entire system.

The question here isn't about determinism, the question is whether the universe could ever be modelled completely enough to understand and predict what may or may not be predetermined.

Short of that level of modelling and understanding, determinism is based on belief or faith just like any other religion. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but you must recognized it is only belief that can make one view any unproven understanding of the universe to be the true explanation for it.

There is strong reason to expect evolution to have found a system that is complex and changing for its control system, for this very reason so it can't get easily gamed (and eaten).

Welcome to the 1600s.

If you start studying basically any field that isn't computer science you will in fact discover that the world is rife with randomness, and that the dreams of a Laplace or Bentham are probably unrealizable, even if we can get extremely close (but of course, if you constrain behavior in advance through laws and restraints, you've already made the job significantly easier).

Thinking that reality runs like a clock is literally a centuries outdated view of reality.

There is voodoo in begging the question though.

I think its hubris to believe that you can formulate the correct game theoretic model to make significant statements about what is and is not inevitable.

I don't think OP claimed that. There is no conflict between not able to formulate the true model vs the existence of that actual model.

Just because we weren't able to discover all of the law of physics, doesn't mean they don't apply to us.

I guess, but there are significant differences between the laws of physics and a game theoretic description of human behavior. Fundamentally, you cannot game theoretically predict the future without a model of the participants and, as you perhaps have noticed, there is no single model for the behavior of human beings because, fundamentally, human beings are an abstraction which covers ~9 billion distinct globs of cells with different genes, gene expressions, culture, personal experiences, etc.

As a physicist I think people are more sure about what an electron is, for example, than they should be, given that there is no axiomatic formulation of quantum field theory that isn't trivial, but at least there we are in spitting distance of having something to talk about such that (in very limited situations, mind you) we can speak of the inevitable. But the OP rather casually suggested, implicitly, if not explicitly, that the submitted article was wrong because "game theory," which is both glib and just like technically not a conclusion one could reasonably come to with an honest appraisal of the limitations of these sorts of ways of thinking about the world.

Game theory is only as good as the model you are using.

Now couple the fact that most people are terrible at modeling with the fact that they tend to ignore implicit constraints… the result is something less resembling science but something resembling religion.

I think you've missed the point.

The concept of Game Theory is inevitable because it's studying an existing phenomenon. Whether or not the researchers of Game Theory correctly model that is irrelevant to whether the phenomenon exists or not.

The models such as Prisoner's Dilemma are not inevitable though. Just because you have two people doesn't mean they're in a dilemma.

---

To rephrase this, Technology is inevitable. A specific instance of it (ex. Generative AI) is not.

In a world ruled by game theory alone marketing is pointless. Everyone already makes the most rational choice and has all the information, so why appeal to their emotions, build brand awareness or even tell them about your products. Yet companies spend a lot of money on marketing, and game theory tells us that they wouldn't do that without reason

Game theory makes a lot of simplifying assumptions. In the real world most decisions are made under constraints, and you typically lack a lot of information and can't dedicate enough resources to each question to find the optimal choice given the information you have. Game theory is incredibly useful, especially when talking about big, carefully thought out decisions, but it's far from a perfect description of reality

> Game theory makes a lot of simplifying assumptions.

It does because it's trying to get across the point that although the world seems impossibly complex it's not. Of course it is in fact _almost_ impossibly complex.

This doesn't mean that it's redundant for more complex situations, it only means that to increase its accuracy you have to deepen its depth.

Your point of view is based on extreme reductionism.

It's nature.

Whether that word is reductionism is an exercise left to Chomsky?

Models are emphatically not nature.

They are at best an attempt to use our tools of reason and observation to predict nature, and you can point to thousands of examples, from market crashes to election outcomes, to observe how they can be flawed and fail to predict.

> the future is made up of 8B+ independent actors and they're going to react to incentives

= “nature”, if you're an evolutionist

as for models, all models are wrong etc.

Game theory is no more a description of nature than Euclidian geometry is.

Sure, but go try to build a house while ignoring what Euclidean geometry tells you about it.

I agree that both geometry and game theory are very useful tools.

Game theory is not inevitable, because we can change the rules of the game.

> It's also true that you, personally, are just one of those 8B+ people

Unless you communicate and coordinate!

Game theory is a model that's sometimes accurate. Game theorists often forget that humans are bags of thinking meat, and that our thinking is accomplished by goopy electrochemical processes

Brains can and do make straight-up mistakes all the time. Like "there was a transmission error"-type mistakes. They can't be modeled or predicted, and so humans can never truly be rational actors.

Humans also make irrational decisions all the time based on gut feeling and instinct. Sometimes with reasons that a brain backfills, sometimes not.

People can and do act against the own self interest all the time, and not for "oh, but they actually thought X" reasons. Brains make unexplainable mistakes. Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten what you went in there to do? That state isn't modelable with game theory, and it generalizes to every aspect of human behavior.

Game theory applied to the world is a useful simplification; reality is messy. In reality:

* Actors have access to limited computation

* The "rules" of the universe are unknowable and changing

* Available sets of actions are unknowable

* Information is unknowable, continuous, incomplete, and changes based on the frame of reference

* Even the concept of an "Actor" is a leaky abstraction

There's a field of study called Agent-based Computational Economics which explores how systems of actors behaving according to sets of assumptions behave. In this field you can see a lot of behaviour that more closely resembles real world phenomena, but of course if those models are highly predictive they have a tendency to be kept secret and monetized.

So for practical purposes, "game theory is inevitable" is only a narrowly useful heuristic. It's certainly not a heuristic that supports technological determinism.

This argument has the unspoken premise that in large part, people's core identity is reacting to external influences. I believe that while responding to influences is part of human existence, the richness of the individual transcends such an explanation for all their actions. The phrase "game theory is inevitable" reads like the perspective of an aristocrat looking down on the masses - enough vision to see the interplay of things, and enough arrogance to assume they can control it.

Yes it's one thing to say that game theory is inevitable, but defection is not inevitable. In fact, if you consider all levels of the organization of life, from multicellularity to large organisms, to families, corporations, towns, nations, etc, it all exists because entities figured out how to cooperate and prevent defection.

If you want to fix these things, you need to come up with a way to change the nature of the game.

Game theory assumes that all the players agree on the pay-offs. However this is often not the case in real world situations. Robert MacNamara (the ex US secretary of defence) said that he realized after the Vietnam war the US and the Vietnamese saw the war completely differently, even years after war had ended (see the excellent documentary 'Fog of War').

Game theory is also a model, with concrete assumptions, which are not universally followed.

It is not a physics theory, that works regardless of our will.

It feels like the only aspect of Game Theory at work here is opportunity cost. For example, why shouldn't you make AI porn generation software? There's moral reasons for it, but usually, most put it aside because someone else is going to get the bag first. That exhaustive list the author enumerated are all in some way byproducts of break-things-move-fast-say-sorry-later philosophy. You need ID for the websites because you did not give a shit and wanted to get the porn out there first and foremost. Now you need IDs.

You need to track everyone and everything on the internet because you did not want to cap your wealth at a reasonable price for the service. You are willing to live with accumulated sins because "its not as bad as murder". The world we have today has way more to do with these things than anything else. We do not operate as a collective, and naturally, we don't get good outcomes for the collective.

I do partly disagree because Game Theory is based on an economic, (and also mentioned) reductionist view of a human, namely homo oeconomicus that does have some bold assumptions of some single men in history that asserted that we all act only with pure egoism & zero altruism which is nowadays highly critiqued and can be challenged.

It is out of question that it is highly useful and simplifies it to an extent that we can mathematically model interactions between agents but only under our underlying assumptions. And these assumptions must not be true, matter of fact, there are studies on how models like the homo oeconomicus have led to a self-fulfilling reality by making people think in ways given by the model, adjusting to the model, and not otherwise, that the model ideally should approximate us. Hence, I don't think you can plainly limit or frame this reality as a product of game theory.

Hopefully without spoiling it, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time has an interesting take on game theory at the end

The greatest challenge facing humanity is building a culture where we are liberated to cooperate toward the greatest goals without fear of another selfish individual or group taking advantage to our detriment.

Yes, the mathematicians will tell you it's "inevitable" that people will cheat and "enshittify". But if you take statistical samplings of the universe from an outsider's perspective, you would think it would be impossible for life to exist. Our whole existence is built on disregard for the inevitable.

Reducing humanity to a bunch of game-theory optimizing automatons will be a sure-fire way to fail The Great Filter, as nobody can possibly understand and mathematically articulate the larger games at stake that we haven't even discovered.

Hi, sure, you can say, "I will always view the world through the eyes of Game Theory."

But don't forget, we discovered Nash Equilibrium, which changed how people behaved, in many interesting scenarios.

Also, from a purely Game Theoretic standpoint... All kinds of atrocities are justifiable, if it propagates your genes...

When they coined the term "influencer" it was a perfect definition for what that is.

It's not a question about the one who cannot influence the 7.9B. The question is disparity, which is like income disparity.

What happens when fewer and fewer people influence greater and greater numbers. Understanding the risk in that.

One person has more impact than you think. Many times it's one person that is speaking what's on the mind of many and that speaking out can bring the courage to do what needs to be done for many people that sitting on the fence. The Andor TV series really taught me that. I'm working on a presentation of surveillance capitalism that I plan to show to my community. It's going to be an interesting future. Some will side with the Empire and others with side with the Rebellion.

You realize surveillance capitalism is what caused the Andor TV show (and more broadly the entire Star Wars franchise) to exist at all, right? Gigantic corporate entities have made a lot of money from monetizing the Star Wars franchise.

I'll say frankly that I personally object to Star Wars on an aesthetic level - it is ultimately an artistically-flawed media franchise even if it has some genuinely compelling ideas sometimes. But what really bothers me is that Star Wars in its capacity as a modern culturally-important story cycle is also intellectual property owned by the Disney corporation.

The idea that the problems of the world map neatly to a confict between an evil empire and a plucky rebellion is also basically propagandistic (and also boring). It's a popular storytelling frame - that's why George Lucas wrote the original Star Wars movies that way. But I really don't like seeing someone watch a TV series using the Star Wars intellectual property package and then using the story the writers chose to write - writers ultimately funded by Disney - as a basis for how they see themselves in the world poltically.

We can't blink without involving some corporation into our creative process. I think Tony Gilroy has some interesting things to say about our world with-in the Andor TV series. Its not an easy map. The character arcs, when the are based on the truth of the situation can help people change their way of thinking.

I never got anything out of the original Star Wars films except heroes and villains. Andor is on a completely different level then the original Star wars world IMHO.

Some times you got to use whats available to you. I do think that we are living in an evil time and in order to change that story, we are going to have to envision something different. I think good stories can help us do that, regardless of how they are funded. Corporations will sell you the rope to hang themselves. They don't care what happens, only that they make money, and I think that will be there downfall at some point.

> if you can shape those beliefs and that information flow, you alter the incentives

Selective information dissemination, persuasion, and even disinformation are for sure the easiest ways to change the behaviors of actors in the system. However, the most effective and durable way to "spread those lies" are for them to be true!

If you can build a technology which makes the real facts about those incentives different than what it was before, then that information will eventually spread itself.

For me, the canonical example is the story of the electric car:

All kinds of persuasive messaging, emotional appeals, moral arguments, and so on have been employed to convince people that it's better for the environment if they drive an electric car than a polluting, noisy, smelly, internal-combustion gas guzzling SUV. Through the 90s and early 2000s, this saw a small number of early adopters and environmentalists adopting niche products and hybrids for the reasons that were persuasive to them, while another slice of society decided to delete their catalytic converters and "roll coal" in their diesels for their own reasons, while the average consumer was still driving an ICE vehicle somewhere in the middle of the status quo.

Then lithium battery technology and solid-state inverter technology arrived in the 2010s and the Tesla Model S was just a better car - cheaper to drive, more torque, more responsive, quieter, simpler, lower maintenance - than anything the internal combustion engine legacy manufacturers could build. For the subset of people who can charge in their garage at home with cheap electricity, the shape of the game had changed, and it's been just a matter of time (admittedly a slow process, with a lot of resistance from various interests) before EVs were simply the better option.

Similarly, with modern semiconductor technology, solar and wind energy no longer require desperate pleas from the limited political capital of environmental efforts, it's like hydro - they're just superior to fossil fuel power plants in a lot of regions now. There are other negative changes caused by technology, too, aided by the fact that capitalist corporations will seek out profitable (not necessarily morally desirable) projects - in particular, LLMs are reshaping the world just because the technology exists.

Once you pull a new set of rules and incentives out of Pandora's box, game theory results in inevitable societal change.

"in formal experiments the only people who behaved exactly according to the mathematical models created by game theory are economists themselves, and psychopaths" [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(television_documentar...

I mean, in an ideal system we would have political agency greater than the sum of individuals who would put pressure/curtail the rise of abusive actors taking advantage of power and informational asymetry to try and gain more power (wealth) and influence (wealth) in order to gain more wealth

what i'm reading here then is that those 7.999999999B others are braindead morons.

OP is 100% correct. either you accept that the vast majority are mindless automatons (not hard to get onboard with that honestly, but still, seems an overestimate), or there's some kind of structural unbalance, an asymmetry that's actively harmful and not the passive outcome of a 8B independent actors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com