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The “Tragedy of the Commons” Is a Dubious Concept
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this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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Environment
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This is interesting, since my perspective on be tragedy has always been from the perspective of game theory. Often the optimal outcome isn't a stable one because in many circumstances a totally altruistic system can be taken advantage of.
Humans of course beat the game theory predicted stability points quite often, because humans are not rational actors and that is an adaptive advantage that lets us beat gave theory often unintentionally, compared to most other animals which do behave rationally.
So the important takeaway I think is that models don't describe everything, all perspectives have limitations. Humans beat the tragedy of the Commons regularly and often there are ways to. But it is a genuine problem that exists in many situations and does need to be solved.
Game theory is deeply flawed because it plays out on too small of a scale. Both in scope (individual games between too few actors) and in measure (doesn't play out over tens or hundreds of thousands of repetitions in a system which can adapt/evolve). It has always stuck me as people who think they're smart measuring what they think being smart should be.
A recent study on large scale cooperation shows that the creation of societal norms which help to promote cooperation naturally occurs and that working for the benefit of many is actually more advantageous.
The critique of simple games in game theory comes from game theory. It’s usually just people who don’t know game theory that think it’s bad or something. I think game theory pretty concretely leads us to some pretty based conclusions.
Years ago I read of a couple of game theorists who were attending a conference in .. perhaps Egypt .. and they decided to wait until at the destination ( taxi ) before declaring that they would only pay part of the fare, & the driver would just have to accept it...
What the driver did was drive them back to their origin, at his expense, & told them to get out.
Game theory didn't allow that.
Therefore they invented Drama Theory, which takes into account emotion/politics, because the evidence that human behaviour contradicts Game Theory had finally got noticed by them.
No idea who they were, nor have I noticed anything obvious published as Drama Theory, since.
It may have been in Scientific American, or some similar thing, it was years ago, possibly last century.
It's... Not? Applications of it maybe but this is like saying algebra is flawed because it's hard to model rates of change. I don't think you're totally understanding the purpose of game theory as a mathematical model. And believe me, game theory is absolutely verified as mathematically valid. We wouldn't have modern gene theory without it.
Very cool. And exactly what I was talking about. Humans aren't rational actors, to do things exactly line this. Game theory on basic altruisistic systems predicted, as one of the first things that was done with it, that total altruism is more advantageous, but due to the nature of the choices rational actors make, impossible to sustain. If you want to learn more about these systems there are plenty of resources, but as discussed, they are demonstrative, the simple examples are rare and more easily found in genes.
Apologies I meant the application of game theory as an explanation for optimization of behavior or evolution. Not as like, a mathematical model or it's potential applications. To be fair I'm also simplifying to what people think of as game theory which is more aspects of it, namely hypotheticals like the prisoners dilemma being used as an explanation for human behavior on a broad scale rather than on an individual level
What I probably should have said is that many applications of game theory are deeply flawed for the reasons I listen above
It's certainly a functional way to model many many systems in evolution, social sciences, economics, etc. But all models are limited at least by how much complexity you can put in.
The fact that humans actually don't behave rationally itself is a huge discovery of game theory. Evolutionary models fundamentally rely on game theory in a way that is hard to overstate. Genes are inherently rational actors, the system is just complex.
I don't doubt there are plenty of misapplications of it like anything else. But I mean, same with statistics, or calculus, or set theory.