I’ve read this book and learned about game theory in the past, so I feel pretty familiar with the subject matter. One thing that I think is so cool about game theory is how universally applicable it is — the concepts and situations appear in every single instance of human interaction. One of these situations tends to come up in almost every single one of my classes since freshman year. One point that RPS made was that all four situations are essentially the same thing because the cooperative solution is never the default despite being the best possible outcome. Thinking about why this takes place, I feel like a lot of people cite the reason that people are inherently selfish so you can never act under the assumption that another person will look out for you. I am less pessimistic and think that educating people on the situation and telling them about game theory and the factors at play will make someone understand that they are operating on incorrect assumptions that they should not be using.
Critical Thinking
I see where you are coming from. But I also think that a major contributor in lack of cooperation is credibility. How can I trust the person who is telling me to cooperate? What if that person who is telling me to cooperate is just telling me to do this so that they can defect and get the higher “reward” or outcome? This is where we can see the Prisoners Dilemma in play. I think it is hard to rely on education, especially when it comes to credibility.
I agree that game theory is so applicable in the real world. One thing that I liked about this reading is that the author was able to give examples in the real world on both a small scale (like examples of him and his wife) and on a much larger scale (world wide conflict). It really made the concepts easy to understand and demonstrated how important they are in everyday life.
I agree, I was surprised to read that all of these dilemmas are so relevant in everyday life. I think that it is so sad that as humans we do not go for the option that involves cooperation because we are all inherently selfish. I think that if we were able to change this factor of our society then there would be a lot less dilemma situations in which people lose out in the end.
I agree that the game theory, and nearly all the theories for that matter, are so very applicable to daily life. I also find it interesting that in your last sentence you suggest spreading the knowledge on these dilemmas. I agree with this idea because if people are more intuitive about the arguments and thoughts they have about their interactions with other people, they may react more efficiently and methodically.