Yes, because one is a real problem in America and one is not… I’ll let you ponder which is which.
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The trickling is simply the pissbucket parade.
DIfference of opinion is what makes horse races. See ya tomorrow!!
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One could be both selfish and cooperative. I’m not referring to ‘greed is good’ here. There are some contradictions (the Prisoners’ Dilemma) and some partial resolutions of the contradictions (the Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma).
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Difference of opinion is in the lead… it’s in the lead… OH, and reality wins by a nose!
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Well, it seems like you are able to reduce some of our forum denizens to the conversational level of 4-year-olds without any special effort at all.
I’m not sure if I should be offering sympathy or admiration, honestly.
But if you get tired of it, there’s always greasemonkey. 
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I’ve always been of the mind that the first person to resort to “you are a poo poo head” has lost the discussion.
Decisively if it’s accompanied by a .gif.
So I always make a point of congratulating them on the sophistication of their comments.
(Edit) And now I see that the posts which prompted my reply have been deleted! That’s really disappointing in a way. I think everyone’s level of civility should remain on display for further reference…
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Not only can we be both selfish and cooperative, but we all are, in any meaningful sense of the words. I don’t understand how Prisoner’s Dilemma is a contradiction or in what way interating it resolves that contradiction. The optimal solution to the Prisoner’s Dilemma is to cooperate, and the fact that a certain incredibly naive logic says that the optimal solution is to defect is just evidence of the failure of that logic.
- All other things being equal, defecting gets me a better result
- All other things will be equal, for sure
C. I should defect
What the hell is up with (2)?
I just finished reading your cite on “libertarian socialism”. Interesting, and not something I would entirely disagree with.
Anyone who is truly committed to a decentralized system with room for many variants of ownership models would, I think, truly qualify as a “progressive” and in fact as a happy mutant.
It’s the crowd that looks forward to ever more 1000-page “comprehensive reform bills”, ever more “The Secretary shall regulate at his/her discretion”, ever more uniform masses marching toward the future under the supervision of wise, benign technocrats…that’s the crowd which is regressive, in the fullest sense of the word.
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’ I don’t understand how Prisoner’s Dilemma is a contradiction’
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner’s_dilemma , in which both the non-interated and iterated forms are discussed.
Just because you made someone mad doesn’t actually prove that you are right. Your smugness may not actually be warranted.
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A quick note, the word “contradiction” does not appear in the linked article. And I thought my reply would probably have indicated that I was familiar with what the Prisoner’s Dilemma is.
“For further reference”? Why? So they can be chastized again for not conducting themselves like tight-assed – ahem, like polite, middle-class citizens, who go all wobbly kneed when someone “swears” or calls them a “bad name”? I swear (in the other sense – I swear!), some folks, excuse me, citizens, should work harder to realize that their insistence on conducting a conversation in the ways that THEY are used to conducting them is oppressive.
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It contradicts the idea that cooperation is better than exclusive self-interest (but only in the non-iterated form). It’s kind of a paradox in that aggregate utility is maximized when neither party defects, yet each individual’s utility is maximized if he defects and the other doesn’t. However, if you don’t like ‘contradiction’ or ‘paradox’ don’t worry about it for my sake. I won’t insist.
I completely agree. However, when one party moves into poo poo head mode, the discussion is no longer about rightness or wrongness.
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Yeah, but I already explained that the argument for defection in the single iteration is naive and flawed:
I’m not saying that I can’t see a contradiction between (1) it is correct to defect in single iteration prisoner’s dilemma; and (2) cooperation is usually the best strategy. I am saying that it is usually correct to cooperate in single iteration prisoner’s dilemma.
The Nash Equilibrium strategy is defection. In all events, examination of circumstances is required to determine whether a Nash Equilibrium strategy is a good one to pick.
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It does necessarily contradict it at all. The apparent contradiction arises from the presumption that these units of self, other, collective, aggregate, etc are unambiguously defined and static. It might be convenient, for the sake of discussion, to assume that they are - but I think it can also argued that there is little sound underlying reason for doing so.
Instead of cooperation and self-interest representing opposite dynamics, they can also be modelled as the same dynamic with differing scope. The self-interest model simply draws a much smaller boundary of selfhood than that of the cooperative model.
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and if we think a centralized system might be what is necessary to save humanity given current global warming and climate apocalypse?
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Once again, people seem to think if you disagree with them, you must be ignorant and not actually understand a thing (otherwise, you’d agree with them, of course!).
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The one centralized system is here now, and it works - the one known as “ecology”. Everything else is only so many species of human chauvinism. Putting humans first is precisely how we got into this mess in the first place.
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