Re:Resilient cooperators stabilize long-run cooperation in P...
by Nomentatus on Saturday January 28, 2017 @09:51PM
(#13511567)
The PD is important because it's mostly the rational selfish actors who we need to worry about. Irrationally altruistic actors are rare, and irrational selfish actors tend to self-immolate or get arrested quickly. Many things go on during church socials that don't require any problem-solving on the part of game theorists; because widespread altruism is already a solution, just the hardest solution to actually get to.
Another meta-conclusion I would draw from our paper is that current game theory is insufficient to explain what we observe in real life, including politics, negotiation, and so on. It is folly to apply hyperrationality (strict economic modeling) to real human behavior, and part of the goal of our work is to stimulate more realistic models of what people do in these situations.