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micamo
@micamo

The trouble with mathematics is that what we mean by "truth" is different for mathematical questions ("What is the product of 3 and 5?") and questions about our material reality ("Is there a cat in this box?"). In mathematics, to say a statement is "true" is to mean it is the result of some well-defined process of computation. But in material reality, a statement being "true" means it is in some way verifiable. We cannot say anything about whether there's a cat in a box unless we actually examine the box. No amount of reasoning from first principles will get you to a correct answer.

Mathematical truths can map to material truths, but if and only if the process of computation you carry out to arrive at that mathematical truth, is in some way isomorphic to the process happening in material reality. Mathematics is not "unreasonably effective" at describing the real world at all, scholars studying the material world pick and choose mathematical constructs to use as their models depending on their effectiveness.

And you get very silly results, when you decide upon a mathematical construct to use ahead of time, and then demand material reality conform itself to your chosen ideology.


The game I'm about to discuss has several names, but where I first learned of it called it the Pirate Game, so I'm going to call it that. The game works like this:

You have two players, the Captain and the Crew. The Captain is given $10 and is told to split it up with the Crew however they like. The Captain makes a proposal on how to split the money, which the Crew can Accept or Reject. If the Crew accepts the proposal, the money is split according to the proposal. However, if the Crew rejects the proposal, both players get nothing.

Standard game theory will tell you that the optimal strategy is for the Captain to offer the Crew the smallest amount of money they can possibly offer that is greater than zero. The Crew has no choice but to Accept, because Rejecting means, for them, an even worse outcome of them getting nothing.

However, when you actually run the experiment, when you actually open the box to see if there's a cat inside, something very different happens.

Most Captains don't offer the Crew a penny and take the rest for themselves. And of the Captains who do try this, most Crew tell them to go fuck themselves. This is the case even when you have them play the game anonymously and so the social repercussions of being an asshole are eliminated. Humans have a innate bias toward fairness.

What do game theorists say about this? That the players are being irrational and letting their emotions get in the way: The Captains, their guilt, and the Crew, their indignance. If both of them could just Be Rational, then they would both have better outcomes.

But, better outcomes for whom exactly? A fair split is a better outcome for the Crew, certainly, and not that much worse of an outcome for the Captain. Surely, when you consider the diminishing marginal utility of each dollar, the total utility is increased from the Asshole Captain outcome, is it not? The game-theoretic "outcome" is only better when you assume the Captain is making a choice between a fair split and a selfish one, and the Crew is making a choice between a penny and nothing.


Indeed, the selfish strategy is only optimal in a platonic void, where two mathematical constructs face off who exist only for the duration of that one game, and their only purpose for that brief existence is to maximize the amount of money they win in that game.

Here in the real world, the game is played by people, and the "emotional reaction" that causes them to make the fair deal where Game Theory predicts this is impossible is not irrational in the slightest. Consider Group Selection. What's best for the group, when members of that group will end up in situations where they're repeatedly playing the Pirate Game against each other (at least metaphorically speaking), is for them to work together and produce fair deals.

The way to force a fair deal is, as the Crew, to precommit to rejecting an unfair deal no matter what, and for the Captain to know you have precommitted. That way, the Captain's choice is between a fair deal, and nothing.

It is therefore advantageous for members of such a species, that survives by working in groups and whose group cohesion is vital to maintain, to have an inherent, "irrational" bias toward fairness. A baked-in precommitment to rejecting unfairness, even at their individual short-term expense.

(Obviously, and unfortunately, this baked-in precommitment is not absolute. Some Crew do accept that Selfish Deal. And if we all rejected unfair outcomes absolutely, then capitalism could not exist.)


There are two kinds of libertarians. The "I want to be allowed to refuse to serve Black people at my small business" kind, and the "I'm an ultra-rational big brain smart boy who arrived at these ideas through pure reason and logic" kind. There's certainly an overlap, mind, but I'm going to focus on the latter as it's that kind of reasoning that gets spouted in academic papers on the subject.

Libertarianism (and neoliberal economics too, though they claim to despise globalism) is based precisely on these kinds of mathematical models, where we assume that people are these abstract mathematical constructs, reason out what the optimal social policy would be for such a society of abstract mathematical constructs, and then persist in advocating for those social policies even in the face of reality that contradicts those models.

Of course it is rational for employers to offer their employees a wage as small as they can get away with.

Of course it is rational for employees to accept any wage large enough for them to not literally drop dead immediately.

Of course it is rational to tell people whose livelihoods are being destroyed by capital flight and rising rents to simply move somewhere else (community? what's that?) and reskill themselves to find other jobs.

Rather than question their assumptions when faced with the reality that their proposed policies have been tried and tried and tried again and they never work, they always find a scapegoat. It's because of arbitrary institutions getting in the way of The Market, or because of imperfect information, or because assets aren't liquid enough, or because of people being emotional and irrational.

And somehow their patches for these problems are always more of the same. This is the promise of the Blockchain and Web3 and why they're all so obsessed with it: An ecosystem where everything is a commodity, where all interactions are economic transactions, where everyone has all the information about everything all of the time, and where everything is controlled by "impartial," unappealable algorithms instead of human institutions.

Libertarianism is the opposite of rationality. This is the literal opposite of scientific inquiry. It is the absolute ideological commitment to a model of the world even as the world slaps you in the face with evidence to the contrary over and over. It is insisting until your last breath that there's no cat in the box, even as it scratches at the walls and meows to be let out.


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in reply to @micamo's post:

I should add, that game theory isn't universally bad. There are game theorists who acknowledge that their models are abstract mathematical constructs and the real world is more complicated. I'm just dunking on libertarians here.

You might be wondering "Wait, if the Crew can get a fair deal by precommitting to flipping the game board if they don't, then why don't they precommit to demanding the captain only take a penny themselves and give the Crew the rest?"

That's possible, but remember the Captain has their own way of flipping the game board: They can simply give the fair offer of a 50/50 split, and let the Crew refuse if that's not good enough. So the Crew has to consider this and roll back that precommitment, lest they be forced to take nothing.