From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Feb 25 2003 - 03:41:12 MST
Sure, game theory is often an extreme oversimplification and especially
in foras like this we tend to overuse it (I'm certainly guilty of that
quite often). But at the other hand it also represents a well-understood
formal structure which can derive implications of certain kinds of
assumptions effectively; it is a modeling tool. The important thing to
remember whenever one is making a model is whether the assumptions are
complete enough to both lead to the right behavior and not leave out
additional small complications that can change the resulting behavior
qualitatively. The model should be as simple as possible, but not
simpler.
On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 06:31:03PM -0800, Lee Corbin wrote:
>
> Now sometimes GT could be useful, it seems to me, in helping
> some people see over their ideological blinders. But even
> there, I would really like to know of any actual cases. People
> who simply never could grasp the Cold War in abstract terms
> would nonetheless excel in understanding a precisely
> equivalent contest between, say, union and management.
I seem to recall that a lot of nuclear policy from Rand Corp
was set using game theory.
Game theory is an useful tool to abstract situations to make them more
cognitively manageable. That is extremely important in many
military/political situations since (as the debate on this list has
shown) people tend to get rather emotional about them.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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