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Comment by JackFr | Hacker News Reader

> Game theory, faithful to its name, treats every human context as a game—a self-contained situation in which your sly rival must lose for you to win, and in which the nature of these losses and wins can be always summed up in precise numbers.

That’s a complete mischaracterization. Game theory literally has zero to say about the human condition. It is a mathematical theory.

It reads to me as if the reviewer had a ‘hook’ for the review and was going to use it, whether he could find support for it or not.

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>Game theory literally has zero to say about the human condition. It is a mathematical theory.

Correct. Economics is the study of the result of rational agents engaging in optimizing (in the mathematical sense) behavior. Game theory is an extension of that when there are strategic interactions between those agents (traditional micro assumes simple price-taking behavior). Source: undergraduate was in Economics.

> Correct.

No, not correct. Not even a little bit correct. Game theory explains a lot of human (and animal) behavior. It explains, for example, why I do not rob my neighbor's house when I know they are on vacation even though I could almost certainly get away with it and thereby achieve a short-term profit for myself. It explains why rich people who wring their hands over climate change continue to buy first-class airline tickets posh vacation destinations. It explains why Putin invaded Ukraine, and why the soldiers who are actually doing the dirty work continue to do that dirty work despite the fact that very few of them actually would have chosen to invade Ukraine.

It explains why discussions on the internet often degrade into flame-fests, and why this happens more rapidly if people are allowed to post anonymously or pseudonymously.

It can be used to offer an explanation for those things, there are other frameworks that can as well

Not really. It explains only the optimal play of intelligent, clear headed, self-interested actors. It does not explain why someone would jump into a river to save a drowning child that they do not know even at the cost of their own life. There are many other examples like this. Game theory does not encapsulate values or morality. It's fine for someone with sufficient psychopathy or cowardice, but to say it explains even a small fraction of human behaviour goes too far. Bakers and butchers are not seeking to maximize their utility. Some people just want to grow flowers, go to Church, and be good neighbours.

Those are all perfectly rational actions if you use a sufficiently nuanced utility function. It shouldn't surprise that modeling humans as "maximizes dollars" is overly simple.

> It does not explain why someone would jump into a river to save a drowning child that they do not know even at the cost of their own life.

Yes it does:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation

> It explains, for example, why I do not rob my neighbor's house when I know they are on vacation even though I could almost certainly get away with it and thereby achieve a short-term profit for myself.

Does game theory explain why other people do steal? Should we assume that thieves' circumstances are different enough that stealing is rational?

Game theory is sometimes a useful way of thinking about human behavior but it's a stretch to say it "explains a lot of it". The various ways people come to value things and make decisions are opaque. It's begging the question to insist that these processes are explicable by game theory, especially when so much human behavior seems inexplicable.

> Does game theory explain why other people do steal?

Yes.

> Should we assume that thieves' circumstances are different enough that stealing is rational?

You don't have to assume it. It's a fact. There's a reason that thieves come mainly from a certain socioeconomic group.

> it's a stretch to say it "explains a lot of it".

No, it is not a stretch at all. If you think it is, then you don't understand game theory. You should read this book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation

You said "a lot of human behavior is explained by game theory". Why can't we say that all human behavior is explained by game theory? How do we differentiate between an instance of behavior that is explained by game theory and one that isn't?

It's useful and interesting to say "here's a theory that predicts ways in which people actually behave". It's begging the question to claim the theory actually explains human behavior, which remains opaque.

> Why can't we say that all human behavior is explained by game theory?

We can. But game theory turns on the parameters of the payoff matrix, and those are "hidden variables" that are hard to measure. But they are constrained by ESS requirements, which is the thing that makes game-theory non-vacuous. It's analogous to saying that weather is explained by fluid dynamics.

My professor said that a good example of the Nash equilibrium is the double yellow line on the road. You have no incentive to go past it, just like the people driving at you in the other lane have no incentive to go into your lane. Game theory can explain a lot of human actions, alone or in groups.

In the context of a person who (for zero real research) sounds as though he intellectualized life perhaps to a fault, the game theory anecdote seems to fit.

If it had nothing to say about the human condition it would be called something like "multi-party valuation theory" and not specifically designed to analyze "roulette to chess, baccarat to bridge".

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