[HN Gopher] Terence Tao: Game theory, politics and control of in...
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Terence Tao: Game theory, politics and control of information
Author : bertman
Score : 41 points
Date : 2025-07-17 07:22 UTC (15 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (mathstodon.xyz)
| like_any_other wrote:
| > This can lead to the paradoxical phenomenon of a party becoming
| increasingly successful while simultaneously inflicting negative
| outcomes to the majority of their supporters; or of "players"
| deliberately abandoning accurate sources of objective information
| about their current and future "game state", in favor of sources
| controlled by other players that are designed to offer narratives
| about those states that are factually inaccurate to the point of
| being detrimental as guidance, but nevertheless provide emotional
| payoffs such as a sense of identity, comfort, or being on a
| "winning" side.
|
| Tao undervalues the importance of identity. As he says, it's not
| a single-player game, and as we all know, players will form
| teams. If you can convince your opponents to instead play solo
| (by, say, deconstructing their sense of identity), while you keep
| yours, you've basically won.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| This is another interesting take, E pluribus unum.
| photonthug wrote:
| This is mostly just a really high-level overview and the exciting
| stuff is only teased in the conclusion:
|
| > (There is a nascent field of epistemic game theory, as well as
| some models of social media manipulation, but these fields are
| still in their infancy.) A more systematic study of such games
| would help provide a basic conceptual framework to understand
| these very real dynamics, and develop strategies to counter or
| mitigate them.
|
| Time for a renaissance! Honestly game theory feels more
| practically relevant now than earlier with MAD, and it also seems
| obvious that the "rational actor" posited by classical
| behavioural economics is a pretty limited abstraction if you're
| interested in modeling the world. Besides politics/misinformation
| and wild stuff that happens in aggregate at the highest levels of
| "rational" economics policy.. it also feels like "management
| science" never really succeeded in actually saying much about the
| difference between healthy vs unhealthy bureaucracies, and the
| varieties and lifecycles of these kinds of systems. Plus
| epistemic/nonmonotonic logics capable of explicit belief modeling
| seems very well positioned for analyzing and architecting with AI
| systems, like checking theoretical properties of agentic
| interaction protocols, or answering what good mixtures of
| (credulousness for creativity) vs (skeptics for grounding
| beliefs) look like, etc.
|
| Here's a really interesting thing, basically TLA+ style model-
| checking engine that supports agents, environments, protocols etc
| and explicitly takes into account epistemics:
| https://sail.doc.ic.ac.uk/software/mcmas/ Anyone else know of
| similar things? Software suites that are useful for game-
| theoretical analysis and modeling are kind of hard to find unless
| it's yet another toy for prisoners dillema.
|
| Belief-and-knowledge stuff seems to be consulted and adopted in
| robotics/autonomous vehicles research sometimes, a place where
| wrong answers actually matter. But I sort of expect
| modeling/specs/invariants/determinism to continue to be kind of
| neglected almost everywhere else, because resolving ambiguity in
| advance is kind of threatening for groups that benefit from a
| zero-theory "just try it!" and "you're doing it wrong, buy more
| tokens and use this framework" kind of approach with AI and ML.
| Hope this changes.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| epistemic game theory -> mean field games -> Tao's take on NSF
| funding cuts etc... In this case, the solution in the latter is
| to pander to the audience (aka Trump). There are multiple ways
| to do that. I would emphasize US loss of status, China etc...
| Anyway, it is interesting to see mathematicians think about
| this. I wonder if there will be formal ways to identify a
| lynch-pin or to otherwise influence the lynch-pin.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Nice breakdown of different types games.
|
| One thing I didn't see (but could have missed), are the two grand
| archetypes of games:
|
| - finite games
|
| - infinite games
|
| The former have rules for winning and a clear beginning and end.
|
| Infinite games are those where the purpose is not to end the game
| by winning, but to continue playing indefinitely. Players want to
| perpetuate play itself. There's no fixed roster (players can join
| at any time, number of players can change). Rules are changeable
| and exist to ensure the game continues. When rules threaten to
| end the game, they get modified. Boundaries are fluid and can
| expand or contract as needed to keep play alive.
| sorokod wrote:
| More can be said about finite games:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo%27s_theorem_(game_th...
| 7402 wrote:
| Classic text that discusses some of this: The Strategy of
| Conflict by Thomas Schelling.
|
| He has, for example, an interesting discussion showing how having
| less information about one's opponent or less freedom of decision
| can actually put that party in a stronger position.
| jablongo wrote:
| Tao is now transitioning to psychohistory.
| haloboy777 wrote:
| Ha.. a foundation reference! Love it.
| noqc wrote:
| Terry is saying to stop bugging mathematicians for theorems about
| misinformation.
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