[HN Gopher] A Brief Introduction to the Basics of Game Theory
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A Brief Introduction to the Basics of Game Theory
Author : 7777777phil
Score : 70 points
Date : 2026-01-12 07:53 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (papers.ssrn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (papers.ssrn.com)
| bob1029 wrote:
| I think a basic overview of game theory should also discuss
| Pareto optimality to some extent. You can have 100% of
| participants operating in a locally-ideal way while still
| creating problems in aggregate.
| SaltyBackendGuy wrote:
| Tragedy of the commons / bounded rationality for example.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
| nosuchthing wrote:
| The Tragedy of the Commons has long been discredited by the
| noble winning game theorist Elinor Ostrom and her research of
| numerous case studies on the commons, and how people
| coordinate for collective resilence and prosperity (through
| rules and by auditing and retaliating against abusers and
| selfish exploiters)
|
| The infamous "tragedy of the commons" rational resource
| optimization game is often cited as justification for
| machiavellian exploitation, but humans being social creatures
| are subject to reputations, and have sophisticated methods of
| communication, cooperation, reputation, trust,
| accountability, auditing, and retaliation capabilities. [1]
| [2]
|
| Elinor Ostrom's "Rules, games, and common-pool resources" and
| Robert Axelrod's work "The Evolution of Cooperation" both
| explain game theory in the context of human scale realities.
| Of particular interest to the hacker community would be
| Ostrom's Common Pool Resource principles, which are totally
| applicable to the way we form communities anywhere.
| Decenteralized or in any form.
|
| At the core of game theory and human civilization is
| communication and trust. The abuse of mass media to
| manipulate populations knows the power of communication and
| cultural narratives, and we're in a new enclosure [3] [4] of
| the commons and as media communication networks are being
| used to exploit through "hypernormalization" and
| "accelerationism" [5][6][7][8]
|
| For a better applicable human scale game theory primer, check
| out Bruce Schneier's (yes, the same legendary cryptographer
| Bruce), "Liars and Outliers"
|
| [1] https://ncase.me/trust/
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#Design_princi
| ple...
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything
|
| [5] on Cybernetics and the 20th century "All Watched Over by
| Machines of Loving Grace" by Adam Curtis
| https://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-
| lov...
|
| [6] on propaganda and 20th century culture "The Century of
| the Self" by Adam Curtis https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-
| century-of-the-self/
|
| [7] on the hyperreal news and the use of crisis to manipulate
| populations and normalize a polycrisis - "Hypernormalization"
| by Adam Curtis https://thoughtmaybe.com/hypernormalisation/
|
| [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > At the core of game theory and human civilization is
| communication and trust.
|
| No and no. Game theory is game theory. When Nash says: _"
| Optimal move for non-cooperative participants"_ there is no
| communication and no trust. And it is still game theory.
| The Wikipedia page on the Nash equilibrium mentions game
| theory 42 times.
|
| I'm not saying what you're mentioning ain't _also_ game
| theory.
|
| But you're putting an ideological/political motive to
| freaking maths to then reframe what "game theory" means in
| your own view of the world.
|
| As a side note I'll point that humans do play games: from
| toddler to grown up adults. Game theory also applies to
| something called "games": be it poker or chess or Go or
| whatever.
|
| Not everything has to be seen through the lens of
| exploitation / evil capitalism / gentle communism
| (collective resilience) / etc.
| perfect-blue wrote:
| Pareto efficiency is a welfare economics concept. In game
| theory, the closest you can get to that is a Nash equilibrium.
| emil-lp wrote:
| Pareto optimal is definitely a core concept in game theory.
| It says that no other vector beats it in every dimension (or
| at least as good in all but one, and better in at least one).
| rented_mule wrote:
| I wish more business / product people understood this
| concept. When a product has been refined enough to approach
| Pareto optimality (at least on the dimensions the product
| is easily measured), it's all too common for people to
| chase improvements to one metric at a time, and when that
| runs out, switch to another metric. This results in going
| in circles (make metric A go up-up-up, forcing metric B
| down-down-down, then make B go up-up-up while forcing A to
| go down-down-down - it's worse than this because multiple
| dimensions go up/down together, making it harder to spot).
| Sometimes these cycles are over a period of quarters or
| years, making it even harder to spot because cycles are
| slower than employee attrition.
|
| This is not independent of Goodhart's Law[1]. I've seen
| entire product orgs, on a very mature product (i.e.,
| nearing the Pareto frontier for the metrics that are
| tracked), assign one metric per PM and tie PM comp to their
| individual metric improving. Then PMs wheel and deal away
| good features because "don't ship your thing that hurts my
| metric and I won't ship my thing that hurts yours" - and
| that's completely rational given the incentives. Of course
| the best wheelers-and-dealers get the money/promotions. So
| the games escalate ("you didn't deal last time, so it's
| going to cost you more this time"). Eventually negative
| politics explode and it's all just a reality TV show.
| Meanwhile engineers who don't have an inside view of what's
| going on are left wondering why PMs appear to be acting
| insane with ship/no-ship decisions.
|
| If more people understood Pareto optimality and Goodhart's
| Law, even at a surface level, I think being "data driven"
| would be a much better thing.
|
| [1] Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it
| ceases to be a good measure
| nosuchthing wrote:
| Cybernetics has devolved into KPI metrics with
| accelerationism as a treat.
|
| Apparently documents from Google's antitrust case
| revealed the search algorithm was adjusted to give worse
| results in order to force the KPI for AdSense to drive
| quarterly earnings reports.
|
| > "I care more about revenue that the average person but
| think we can all agree that for all of our teams trying
| to live in high cost areas another $[redacted] in stock
| price loss will not be great for morale, not to mention
| the huge impact on our sales team.
|
| > "I don't want the message to be 'we're doing this thing
| because the Ads team needs revenue.' That's a very
| negative message.
|
| > But my question to you is - based on above - what do we
| think is the best decision for Google overall?
|
| > ...Are there other ranking tweaks we can push out
| quickly?" - Dischler
|
| Anil Sabharwal, the Chrome executive: > "1...we were able
| to get launch approval to rollout two changes (entity
| suggest and tail suggest) that increase queries by
| [redacted]% and [redacted]% respectively.
|
| > 2. We are going to immediately start experiments to
| improve search ranking in the omnibox (more search
| results and nudging search to the top)."
|
| [1] https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-execs-
| scheme-to-i...
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| Why Flip a Coin is a really great book about game theory. Easy to
| read, very little assumed knowledge, and lots of very interesting
| and counterintuitive examples and situations. Also, despite the
| introductory nature - still gets into the math in a rigorous way.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation!
| 7777777phil wrote:
| I second that!
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