From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Sun Jun 02 2002 - 13:24:36 MDT
Wei Dai wrote:
> No, prejudgement is not analogous to iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Here's
> a simple example that shows why: Consider a two-player game with two types
> of players. Type A are those who, if they were prejudged, would be
> prejudged favorably. Type B are those who would be prejudged unfavorably.
> Then a type A player has no incentive to not prejudge, since the
> "retaliation" he might get, being prejudged in return, doesn't hurt him;
> in fact it actually helps him. Now consider a type B player. If he faces a
> type A player he might as well prejudge since he's being prejudged anyway.
> If he faces another type B player, he can "not prejudge" but that's now
> meaningless.
I see a non-iterated n-party Prisoner's Dilemma aspect. If I am
"rationally prejudiced" but society as a whole is not, I may achieve
some advantages if prejudice has a core of validity. But if everyone
adopts prejudiced behavior, this has two bad effects from my perspective.
First, I lose my advantage because everyone is doing it. Second, there
are externalities which arise in a prejudiced world. People who are of
disadvantaged groups will be angry and frustrated. Investments in their
own education will be ignored by the prejudiced. Instead they may become
violent. Society will be torn apart by race riots and social protests.
This is of course not hypothetical, it represents historical experience
from the civil rights era.
However a rational Bayesian probably does not behave cooperatively in
an n-party prisoner's dilemma of this kind. This leads to the familiar
paradox that hard-core rationalists live in a miserable, cut-throat
society, while weak-minded pragmatists are able to set up forms of
cooperative behavior that are technically irrational.
The situation is analogous to the tragedy of the commons, in that
each person individually has an incentive to take advantage of others,
but when everyone does so, all are worse off. We solve that case by
introducing property rights. Handling prejudice has been solved by
making it illegal in certain ways (employment for example), which in
the long run benefits everyone. I don't know if there could be a way
to solve it that was more analogous to property rights.
Hal
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