Our tragedy is that in these hyper-partisan times, the mere fact that one side says, ‘Look, there’s [a problem],’ means that the other side’s going to say, ‘Huh? What? No, I’m not even going to look up.’
But if either side admits that they care about disaster befalling the US economy, then if the other does not so admit, this second side can blackmail the first side for whatever they want. Therefore, the only reasonable negotiating strategy is to pretend not to care at all about the US economy.
Belief propagation fail on my part. I had already read that Yvain post when watching that Haidt talk, but I still interpreted the behaviour he described in terms of ape social dynamics, forgetting that the average politician is probably more cold-blooded (i.e. more resembling the idealized agents of game theory) than the average ape is.
OTOH, the problems Haidt describes (global warming, rising public debt, rising income inequality, rising prevalence of out-of-wedlock births) don’t have a hard deadline, they just gradually get worse and worse over the decades; so the dynamics of brinkmanship is probably not quite the same.
-- Jonathan Haidt
-- Yvain, on why brinkmanship is not stupid
Belief propagation fail on my part. I had already read that Yvain post when watching that Haidt talk, but I still interpreted the behaviour he described in terms of ape social dynamics, forgetting that the average politician is probably more cold-blooded (i.e. more resembling the idealized agents of game theory) than the average ape is.
OTOH, the problems Haidt describes (global warming, rising public debt, rising income inequality, rising prevalence of out-of-wedlock births) don’t have a hard deadline, they just gradually get worse and worse over the decades; so the dynamics of brinkmanship is probably not quite the same.