I liked this essay, but it seems to somewhat abuse the concepts of “Prisoner’s Dilemma” and “tit for tat.” For example, I see no meaningful sense in which using a weird profile picture on OkCupid is tit for tat in an iterated PD.
You can approximate OKC as a two-person game: Weird = Honest, Polished=Dishonest. U(WW)=+3/+3, U(WP)=0/+4, U(PP)=0/0, then you have the usual Prisoner-Dilemma payoff (motivation: being honest will generate more long-term utility).
This is a bad approximation, as OkCupid is a multi-player-game, so it’s more complicated than the classical 2-player Prisoner’s Dilemma. That’s where the tragedy of the commons comes in. In an environment where nearly everyone plays defect-bot, a lot of utility is destroyed. But, tit-for-tat players have an advantage if they meet another TFT player.
That’s how I interpreted the use of concepts in the article, did you understand it differently?
I liked this essay, but it seems to somewhat abuse the concepts of “Prisoner’s Dilemma” and “tit for tat.” For example, I see no meaningful sense in which using a weird profile picture on OkCupid is tit for tat in an iterated PD.
I disagree.
You can approximate OKC as a two-person game: Weird = Honest, Polished=Dishonest. U(WW)=+3/+3, U(WP)=0/+4, U(PP)=0/0, then you have the usual Prisoner-Dilemma payoff (motivation: being honest will generate more long-term utility).
This is a bad approximation, as OkCupid is a multi-player-game, so it’s more complicated than the classical 2-player Prisoner’s Dilemma. That’s where the tragedy of the commons comes in. In an environment where nearly everyone plays defect-bot, a lot of utility is destroyed. But, tit-for-tat players have an advantage if they meet another TFT player.
That’s how I interpreted the use of concepts in the article, did you understand it differently?