I didn’t really mean to insult your post (although I apparently did :). I was probably just as surprised as you at many of the comments in that thread. I agree that you should understand NE if you want to say anything useful about games (and that they are basically the complete story for two-player zero sum games from a theoretical perspective). The one thing I object to is the sentiment that “if you don’t know exactly what is going on, you should just play NE.” After re-reading your latest post this a bit of a straw man. I agree totally that if you know nothing else then you have nothing to do but play the NE, which is all that you actually said. However, you can put any game that you are faced with into the reference class of “games humans play,” and so I don’t think this fact is very relevant most of the time. In particular, if the question was “what should you do in an MMO with these properties” then there are many acceptable answers other than play the NE. It may or may not be the case that anyone in the thread in question actually gave one.
In particular, because I can put all games I have ever played into the reference class “games that I have ever played,” I can apply, over the course of my entire life, an online learning algorithm which will allow me to significantly outperform the Nash equilibrium. In practice, I can do better in many games than is possible against perfectly rational opponents.
I didn’t really mean to insult your post (although I apparently did :). I was probably just as surprised as you at many of the comments in that thread. I agree that you should understand NE if you want to say anything useful about games (and that they are basically the complete story for two-player zero sum games from a theoretical perspective). The one thing I object to is the sentiment that “if you don’t know exactly what is going on, you should just play NE.” After re-reading your latest post this a bit of a straw man. I agree totally that if you know nothing else then you have nothing to do but play the NE, which is all that you actually said. However, you can put any game that you are faced with into the reference class of “games humans play,” and so I don’t think this fact is very relevant most of the time. In particular, if the question was “what should you do in an MMO with these properties” then there are many acceptable answers other than play the NE. It may or may not be the case that anyone in the thread in question actually gave one.
In particular, because I can put all games I have ever played into the reference class “games that I have ever played,” I can apply, over the course of my entire life, an online learning algorithm which will allow me to significantly outperform the Nash equilibrium. In practice, I can do better in many games than is possible against perfectly rational opponents.
Okay, then it looks like we are in agreement.