I didn’t read through the math, but appreciate this post. Are you familiar with Douglas Hofstader’s “Metamagical Themas”? It’s a collection of articles he wrote for Scientific American in the early 1980s. I haven’t read it in a while but I remember him arguing persuasively that the right thing to do is cooperate in the prisoner’s dilemma. It was a concept he called “superrational” thinking (which I guess now has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality). You’ve generalized this concept beyond superrational thinkers and towards real world cases where even minor correlations may suggest cooperation is the rational strategy.
I didn’t read through the math, but appreciate this post. Are you familiar with Douglas Hofstader’s “Metamagical Themas”? It’s a collection of articles he wrote for Scientific American in the early 1980s. I haven’t read it in a while but I remember him arguing persuasively that the right thing to do is cooperate in the prisoner’s dilemma. It was a concept he called “superrational” thinking (which I guess now has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality). You’ve generalized this concept beyond superrational thinkers and towards real world cases where even minor correlations may suggest cooperation is the rational strategy.