This “perfectly rational” game-theoretic solution seems to be fragile, in that the threshold of “irrationality” necessary to avoid N out of N rounds of defection seems to be shaved successively thinner as N increases from 1.
Also, though I don’t remember the details, I believe that slight perturbations in the exact rules may also cause the exact game-theoretic solution to change to something more interesting. Note that adding uncertainty in the exact number of rounds has the effect of removing your induction premise: e.g., a 1% chance of ending the iteration each round has the effect of making the hanging genuinely unexpected.
Anyway, the iterated prisoner’s dilemma is a better approximation of our social intuition, as in a social context, we expect at least the possibility of having to deal repeatedly with others. The alternate framing in the previous article seems to have been designed to remove such a social context, but in the interests of Overcoming Bias, we should probably avoid such spin-doctoring in favor of an explicit, above-board articulation of the problem.
This “perfectly rational” game-theoretic solution seems to be fragile, in that the threshold of “irrationality” necessary to avoid N out of N rounds of defection seems to be shaved successively thinner as N increases from 1.
Also, though I don’t remember the details, I believe that slight perturbations in the exact rules may also cause the exact game-theoretic solution to change to something more interesting. Note that adding uncertainty in the exact number of rounds has the effect of removing your induction premise: e.g., a 1% chance of ending the iteration each round has the effect of making the hanging genuinely unexpected.
Anyway, the iterated prisoner’s dilemma is a better approximation of our social intuition, as in a social context, we expect at least the possibility of having to deal repeatedly with others. The alternate framing in the previous article seems to have been designed to remove such a social context, but in the interests of Overcoming Bias, we should probably avoid such spin-doctoring in favor of an explicit, above-board articulation of the problem.