A nice discussion posting. Let me try to capture some of your points with a game-theory metaphor.
We are playing an iterated two person game, and play has fallen into a repetitive pattern which may well be a Nash equilibrium—satisfactory to both sides. However, we don’t know for sure that current play is optimal, because much of the decision matrix remains unexplored—we simply don’t know what the payoffs are for some combinations of pure strategies, because those strategies have never been tried.
We may be inclined to do some exploring, but there are some difficulties.
Our coplayers tend to treat exploration moves on our part as defections and punish us accordingly. Efficient exploration seems to require collaboration between players, but our coplayers are less inclined to explore than we are.
Exploration usually costs us some payoff utility in the short term, even though it gains us some information about the game we are trapped in. So how do we justify that sacrifice? We obviously need to assign some instrumental value to the gained information. But how do we do that, if we have no idea what we will find by exploring.
Clearly, our propensity to explore is greater the longer our time horizon (the lower our discount rate). This results in an inversion of the normal moral respectability of low discount rates. Those who take the long view are more likely to indulge in explorations that short-termers consider immoral (because they impose some short-term disutility on others.)
A nice discussion posting. Let me try to capture some of your points with a game-theory metaphor.
We are playing an iterated two person game, and play has fallen into a repetitive pattern which may well be a Nash equilibrium—satisfactory to both sides. However, we don’t know for sure that current play is optimal, because much of the decision matrix remains unexplored—we simply don’t know what the payoffs are for some combinations of pure strategies, because those strategies have never been tried.
We may be inclined to do some exploring, but there are some difficulties.
Our coplayers tend to treat exploration moves on our part as defections and punish us accordingly. Efficient exploration seems to require collaboration between players, but our coplayers are less inclined to explore than we are.
Exploration usually costs us some payoff utility in the short term, even though it gains us some information about the game we are trapped in. So how do we justify that sacrifice? We obviously need to assign some instrumental value to the gained information. But how do we do that, if we have no idea what we will find by exploring.
Clearly, our propensity to explore is greater the longer our time horizon (the lower our discount rate). This results in an inversion of the normal moral respectability of low discount rates. Those who take the long view are more likely to indulge in explorations that short-termers consider immoral (because they impose some short-term disutility on others.)
It is an interesting set of issues to look at.