In practice, worse off according to the person answering the question, as is typically true when we ask questions of people, including ourselves.
But, OK, if it’s important for some reason to be more rigorous here: consider the set A of agents (A1..An) who have perspectives I consider salient according to which people can be worse or better off due to the use of a particular tactic.
The expected net value difference, aggregated over the entire system, of using that tactic will be calculated differently by each agent in A, for many different reasons. There are three possibilities, though: (1) All agents in A agree that the expected net value difference is positive. (2) All agents in A agree that the expected net value difference is negative. (3) Agents in A disagree about the sign of the expected net value difference.
I agree that whether a tactic leaves everyone involved worse off is tricky to determine in case 3, and that more generally sometimes the answer to “do the tactics leave everyone involved worse off?” is “I don’t know; it’s complicated,” especially if my set A has a lot of agents in it.
The existence of cases 1 and 2 can still make it worthwhile to ask the question.
The existence of cases 1 and 2 can still make it worthwhile to ask the question.
Given that this is a matter of competition for a scarce resource—the time, attention, and affection of a person − 1 and 2 are vanishingly small cases when dealing with generally desirable mates.
The only way this seems plausible to me is if you’re interpreting “expected net value difference, aggregated over the entire system, of using that tactic, as evaluated by agent A” as being roughly equivalent to “expected net value difference to A of that tactic being used, as evaluated by A.”
That is, if you are assuming an evaluation something like “There’s three of us, we all want the same girl, this tactic works, so either of you two losers using this tactic is BAD, but me using this tactic is GOOD.” Which, I agree, if everyone’s evaluating it that way, 1 and 2 are highly unlikely.
OTOH, if everyone is actually calculating the expected net value difference, aggregated over the entire system, of using that tactic, I would expect a very different result in most cases.… something more like “There’s three of us, we all want the same girl, this tactic works, so one of us using this tactic is better than none of us doing so, and probably better than all three of us wasting resources using it at once if we can agree on some other way of deciding which of us gets to use it, like drawing straws, or letting Sam have her because past experience shows he’s better at this than we are and will win anyway, or some other method.”
But I would agree that most people don’t actually do that in practice.
In practice, worse off according to the person answering the question, as is typically true when we ask questions of people, including ourselves.
But, OK, if it’s important for some reason to be more rigorous here: consider the set A of agents (A1..An) who have perspectives I consider salient according to which people can be worse or better off due to the use of a particular tactic.
The expected net value difference, aggregated over the entire system, of using that tactic will be calculated differently by each agent in A, for many different reasons.
There are three possibilities, though:
(1) All agents in A agree that the expected net value difference is positive.
(2) All agents in A agree that the expected net value difference is negative.
(3) Agents in A disagree about the sign of the expected net value difference.
I agree that whether a tactic leaves everyone involved worse off is tricky to determine in case 3, and that more generally sometimes the answer to “do the tactics leave everyone involved worse off?” is “I don’t know; it’s complicated,” especially if my set A has a lot of agents in it.
The existence of cases 1 and 2 can still make it worthwhile to ask the question.
Given that this is a matter of competition for a scarce resource—the time, attention, and affection of a person − 1 and 2 are vanishingly small cases when dealing with generally desirable mates.
(blink)
The only way this seems plausible to me is if you’re interpreting “expected net value difference, aggregated over the entire system, of using that tactic, as evaluated by agent A” as being roughly equivalent to “expected net value difference to A of that tactic being used, as evaluated by A.”
That is, if you are assuming an evaluation something like “There’s three of us, we all want the same girl, this tactic works, so either of you two losers using this tactic is BAD, but me using this tactic is GOOD.” Which, I agree, if everyone’s evaluating it that way, 1 and 2 are highly unlikely.
OTOH, if everyone is actually calculating the expected net value difference, aggregated over the entire system, of using that tactic, I would expect a very different result in most cases.… something more like “There’s three of us, we all want the same girl, this tactic works, so one of us using this tactic is better than none of us doing so, and probably better than all three of us wasting resources using it at once if we can agree on some other way of deciding which of us gets to use it, like drawing straws, or letting Sam have her because past experience shows he’s better at this than we are and will win anyway, or some other method.”
But I would agree that most people don’t actually do that in practice.