It feels like there's a political analogy here -- something about how democratic or even market practices can fail to produce the expected or desired social result.. — Srap Tasmaner
So it is with the RPI simulation of a social network's marketplace of ideas -- a small group that never adjusts gets its way.
I also found it suggestive that the specific mechanism in this case was one minority, not to put too fine a point on it, singling out a more vulnerable minority. The others respond by watching from the sidelines or trying to coach or coax the one changing the game to quit it. — Srap Tasmaner
I would assume 2's behavior would be different if he saw it as group fooling-around, an activity better the more everyone's involved, rather than as a competition. — Srap Tasmaner
everyone competing, everyone trying to win, and that evening out in such a way that everyone's playing and having fun — Srap Tasmaner
There are games of coordination (the sort of thing that Lewis takes as the basis of convention) and games of competition, and a game can be purely one or the other or mixed, as in the prisoner's dilemma. — Srap Tasmaner
I think most of the boys treat the game as mixed, both coordination and competition. What's curious is that the one who treats the game as pure competition changes the game for everyone. — Srap Tasmaner
I wonder too if, in those games of tag I played as a kid, we didn't treat them as mixed rather than purely competitive, at least by avoiding the singling-out behavior in my example. I think my friends and I would have disapproved of someone going after the slowest kid in class every time he was "it". — Srap Tasmaner
I'm not sure what to make of it. I'm tempted to say that 2, by being intent only on winning, and thus always going after the smallest boy, wrecked the game, at least as far as 1 and 3 were concerned, and possibly 4, though as I said 4 was at least playing a lot and he seemed okay with the challenge. — Srap Tasmaner
I don't really see any of this as a game in terms of it being a fair contest where there can be a meaningful winner. It's really just social interaction where kids are learning to interact with one another. — Hanover
It feels like there's a political analogy here -- something about how democratic or even market practices can fail to produce the expected or desired social result, but I'm not sure there's an analogy for being "it", for having temporary control of the game and the direction it takes. — Srap Tasmaner
I have a similar reaction to Hanover but from a different angle: that the tag-example is oddly individualistic. — mcdoodle
It would only start applying to political economy if alliances, whether overt or not, began. — mcdoodle
...the problem is presented in terms of game theory — Galuchat
1 thought they were all playing 'tag'. 2 was actually playing 'get 4', a quite different game. — Cuthbert
This is what I had in mind: there are theories that expect cooperation to be emergent from competition. — Srap Tasmaner
But your small sample size means that the distance between chasing fairly and chasing unfairly doesn't offer much room except to completely flip state from cooperative to competitive mode. — apokrisis
Yet another thought: I'm torn between the idea that cooperation might not be emergent and needs to be a first-class goal alongside competition, and the idea that market theory could be right. — Srap Tasmaner
In such a story, our player 2 would not be a bully but an iconoclastic hero, the one who says the emperor has no clothes. — Srap Tasmaner
I wondered about this, but my guess was what mattered was the percentage. 25% is clearly enough, but my guess is that a much smaller percentage of the population could effect this kind of change. They wouldn't even need to conspire if there was an objective way the choose a target. — Srap Tasmaner
There just is no organisation unless it has a self-perpetuating balance of competition vs cooperation. — apokrisis
This is interesting: — Srap Tasmaner
But then the paradigm shift is seeing that it is a natural, probabilistic and self-organising thing. — apokrisis
...the paradigm shift is seeing that it is a natural, probabilistic and self-organising thing. It is a mutuality or dichotomy that emerges through "pure statistics". That is why the new wave of system modelling - based on complexity and thermodynamical thinking - offers the right analytic tools. — Apokrisis
What type of predictions can be expected of complex system modelling with regard to cultural development in stratified societies? — Galuchat
A non-growth system would be characterised by approaching the Gaussian limit of a precisely specified mean. A free-growth system does the opposite. — apokrisis
Am I getting this right? — Srap Tasmaner
And so while powerlaw behaviour seems weird and exceptional, it is really the more generic case in nature — apokrisis
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