Useful is something that others find valuable. — Agustino

So for instance someone might purchase a work of art as a useful investment and not because they like the art, valuing capital more than art.

Imagine a world where aesthetic values are greater than materialistic values. Perhaps a nice alternative to the game of monopoly.

The social system has no volition, — charleton

A falling rock doesn't have volition either, but it can certainly act upon you by crushing in your skull.

That said, the need to attend 'outwards' to the social doesn't entail a wholesale disregard for belief and intention, but for a more nuanced understanding of how to appreciate the significance of those beliefs and intentions, which I think you'd agree with — StreetlightX

Yes, I would, there's a certain alchemy of perspective involved.

Geuss wrote this long before the recent brouhaha over price gouging in the medical sector in the US, but it'd be an interesting exercise to look at the media coverage about it and see at what level journalists have predominantly tackled the issue (considering the spectacle that was made of and by, say, Martin Shkreli - who milked it like any good capitalist in the game ought to - I suspect the answer is obvious). — StreetlightX

How easy it is to fall in to the trap of impotent moral outrage. Yep.

Zoom out, and out and out - and then in. — StreetlightX

Yes, even critiquing capitalism in terms of rising drug prices doesn't get you far enough, zoom out again and you get the horrors of the Congo and so on, where characters like Martin Shkreli would be relatively angelic.

Ag's individualism is empowering to each individual, whereas the sociological view is disempowering. (non absolutely). — unenlightened

I don't accept that from the get-go. We're talking about what an effective sociological critique is. There's hardly anything less empowering than a poor argumentative strategy, or blowing your emotions on moral outrage at individuals when you could be identifying and discovering ways to disempower them through an analysis of what gives life to their bad behaviour. The recent exemplar is the sexual discrimination/harassment discussions. What were the most effective arguments there? Ans: Those that zoomed out and put things in socio-historical context in my view.

However, the sociological view is empowering to the managerial sector who are in the position to adjust the structures of society. Those with such power will be structurally directed to conserve their own power, and thus the lawyer, the advertiser, the social work supervisor, the planning officer, the editor, will all be manipulating us in the direction of passivity, compliance, subservience to 'the forces of social necessity'. Success over a generation or two results in rage against the machine - the machinations, that is, of sociologists....

Or to put it another way, we are indeed playing monopoly in a society that mandates greed, and with 50% of wealth in the hands of 1% of the players, we are near the end of the game. The game has been consciously arranged that way by people using the sociological view whereby their own actions are excused, and even laudable; they are realists as opposed to idealists - the latter being responsible for all the conflicts. — unenlightened

But that should be an argument for individuals taking advantage of the very same tools to fight back. They're armed so why shouldn't we be? Again, I see us as talking about what constitutes an effective analysis and you seem to be conceding the point but complaining that the tool is in the wrong hands. So, should we now shout and complain how bad advertisers and managers and so on are for feathering their own nests at the expense of us homeless hatchlings or should we figure out how to fly as well as them and dump their eggs on the ground.

So, the question as I see it and as I've said is:

"How do we most successfully approach a critical analysis of social problems?" and the thesis is that we look out at the social milieu not in to the psychology or behaviour of individuals. The question that follows then is not "What forms an agent of change"? but something like "How do we allow for collective change" and the answer is by aiming to understand the nature of the collective and the forces it has on individuals, their goals, their behaviours and so on, so as to tackle the problem at its root rather than focus on the branches."

So, you've identified a problem, a wealth gap. How do we solve it? By complaining about how mean and immoral the rich are? Or by looking at how they get away with it and fighting back at the structures and ideologies that sometimes not-so-obviously enable them such as the incessant glorification of entertainment and choice, which leads us to want to be more like them (and resent it when we're not) and ends up creating more "successful" thems and more "failing" anti-thems with the accepted criteria of "success" and "failure" remaining solidly in place.

So, you don't ignore individual persons any more than you ignore individual sentences in a book, and some sentences are more important then others, but you still need to read the book and compare it to other books and think about the nature of books and so on. (And I don't think your view is much like Agu's by the way. Agu is all for Individualism with a capitalist "I", the pursuit of wealth and power, glorifying the emperor and pretending to the throne, as his posts here, most of which don't seem very relevant to me, have shown.)

Also, you can only have the individual vs. society, the individual changing society, to the extent that there are gaps in that society that allow that to happen. Most societies that have existed have remained the same over millennia. Now we've got societies that are capable of fairly rapid change not simply because of particular individuals but because they are the type of societies which contain with themselves the seeds of their own development. Another reason to zoom out.



I'm with you up to a point. But rather than aim for specifics, which are always very culture laden, I tend to take the more general view that society should facilitate as much variation as possible as much creativity and change as possible while still maintaining itself, i.e. not collapsing into anarchy; in other words take full advantage of its resources, express the full potential of its patterns, the set of relationships that make it up in a sustainable way. As it grows and develops in this way, we cannot but grow too (which emphasises again the point, that to set one against society in the abstract - if not against a particular form of society - is suicide).

So, exactly where is the hope? — TimeLine

But hope is the opiate of the masses, no? ;). In circumscribing expectations, in delimiting our scope, there is still the potential for willing change. And the very will to attack a problem in that way signals there is always hope, and not just a restless yearning hope, a palliative hope, but a focused empowering hope.

Is there an individual or not? And if so, what is it? Is it as I say, moral consciousness, our capacity to reason and transcend this narrow and inescapable micro-social position? But, if you are saying what I think you are saying, then when I say "authentic individual" and the "construct of the individual (i.e. faux)" than essentially you and I are saying the same thing. — TimeLine

Well I don't want to go too far with it as it could end up sounding counterproductive, but the metaphor I would use for society and the individual would be of the sea and its waves. The sea, society; we, waves. Most waves are small and travel in the same direction, but some are larger and very occasionally you get a Tsunami that quickly changes the very map of the sea but you don't get waves separate from the sea, floating over it so to speak; no waves without the sea and no way to separate the two. From birth, the process of individualization is the process of socialization. It's no coincidence that the older we get and the more we consider ourselves a developed individual the more socialized we tend to be. The only true individuals (in the sense of being non-socialized) are babies and the insane. That understood, we can go back to talking about individuals while recognizing we carry around this micro-society in our heads and basically are it with no way to escape except through insanity or death. So,what we are talking about when we talk about significant individuals is those that are larger waves - they separate themselves further from the surface and often pull others along with them; we're talking about people who are different in terms of the power they exert, but they're still part of the sea. (Other individuals who are different and exert little power, waves that travel in their own direction don't tend to last long or get forgotten. Are they less individual? Depends how you look at it, but we're all made of basically the same stuff.)

What happens to rationalism then? Are we never able to access the tools we have in the mind to learn and escape the apparent inescapable? — TimeLine

But what exactly do we want to escape? And why? And is not all this wanting to escape and hoping to escape not just part of the merry-go-round that keeps things just as they are? "I want to escape, I hate it all therefore I've expressed myself as an individual, I've rebelled against the "system", I've done enough". No, I don't think the focus should be negative as if there is no baby in the bathwater or that that it is even possible anyway to escape given that escape from society in general (if not a particular society) is death or insanity. I think it's more about vision and imagination at the personal and social levels. Not "I want to escape out of society" but "I want to create into a specific form of society".

One confusion that seems to have arisen in this thread (exemplified by @charleton's post), is that at stake is a simple displacement of agency from 'individual' to 'society'. But this is wrong. Even the video makes this quite clear: social dynamics are what takes place between individuals and the social system. It is not a question of saying, as @Agustino mistakenly has, that 'there is no individuals, only society': 'Society' is no less a self-contained entity than an 'individual' is. The paradigm at stake here is 'interactionist', and not 'entity-based': individuation (of both society and individuals) is a result of interactions, and not the other way around.

However - and this point doesn't seem to have been addressed by anyone - the larger point is that those the shape of those interactions themselves are molded by socital incentive structures. Or as I said in the OP, this is the rough system of rewards, punishments, pleasures, accolades and disincentives that permeate it. In the terms of system dynamics, incentive structures can be thought of as attactors in a system, where attractors are points towards which trajectories tend towards (without being 'determined' by them). The presence of a Lorenz attactor in a system, for instance, will result (roughly) in the ossilation of a value around two points:



Society can be thought of as precisely a system permeated by an enormous range and distribution of such attractors: factors of "push and pull" which structure the individual trajectories of the elements that compose it. Note that the 'elements' here don't necessarily have to be individual people: in fact I think they'd be better thought of in terms of flows (of migrants, of money, of food distribution, of access to education and employment, etc). The politics of migrants, now so prevalent in the Western discourse, is nothing but the politics of flows. It is literally impossible to see 'the migrant problem' as one of individuals in abstrcto.

Another important caveat is that attractors in society also act differentially: not everyone or everything will respond in the same way to the same pressures and incentives: individuals too are composed of their own set of attractors and thresholds which determine what they can and do respond to. And lastly, the incentive structure of society is not something that is 'set' or unalterable. One of the virtues of thinking of society in this way is that it's very dynamism also means that such incentive structures can be changed or modified: society is plastic. 'Politics' can be thought of as the field which most deliberately aims to modify exactly those structures (and the 'players' can be companies, institutions, people, governments, etc).

The only true individuals (in the sense of being non-socialized) are babies and the insane. — Baden

No wonder the philosophy of individualism is either madness or infantilism...

Social systems, paths of least resistance, and incentive structures are very interesting concepts and seem genuinely helpful in trying to understand simple phenomena like the stagnant trends of monopoly, but the factors which cause real world societies to unfold the way they do are too numerous and too dynamic to be easily analyzed and understood through this one lens.

In the fictional, simplistic, and exaggerated world of Wall-E, social systems are depicted which have obvious direct and indirect impacts on individuals, to the point that the population has become totally homogeneous as their lives are utterly dictated by the system they inhabit. Broadly, the video thrusts the idea that it's all nurture and portrays even speaking about nature as despicable and un-virtuous. Reality is complex and messy though; "nature" along with many confounding circumstantial factors create too many complicated interactions for even our best models. For example, suggesting that we laugh at sexist jokes (or are ourselves conditioned to be sexist) because that's the path of least resistance says nothing about how or why it is actually the path of least resistance and doesn't address the complex psychological and biological components of what causes humans to laugh in the first place or the social forces which cause us to become sexist in the first place (let alone demonstrate that we are in fact living in a sexist society). Similarly, taking economic and other disparities between races or genders as direct evidence of patriarchy and white supremacy (paths of least resistance and incentive structures which harm women and non-whites) doesn't actually describe how these systems work to achieve this or how we can dismantle them. It's alluded that we're conditioned and incentivized, but we're never given coherent explanations of how the conditioning actually happens or how and which incentive structures produce negative results and how to correct them.

This is the same kind of rationale that suggests playing violent video games conditions you to become a violent person, or that provocative depictions of women conditions you to be sexist against women or "treat them like objects". Literally everything can be portrayed as racist or sexist using this most greasy logical incline. On the surface and in the abstract it makes sense, but the real world is just to messy for this approach to yield usable results. This is the same slippery slope that produced the concept of "micro-aggressions" out of a desperate search for a mechanistic explanation of how social systems enforce statistical disparity between demographics.

The majority of the video was just a synopsis of "Wall-E" and the ad-nauseam explanation of the concept of social systems which I don't object to (those parts were informative and entertaining) but I do object to it's complete rejection of nature and individuals/individual variation having anything to do with answering the question "why is society the way it is?". I also object to it's casual insistence that we're living in a white supremacist patriarchy; the video alludes to conditioning, incentive structures, and paths of least resistance as evidence but they're never elucidated on or actually explained (because the subjects are too complex to actually do so).

but what I got from his OP was that we cannot escape and that we are nothing more than an 'incentive structure' — TimeLine

One thing that ought to be questioned is the very desirability of 'escape': if our attachment to society is the very condition of our individuality (and, as Baden said, the very condition of self-intelligibility (contra Cartesian atomism)) , it's not too far a stretch to think that the desire to 'escape' is not unlike the desire of Kant's dove, for which "cleaving in free flight the thin air, whose resistance it feels, might imagine that her movements would be far more free and rapid in airless space.” I've been reading the work of the Invisible Committee recently, and they put this in stark and beautiful terms:

"What am I," then? Since childhood, I've been involved with flows of milk, smells, stories, sounds, emotions nursery rhymes, substances, gestures, ideas, impressions, gazes, songs, and foods. What am I? Tied in every way to places, sufferings, ancestors, friends, loves, events, languages, memories, to all kinds of things that obviously are not me. Everything that attaches me to the world, all the links that constitute me, all the forces that compose me don't form an identity, a thing displayable on cue, but a singular, shared, living existence, from which emerges - at certain times and places - that being which says "I." Our feeling of inconsistency is simply the consequence of this foolish belief in the permanence of the self and of the little care we give to what makes us what we are.

... The West everywhere rolls out its favorite Trojan horse: the exasperating antimony between the self and the world, the individual and the group, between attachment and freedom. Freedom isn't the act of shedding our attachments, but the practical capacity to work on them, to move around in their space, to form or dissolve them ... The freedom to uproot oneself has always been a phantasmic freedom. We can't rid ourselves of what binds us without at the same time losing the very thing to which our forces would be applied." (The invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection).

Freedom is not somehow opposed to the social; the social is freedom's sine qua non. Further reading: Hannah Arendt, What Is Freedom? [pdf].

I'm with you up to a point. But rather than aim for specifics, which are always very culture laden, I tend to take the more general view that society should facilitate as much variation as possible as much creativity and change as possible while still maintaining itself, i.e. not collapsing into anarchy; in other words take full advantage of its resources, express the full potential of its patterns, the set of relationships that make it up in a sustainable way. As it grows and develops in this way, we cannot but grow too (which emphasises again the point, that to set one against society in the abstract - if not against a particular form of society - is suicide). — Baden

But one can argue, our current society is doing this. "Facilitate as much variation as possible as much creativity and change while maintaining itself" seems to be the Western mode for the last couple centuries. So there can certainly be tweaking and such, but by-and-large, your goals for society are rather conservative. One can argue, the structures are already in place for what you ask. Capitalism provides for the incentives for economic creativity. Universities, government, and non-profits provide the incentives for academic creativity. Bars, social clubs, sports, literature, arts, electronics (which is perhaps too dominant), hobbies, etc. provide for entertainment creativity. Except for micro-changes to certain decision-makers (e.g. politicians, economic or social policy changes), your vision there is pretty much fulfilled. Now, if you look at my 6 variations of happiness, you can try to use that as a backdrop to how well current society is measuring up to a standard. Are we actually forming the best relationships we can and is it being realized for the most people? Are we allowing for the best ways to feel achievement and is it being realized for the most people? Are we allowing for the promotion of aesthetic experiences and is it being realized for the most people? Are allowing for immersive mental/physical activities (or flow activities) and is it being realized for most people? Are we allowing for physical pleasures and is it being realized by most people? Are we allowing for learning and promoting curiosity and is it being realized for most people? Well, if the answer is mediocre to not really, then perhaps society isn't measuring up to basic principles of happiness.

Now, to take the flipside. Perhaps life is more like the structural suffering I often describe. It is more about the temporary sensation of completion which tends to then give way to yet more desires and wants that are neverending, hard to satisfy, and are instrumental in the sense that, there is no final completion. We do to do to do to do. We are burdened with maintaining our bodies, and entertaining our minds, thus putting more energy into the system and generally running about on the stage of the world. Why does this have to take place? What are we trying to achieve here?

So for instance someone might purchase a work of art as a useful investment and not because they like the art, valuing capital more than art. — praxis

No difference. They still value the piece of art for one reason or another.

Agustino mistakenly has, that 'there is no individuals, only society — StreetlightX

I never said that, Baden did, I actually just quoted him. That's why there are quote marks around it, you know...

I've been reading the work of the Invisible Committee recently, and they put this in stark and beautiful terms — StreetlightX

They certainly have a way to hit you where it hurts :

"There is no “environmental catastrophe.” The catastrophe is the environment itself. The environment is what’s left to man after he’s lost everything. Those who live in a neighborhood, a street, a valley, a war zone, a workshop—they don’t have an “environment;” they move through a world peopled by presences, dangers, friends, enemies, moments of life and death, all kinds of beings. Such a world has its own consistency, which varies according to the intensity and quality of the ties attaching us to all of these beings, to all of these places. It’s only us, the children of the final dispossession, exiles of the final hour—the ones who come into the world in concrete cubes, pick our fruits at the supermarket, and watch for an echo of the world on television—only we get to have an environment. And there’s no one but us to witness our own annihilation, as if it were just a simple change of scenery, to get indignant about the latest progress of the disaster, to patiently compile its encyclopedia."

I love, love, love this passage. I think it's the most important one in the book.

Yes, I did say that and I did qualify afterwards what I meant too.

From birth, the process of individualization is the process of socialization. It's no coincidence that the older we get and the more we consider ourselves a developed individual the more socialized we tend to be. The only true individuals (in the sense of being non-socialized) are babies and the insane. — Baden

Am I not articulating myself correctly? I am speaking of self-reflective determination within this said-system. I understand what you are saying, but what I am having trouble with is what this 'individualisation' actually is and whether we have the cognitive tools - i.e. reason - that renders us capable through consciousness to transcend the conditioning or determinative role that makes us imitate this 'individual' as an identification process to our social environment. I am not talking about being non-socialised, I am talking about transcending it and being capable of recognising the psychosocial processes and whether our opinions are formed by learned conditioning through the continuous interaction or immersion into environmental and social influences, simulating prominent role models that become ones self-regulatory mechanism and behavioural pattern. Is everything we are merely sensory experience?

The construction of an 'individual’ is nothing more than an adaptation to an external system that we unconsciously internalise that becomes the same system for our self-regulatory processes; our will, values and belief-systems and any changes to this system vis-a-vis new experiences merely alter that brings me to the concern of whether we are cognitively capable of self-reflective determination or are we just a system mimicking another system. I do not think that the sea/waves is a solid example of what I am attempting to convey; the attachment is still there, but with the capacity to detach should we so choose. Are we enabled with the cognitive tools that would allow us to transcend learned social behaviour and become 'self-aware' and empathetic, or is what you refer to as empathy or morality just a shallow system of social imitation?

One thing that ought to be questioned is the very desirability of 'escape': if our attachment to society is the very condition of our individuality (and, as Baden said, the very condition of self-intelligibility (contra Cartesian atomism)) , it's not too far a stretch to think that the desire to 'escape' is not unlike the desire of Kant's dove, for which "cleaving in free flight the thin air, whose resistance it feels, might imagine that her movements would be far more free and rapid in airless space.” — StreetlightX

Why does that need to be questioned? I perhaps take a more Rousseau approach and see the system as the primary issue or problem that restricts our cognitive capacity to naturally evolve, that latter being that we have the tools but we are just not made aware of how to use it because of society (like in Wall-e); those with pathological disorders that have attachment issues fail to 'cut the umbilical cord'.

I perhaps take a more Rousseau approach and see the system as the primary issue or problem that restricts our cognitive capacity to naturally evolve, — TimeLine

Then we disagree irreconcilably unfortunately :(

The paradigm at stake here is 'interactionist', and not 'entity-based': individuation (of both society and individuals) is a result of interactions, and not the other way around. — StreetlightX

You have been careful to support my statement, by pretending to refute it. The two way street that lies between the concepts of the individual and society is not well expressed by the video in the op, yet you do attempt to bring it into sharper focus. In this you give undue credit to the maker of the video, who in fact promotes the same myth that the establishment does. And that is, that social ills can be expressed which fly against individual need. There is not animmigrant problem. There are migrants with agency that the structures build by the establishment are all but powerless to resist. The result is that they invent a myth that lies outside the norm; 'Immigrant problem"; "drugs problem' and so on. In failing to see this for what it is, the maker of the video is in collusion with the establishment by pretending to have found a problem which is defined in "objective" ways.

In this way individual needs are set outside the core structure (those that comprise the ideal social unit). In this way these individuals can be more easily vilified, and the core preserved.
This might seem a reasonable view until, almost unnoticed, the Jews, the blacks, the hispanics, those deemed to be 'abusing' drugs, the irreligious start to go missing and are taken off the streets.

In pretending that 'society' and its units are clearly distinct objects of desire, the agents who actually comprise those structures can be set aside.

In short you and your video are making a political statement of intent. A statement that in essence is counter to personal freedom and in denial of the importance of agency over structure. In truth all you are saying is that we all have equal amounts of agency, but some have more agency than others, and they are those in control of the moral, political, financial and social powers.

On the other hand you might more reasonably promote a discourse which tells the truth about the simply fact that the existence of agents comes before the essence of society. That society is only and can be only the sum of the actions of social agents - be they in power or in poverty. In this way you would be democratic rather than conservative.

In this you give undue credit to the maker of the video — charleton

Dude, he literally freeze-frames the line "The dynamic relationship between individuals and social systems is what makes social life happen" in big bold letters. If you missed it, that's on you.

And I legit can't read that wall of text that is the rest of your post.

Please read what I said Dude! That is EXACTLY the statement I am attacking FFS.
Please have the decency to read what I am saying, and not just pick out one sentence.

The individuals are society. The statement is an utter tautology. There is no society without them, so it does not exist as and of itself, no more than the "migrant problem" exists unless the establishment decide they do not like migrants. The actors are the existence and the essence of society.

I guess one of my major points is that, what if you want to just pause the whole structural process of surviving and whatnot. You cannot do this without some form of death (eventually). So the structure itself is never good. Once born, you must put forth the energy to maintain in the first place. Why would we want to throw more individuals into this situation? Does the six forms of happiness (or some variation thereof) really worth it? Is that the mission? Is that why individuals must be born to be enculturated into a society, for their own happiness? Do you see how I think this is full of contradictions and circular logic?

So for instance someone might purchase a work of art as a useful investment and not because they like the art, valuing capital more than art.
— praxis

No difference. They still value the piece of art for one reason or another. — Agustino

Of course there's a difference. Valuing art as an investment expresses a capitalistic value system. Valuing art for aesthetics expresses a different value system, one based more in meaning than capital gain.

Though capitalism might be a fun game to play if you're good at it, it's meaningless and unsustainable. It's not human nature to compete for resources and hoard wealth. We can change our nature to act cooperatively for mutual benefit and live meaningful lives in a sustainable world.

The idea - not too controversial I hope - is that the typical behaviour of individuals in society is shaped - but not 'determined' - by what might be called the 'incentive structure’ of that society: the rough system of rewards, punishments, pleasures, accolades and disincentives that permeate it

Social behavior must confront the reality of where it finds itself. A city has highways and byways, is set in the middle of a desert or on the mouth of a river, it has a down town an uptown, and an out of town. What people in any city can do is not entirely up to them, there is a large confluence of real structures and junk space, historical facts, and chance occurrences that effect what has and what can be done and thereby what can be thought. Following Rem Koolhaas thoughts and investigations.

Not usually one to zombie a thread, but this was too perfect an easily-digestible illustration of the major points of this thread:

Until you address the institution of procreation, everything else is small peanuts ;) .

The idea - not too controversial I hope - is that the typical behaviour of individuals in society is shaped - but not 'determined' - by what might be called the 'incentive structure’ of that society: the rough system of rewards, punishments, pleasures, accolades and disincentives that permeate it. The video uses the board game Monopoly as its exemplar: regardless of the values or moral dispositions of the individuals involved, the win-conditions of the game are such that the more greedy and ruthless you are, the more successful you will be - and this will be the case regardless of how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ you are as a person.

I think this is important to emphasise because too often - in my opinion - does social discussion focus on the 'psychology' or the ‘values' of individuals involved in any one situation. — StreetlightX

No, it is more insidious than that. In evolutionary game theory and vanilla game theory, it is assumed that the fittest actors in any game are legitimately (as justified by the term 'rational actors') greedy and selfish. Compassion and altruism, to the best of my knowledge, are still seen as means to a selfish end.

So, you have at one end social structures reinforcing greed and selfish behavior lauded under the guise of noble concepts like 'freedom' and 'individualism', and at the other end, the individual trying to stand out from the crowd but in reality just reinforces the whole game.

One thing that game theory does in an analysis is ascribe an abstract opponent. This can be 'nature' or another player. This can be generalised to cooperative games, where groups of players can form coalitions and solutions (strategies) of the game are ways of allocating resources (payoffs) or costs (losses) to groups. Further, the analysis can include leaving allied groups and making new allied groups. The assumption that self interest generates optimal payoff in general really only applies to games of coalition of size 1; self interest becomes interest of one's coalition if they are pre-allocated (like in Secret Hitler). If coalitions are not pre-allocated, self interest can take the usual optimal payoff for me form (which can include overheads of coalition joining to avoid greater losses), but also the group form if leaving the coalition has opportunity costs close to losing the game (or are sufficiently bad for the player)

Things are crazy complicated when an individual player wins, coalitions aren't disjoint (a person can only be a member of 1 player group) and aren't pre-allocated. Like in the board Game of Thrones or Risk. Things are even more complicated when there are group winning conditions, the conditions aren't monotonic (containing a winning player implies that group wins, like in Secret Hitler), and there are overlapping coalitions. Also each player (or coalition) can possibly make multiple moves at once, has incomplete information on allies and enemies, and can make at least one of infinitely many moves (think about adjusting a tax rate)... The latter of which begins to resemble real life more than Fuck You Buddy.

It's worthwhile to remember that the development of game theory was principally done at the RAND corporation (name is significant) during the Cold War, which developed 'the delicate balance of terror' and mutually assured destruction as a Nash Equilibrium to prevent nuclear holocaust in the Cold War. The historical context for its first developments are the paranoid spying and technocratic policy planning of the Cold War, so it isn't surprising that the subject which plays games in the old game theory is self interested, isolated and amoral.

The idea of applying game theory to large social structures seamlessly is pretty bad - the kind of games that begin to approach the complexity of real world diplomacy are analytically intractable, mathematician speak for 'this can't be solved exactly, only approximately', and so resist pithy formulation to evince claims in essays. A rule of thumb when someone justifies something using game theory is to look at the assumptions for the game and see how distorted the vision of politico-economic life it requires. That said, the numerical analysis of games to inform policy decisions lends itself very well to technocratic powers attempting to keep things as they are, like the aforementioned US think tank, but it's also present in the UK under the guise of neoliberal public choice theory.

One thing that game theory does in an analysis is ascribe an abstract opponent. This can be 'nature' or another player. This can be generalised to cooperative games, where groups of players can form coalitions and solutions (strategies) of the game are ways of allocating resources (payoffs) or costs (losses) to groups. — fdrake

Yeah, but expected utility for an individual participant or a group of collectively cooperating participants is still defined as optimal if self-interest is maximized through decision making by anyone or group of individuals.

Further, the analysis can include leaving allied groups and making new allied groups. — fdrake

Game theory would postulate that common characteristics such as sympathy and such are irrational if participants stand to have a better payoff if the other group is more fit, and again fitness is defined as pursuing or maximizing utility by selfish behavior. But, fortunately, in reality, people aren't that rational.

The assumption that self interest generates optimal payoff in general really only applies to games of coalition of size 1; self interest becomes interest of one's coalition if they are pre-allocated — fdrake

If they are preallocated is a big 'if'. Rarely are things so clear or obvious in the real world, which you bring up later in your post. Which, leads me to believe that acting selfishly will almost always be what is best for the individual and group of individuals (Is there a theorem for that? I think the Nash Equilibrium only holds given that premise, otherwise the game falls apart, I think.). This isn't even starting to mention the asymmetric information problem. But, what I gathered from my short stint at one course of game theory at college, is that even when asymmetric information problems are avoided by having a game of guaranteed rewards or more formalized conditions (the market) is that utility is maximized even more by self-interested behavior. This is again because, at the very fundamental level, self-interested behavior is rational and ought to be done. So, the system is constantly self-reinforcing.

If they are preallocated is a big 'if'. Rarely are things so clear or obvious in the real world, which you bring up later in your post. Which, leads me to believe that acting selfishly will almost always be what is best for the individual and group of individuals (Is there a theorem for that? I think the Nash Equilibrium only holds given that premise, otherwise the game falls apart, I think.).

When you say 'is there a theorem for that' it has to be specific to a game or class of games. There's not 'theorem for that' for games which display most of the features of political/economic discourse or activity. There isn't even a guarantee for Nash equilibrium in this kind of context.

This isn't even starting to mention the asymmetric information problem. But, what I gathered from my short stint at one course of game theory at college, is that even when asymmetric information problems are avoided by having a game of guaranteed rewards or more formalized conditions (the market)

Trying to model 'the market' in terms of game theory is not usually done in a manner that represents the complexities of the market. If someone agrees that the Black-Scholes equation is useful - or more generally continuous time modelling of financial time series - this is no longer representable as a game with a finite number of actions without losing information. Fluctuations of the market in continuous time are generated per unit time through the activities of humans.

is that utility is maximized even more by self-interested behavior. This is again because, at the very fundamental level, self-interested behavior is rational and ought to be done. So, the system is constantly self-reinforcing.

In a tautologous sense, you can define self-interest as maximising your utility function. But to say that this necessarily contains all the features of 'rational self interest' in something close to the Randian or non-empirical economic models sense for all games just isn't true. Secret Hitler makes people behave collegially since they share winning conditions for the group and they cannot defect. The interest of the individual is equivalent to the interest of their group here.

The subject is constrained by the rules of the game they are depicted in. This entails that the sense of game-theoretic rationality for Secret Hitler has the exact same kind of justification to be the 'primordial sense of self interest' that any (most, really) other game theoretic conception of human activity, including the rational-self-interest Bayesian-dutch-book super capitalist investor-God. It's only the pop-cultural amalgamation of the old Cold War game theory + the neoliberal economic subject that makes us believe the subject in their use of games is more primordial or even more representative of human subjectivity than someone playing Secret Hitler.

When you say 'is there a theorem for that' it has to be specific to a game or class of games. There's not 'theorem for that' for games which display most of the features of political/economic discourse or activity. There isn't even a guarantee for Nash equilibrium in this kind of context. — fdrake

I was under the impression that game theory is based on mathematics, so, eventually (given a sufficiently complex calculus) all games could be modeled to understand what actions would produce the maximum amount of utility to all participants. Since you seem to know more about this than I do, then I figure you must be right in highlighting the complexity of various games and imposed constraints on participants. But, again it seems that the underlying premise to render such a conclusion as sound would be that every participant is acting in their own or collective self-interest, no?

Trying to model 'the market' in terms of game theory is not usually done in a manner that represents the complexities of the market. If someone agrees that the Black-Scholes equation is useful - or more generally continuous time modelling of financial time series - this is no longer representable as a game with a finite number of actions without losing information. Fluctuations of the market in continuous time are generated per unit time through the activities of humans. — fdrake

Yes, I understand that modeling a situation often requires more than the 2D analysis we're talking about, or rather 3D analysis bounded by time; but, as I understand it, there are no hard limits imposed by any situation that wouldn't allow a sufficiently complex calculus to be devised to account for all externalities arising from interactions in the market.

In a tautologous sense, you can define self-interest as maximising your utility function. But to say that this necessarily contains all the features of 'rational self interest' in something close to the Randian or non-empirical economic models sense for all games just isn't true. — fdrake

What makes you say that? Again, is there a hard limit imposed by a theorem or such that would prohibit said modeling to occur?

I was under the impression that game theory is based on mathematics, so, eventually (given a sufficiently complex calculus) all games could be modeled to understand what actions would produce the maximum amount of utility to all participants. Since you seem to know more about this than I do, then I figure you must be right in highlighting the complexity of various games and imposed constraints on participants. But, again it seems that the underlying premise to render such a conclusion as sound would be that every participant is acting in their own or collective self-interest, no?

Acting in someone's self interest isn't actually a clear thing game theoretically unless strategies can be discussed. To 'act in your self interest' is to make a move or sequence of moves which increase your utility. IE, you need to be able to evaluate the utility quantitatively to speak clearly in this sense. This is why it works for simple games better than complex ones.

There's a big difference between 'collective self interest' and 'self interest', if you read the wiki-page on cooperative game theory, you can see that self interest is simply the interest of what counts as a player. There's not necessarily a sense of subjectivity implicit in the game, even. You can consider estimating a line of best fit a game where nature tries to give you the worst possible data for the estimate and you need to make the best possible guess (given a loss or utility function).

Yes, I understand that modeling a situation often requires more than the 2D analysis we're talking about, or rather 3D analysis bounded by time; but, as I understand it, there are no hard limits imposed by any situation that wouldn't allow a sufficiently complex calculus to be devised to account for all externalities arising from interactions in the market.

Games typically have finite numbers of moves, prices of stuff in the market are determined by buying and selling games, time is continuous in financial time series models, therefore there are infinitely many moves made. If you require a calculus that can be written down and computed by hand, that doesn't always exist for Bayesian Games. It could be done with numerical approximation though. Hard limits on the situation correspond to constraints imposed by the game theoretic model which do not actually obtain in a relevant manner. Such as the symmetry of gains and losses of actions which is typically assumed, and the role that the negation of that assumption plays in prospect theory.

What makes you say that? Again, is there a hard limit imposed by a theorem or such that would prohibit said modeling to occur?

Well, self interest can mean the interest of everyone in the game, you, the self interest of nature... And what self interest means game theoretically only makes sense in terms of calculable payoffs and costs. Finding a 'utility function' for life in general is doubtlessly impossible.