Cognitive Thrift 28 – Meta-Game Theory
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/07/08
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about meta-game theory or cognitive meta-game theory? Theories about not only individuals, but many individuals, groups, and societies in interaction – or information processors or agents in interaction.
Rick Rosner: Game theory is traditionally involving people playing against each other, and trying to come up with optimal strategies that are resistant to other people’s decisions which you would expect themselves to be informed by game theory with the classic game theoretic problem being the prisoner’s dilemma, which is whether or not you rat out your partner in crime.
So, cognitive game theory to the extent that you’re thinking about your place in society and your place among other people. It includes assumptions about other people’s mental and decision making landscapes.
So, I guess you would expect over time brains to evolve to decisions that maximize mutual benefit, at least to the extent that this allows people to raise children that themselves will be able to raise children because the prize with evolution is always the succeeding generations.
But to go back to cognitive game theory for the individual, your brain is trying to follow heuristics or come up with rules that maximize its available abilities to minimize risk and maximize benefits, which to some extent means that the less conscious consideration you have to give decisions.
The better because conscious decisions use up less resources than pre- or sub-conscious decisions, so to go back to the usual example of the traffic light.
If you know hundred percent of the time that a red light means danger and a green light mans safety, you don’t have to think about your position or your decisions to do with lights. It becomes increasingly unconscious that you drive through green lights and stop at red lights.
However, real world experience shows that it is not 100% and the prudent drivers pay a certain amount of attention to the state of the light because everybody increasingly an idiot when it comes to driving.
Which itself is a consequence of cognitive economics, where due to the evolutionary nature of the brain, the brain has built-in biases, which means that we have a hard time resisting these biases and the kind of information that we get from our devices seems pertinent on a personal level – which makes it delicious, very attractive, in the same way that salt and sugar are delicious and attractive based on our evolutionary history.
So, the deliciousness of personal information received from our phones puts us in danger because at some point the brain – evolution biased us towards finding this kind of information super important by making it tasty.
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