Right Reason

Magic Card Sells for $19,400

 

Polygon reports the story: 

A rare and controversial Magic: The Gathering card sold for $14,900 on eBay, and the seller says he'll donate half of the proceeds to charity, according to the auction site's listing for the mythical Tarmogoyf card.

"You are bidding for a piece of Magic the Gathering history," the item's description reads. The owner and seller, Pascal Maynard, drew the card in the recent Grand Prix Las Vegas event, which took place last month. "I opened this Foil Modern Masters 2015 Tarmogoyf Grand Prix Vegas Stamped in the Top 8 and it created a huge story in the community, which you can probably find on the internet via #GoyfGate #FoilGoyf #MakeMagicHistory."

His decision to choose Tarmogoyf sparked some debate and controversy within the Magic community, as the hashtags above imply. 

As interesting as the story may be, it's the card that snatches my interest. One of the reasons why Magic: the Gathering has been such a successful game is that it's cards are so imaginative. Although each new set of cards certainly deserves not for introducing new mechanics and factors into the game, each also brings along with it new art work and new flavor brief texts, all enmeshed together. Just those those factors can make a fantasy world open up to a day-dreaming mind. Behold the Tarmogoyf:

Gorgeous. That flavor text alone wants me to immediately go out and buy a new Magic deck, just to see what new fantastical worlds Wizards of the Coast has thought up.

Chimps, Game Theory, and Morality

 

In "Chimps Rock at Game Theory" at Marginal Revolution, Alex Taborrak discusses a new paper which finds that chimps are actually really good at game theory:

Economics assumes that people are rational, self-interested, lightning fast calculators. Obviously a bad assumption as we are constantly told. Chimps, on the other hand, are rational, self-interested, lightning fast calculators. That is the surprising conclusion to a great paper by Colin Camerer and co-authors. Camerer had chimps play versions of the matching pennies game also called the cat and mouse game. In the cat and mouse game each player can go left or go right. The cat wins when cat and mouse choose the same strategy. The mouse wins when they choose different strategies. In the simple version the best strategy is 50:50, toss a coin. When the payoffs change, however, the optimal strategies still involve randomization but they change in surprising and nonobvious ways. 

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Camerer et al. also tested humans in similar games and they found that humans often deviate from NE play and they adjust their strategies more slowly when payoffs change, i.e. they learn more slowly! The only thing that Camerer didn’t do was to play humans against chimps in the same game. That would have been awesome! 

 

Two important paragraphs in the original paper are:

Ecological experience and development are likely to play an important role too. In the wild, great apes engage in many competitive strategic interactions such as predatory stalking, young chimpanzee wrestling, border patrolling (which is very much like the Inspection game), raiding crops from human farms, and play chasing (“tag”). Because competitive payoff games are common in chimpanzee life, evolutionary theory predicts that chimpanzees would have developed cognitive adaptations to detect patterns in opponent behavior and to create predictability in their own behavior. More generally, chimpanzees are capable of strategic thinking in cooperative hunting, sneaky copulation, future planning, and many elements of theory of mind computation. Some have argued that the capacity to randomize effectively evolved because primate predatory behavior and routine social interaction selects for unpredictability in counter-strategies. Experiments also show that chimpanzees are better at competitive tasks than at comparable cooperative ones.

In contrast, humans are relatively highly prosocial and cooperative. As human children begin to speak and acculturate, their play shifts between ages 2 to 4 from solitary and parallel play, to associative and cooperative play. While young chimpanzees continue to hone their competitive skills with constant practice, their young human counterparts shift from competition to verbally-facilitated cooperation.

 

We may think of human beings as great rational calculators, but what matters more to being human is the ability to cooperate. When it comes to being human, morality and the sense of duty, two factors which throw in complications to the prediction of human behavior with game theory, outweigh rational calculation. Charles Darwin even noted this in The Descent of Man when he wrote: 

I fully subscribe to the judgement of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important. This sense, as Mackintosh remarks, ‘has a rightful supremacy over ever other principle of human action’; it is summed in that short but imperious word ought, so full of high significance (Darwin 1989[1877]: 101 [97]). 

 

The Prisoner's Dilemma: A Matter of External Constraints

 

Men keep their agreements when it is an advantage to both parties not to break them; and I shall so frame my laws that it will be evident to the Athenians that it will be for their interest to observe them.

-Solon, reported in George Shelley Hughs, Ancient Civilizations

 

The prisoner’s dilemma is the textbook example of a coordination failure in which rationality is an insufficient condition for bringing about the best state of affairs. Rather than ensuring the best state of the world, rational forethought actually brings about the worst. Rational forethought - prudence, supposedly a virtue - is the cause of malaise rather than prosperity. The prisoner’s dilemma has thus become a template for all coordination failures to be seen, whether that is the depletion of fishing stocks or the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. 

 

One of the ignored features of the prisoner’s dilemma is that in the orthodox elucidation of the problem, the dilemma is not a dyadic relationship between the two prisoners, but a triadic relationship between the two prisoners as well as the police. Considering that the payoff matrix of a prisoner’s dilemma only provides payoffs for two players, one can easily forget that there are actually three parties at play: two who are interacting within the game and another who is setting up the parameters that the two prisoners are dealing with. In the prisoner’s dilemma, the police are offering the prisoners a deal no rational agent would refuse: “You can either confess your crimes and be a witness against the other guy in the room, get a plea deal, or go on trial for your crime. Oh, and your friend may tattle against you, so make your decision quick.” The two players aren’t prisoners of the dilemma; rather, they’re prisoners of a third party which has created the dilemma they are in. The prisoners have no choice but to play the game put before them.

 

Consequently, the prisoner’s dilemma is not a template for studying cooperation in general. We need to be mindful that game theory is a way of studying particular interactions, and that no game will ever provide a general theory of any phenomena. Whereas the prisoners are stuck in the position that they are within by virtue of being in custody, people across the world are working so as to ensure that cooperation does not take the form of a prisoner’s dilemma. 

People are natural problem solvers. They are able to mold the context of social interaction in ways that violate the assumptions of the prisoner’s dilemma. Human interactions are more than the dyadic choice to cooperate or defect. People aren’t stuck with the choices that they are given by the police, but are instead free to bargain over the gains to cooperation, and to create deals which leave everyone at the table content.  The entrepreneurial facet of human nature ensures that people are alert to opportunities for pure profit and that those opportunities open up the possibilities for better (we could even say Pareto-superior) outcomes. 

 

Interactions can take forms like the invisible-hand game, in which the payoffs guide cooperation to better outcomes for all involved. For centuries, political economists have shown how, with the right rules in place, man’s selfish nature can even benefit social harmony. What enables the maintenance of such cooperation is mutualistic behavior: behavior in which it is in the best interest of both players to do and to see the other player doing.

The threat of defection does not threaten the integrity of the international division of labor nor would it threaten the integrity of a hunting-gathering band because culture structures the payoffs such that they don’t. Cooperation within such societies is mutualistic. Everyone’s best interest is served by cooperation within their respective societies. Cooperation therefore often doesn’t take the form of a prisoner’s dilemma, but rather some game in which cooperation is an evolutionarily stable strategy. 

 

The prisoner’s dilemma does not describe cooperation in general. We would be fools for thinking that. Rather, the prisoner’s dilemma explains a very specific context of social cooperation, and a context which is actually artificially created by a third party, the police which are offering the deal to cooperate with the investigation.

The prisoner’s dilemma is certainly applicable to other circumstances, but when applying it to them, we need to be mindful about what are the circumstances that are preventing players from bargaining with each other to find better outcomes than the one they are initially faced with. Without that explicit constraint, the prisoner’s dilemma will largely fail to apply; after all, the history of human cooperation, from the Paleolithic on, has been a history of human beings adapting their social circumstances to the challenges they face, and that history of adaptation leading to the social conquest of the Earth.