Jinx wrote:

> The basis of these puzzles are as follows:
> 
> The best AVERAGE outcome is if everyone works together.
> The best INDIVIDUAL outcome is if everyone except one person
> works together; in this case the person who stays out will get a
> (usually small) advantage, and everyone else gets a disadvantage.
> The WORST AVERAGE outcome is if everyone works for themselves
> only.
> The WORST INDIVIDUAL outcome is if everyone works for themselves,
> except you.
> No matter what others do, working for yourself will allways give you
> an advantage over working together.

This may be a correct conclusion for a traditional game, where the only
thing that counts is how you stack up relative to the others. Reality is
quite a bit different, in that even if someone else has an advantage over
me (that is, if it were I game, I had lost), I still may be better off than
in the other alternatives (which in a game doesn't count, but in reality
does). 

This difference is also why I think that Russell's fallacy is not really a
fallacy in the game. The overall problem with pretty much everything we do
as a group is that we don't work towards maximizing our absolute benefits,
we work towards maximizing our relative benefits, relative to the others
around us. (Not sure "benefits" is the right word here, but I'll stick with
it for now :) This in general leads to a quite sub-optimal situation as far
as our own benefits go -- see everything "common" (security, taxes,
politics, ...). And this seems to be what the game shows. So no fallacy; it
just shows this difficulty we're having with seeing our absolute benefit,
even if it comes with an even bigger (potential) benefit for someone else.

In essence, you probably could say that our collective efforts usually are
more targeted towards reducing others' benefits than they are towards
increasing our own. Or, put in another way, we are willing to accept a
scenario in which we have 50% less, only to avoid that another might have
10% more than we do. 

(Brazil is a living example of how this works. The dominating, rich class
has for a long time worked towards being the only top dogs in an otherwise
poor country. If they had spent only a small part of their fortune towards
the overall development, both they and the rest of the country could be
much better off than they are now -- but the difference would be smaller.)

This all makes sense in an evolution situation -- you want to be better off
compared to your peers, so that it's your genes that procreate. But
humanity is long past the traditional mechanisms of evolution, in terms of
individuals. Not as a species, though, and that transition looks like its
our current problem. As demonstrated by the game.

Gerhard

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