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Is game theory as insightful as it's made out to be? (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 8 months ago by CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.ml to c/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml

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I've seen game theory brought up as being incredibly useful for understanding reality, like the new cold war and the Al Aqsa Flood. Pretty much everyone I've seen praise it has been a lib though.

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[–] 420stalin69@hexbear.net 13 points 8 months ago

It’s a useful abstraction for understanding incentives which can be usefully descriptive of many situations.

For example, when applied to large groups of people then the fact it’s highly abstracted becomes a benefit since when we’re talking about many decisions by many people in aggregate then it makes sense to use simpler models that discard more individual motivations that don’t generalize.

It’s also very useful for predicting the behavior of systems that don’t have motivations beyond cost and benefit or that mercilessly seek to maximize benefit, such as assessing great power geopolitics or the behavior of corporations.

It’s wrong to think of game theory as a model of individual behavior (outside of actual games) but for aggregate behavior of many people towards incentives / risks or behavior of actors within constructed systems of risk-reward (geopolitics, business) it’s an often useful abstraction.