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Game theoretic punishment of defection, in general, requires you to be willing to destroy good things and make the world worse. This is a necessary trait in order to get optimal outcomes. As they said, "unless we're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." This is bad for you, but it's good in the counterfactual case where the threat motivates cooperation.
A game theoretic agent that won't ever defect isn't a "good guy" but a "resource". I believe the lower classes understand this very well.
There is no defection going on here from the superior stock, upper classes don't benefit at the expense of lower classes at the moment, instead in the west it is lower classes that benefit at the expense of the upper classes (regardless of whatever trivially false jeremiads they like to tell themselves) and what you are proposing is basically blackmail: "give us even more of the surplus you generate or we will hurt you".
The solution to blackmail is, as you said, punishment, and I absolutely agree that western lower classes are in dire need of some serious punishment to set them straight, and I would be open to burning some our our surplus value to get them to see straight (you could argue cultural change due to mass immigration is indeed this, the higher classes do have to pay a cost to avoid the consequences, but it is indeed a very effective method of punishment for the lower classes who can't afford that), however I would say that wasn't what you were talking about.
We're just using different terms. You say "blackmail", I say "punishment"- they're the same concept. "Obey the law or we put you in jail" is structurally indistinguishable from blackmail, also taxation is theft. These are disagreements of emotional valence, not fact.
Game theory doesn't have an opinion about who should win, just about how to win the most effectively. (Though if it comes to it, I would like it to be known that I'm with the underclass.)
Is cooperation structurally indistinguishable from submission as well? What about domination? Are all equilibria "structurally" exactly the same, irrespective of total payoff and underlying conditions determining optimality of strategies? You sure find it easy to smudge borders of categories when it serves a narrative. I really like this unabashed postmodernism, @fuckduck9000 would do well to meditate on it.
Game theory does offer something of a moral judgement, implicitly – by imposing an objective unidimensional yardstick of an agent's performance. He who cannot make peace with the thought that his payoff is the smaller one, and makes it even less, burning commons out of pure spite, is irrational; thus, evil.
(Mistake theory posits that people doing that are not «evil», they are just literally too dumb to tell whether they are diminishing their payoff. This certainly is often the case for a fraction of players).
I mean, yes. There's a bunch of arguments for situations where you should not extract the maximum you can in the short term from a relationship, but they're all founded in maximizing your long-term payoff, not in "being a good person". Even decision theories like TDT/superrationality, where you occasionally leave money on the table, are based on this - in sum, the TDT agent walks away with more utilons than the CDT agent. A decision theory that systematically ended up with less utilons than it could would just be bad.
Utility, being unitless, is not comparable between agents. All theories that allow comparing payoffs do so on the basis of axioms, like pretending that every other agent is a copy of you ("putting yourself in their shoes"), or normalizing all human preferences to a common bound (humanism). Money is arguably also a way to do this. Though all variants of the ultimatum game depend on some way to compare utility between agents to converge, that comparison has to be agreed upon by some other mechanism such as relative capacity to destroy whatever your opponent values. Utilitarianism has no opinion on what the "correct" exchange ratio is. (Though it does advise that you should follow an algorithm to find it that maximizes your payoff. It says that a lot.)
Yes, but, well, this of course throws the apparatus of game theory out of the window and reduces your argument to "everyone's looking for something" or less than that.
Anyone who's selling you game theory that contains unexamined utility comparisons between agents is bullshitting.
Note that for instance EA does not do this - it usually starts with the premise of "all human lives have the same worth", which is a valid assignment, and has several charming properties such as being very simple and universal. But if you used a different assignment, it wouldn't be wrong from a utilitarian perspective. The power of EA comes from the fact that most people already profess to have this belief.
Also, classical hedonic utilitarianism defines, by fiat, utility as a qualia of happiness, which being a physical effect in the brain can then be empirically compared. I believe the problems with that are well-known. :) But again, it's a valid assignment, much as it turns the cosmos into a dense farm of amoebas having continuous orgasms.
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The upper classes benefit a lot from not having to grow their own food, drive their own trucks, fight their own wars, build their own houses, fix their own plumbing, spend hours a day working on computer programs, personally attend to the boring details of government and corporate machinery, and so on.
The upper classes can import people who are willing to do all of those things for much much cheaper than locals are, and even better, the new citizens will actually be thankful for it, unlike the lower class ingrates that populate the west at the moment.
The lower classes benefit from having upper class people able and willing to pay $5 for a sandwich instead of 30 cents. The beneficial relationship goes both ways but it's far harder to replace people willing to overpay for sandwiches compared to replacing people who're willing to be overpaid making sandwiches.
(I'm defining upper classes as everything from low PMC upwards here).
So you agree that the upper class does benefit from the lower classes, it's just that they might benefit more from replacing the existing lower classes with new ones?
The upper classes are able to pay $5 for a sandwich not just because of their own efforts, but also because of the entire society of which they are a part, which includes the lower classes. If the lower classes vanished tomorrow, there would be no sandwiches at all until some of the upper classes moved to the farms and learned how to be farmers. In order to have a functional modern society in this scenario, so many of the upper classes would have to start doing lower class type jobs that the overall ability of the upper classes to innovate would decrease by a lot. It is hard to be a gentleman scientist or a business entrepreneur after spending the day growing food or working in the factory.
Of course, society is a positive sum game, I never disputed that, I said that the lower classes at the moment are capturing more of the economic surplus society generates than they are due if you just look at supply demand etc. If they were being "exploited" they would be capturing less of it.
All true. And even now the upper classes pay for not having to do these jobs, and they pay more than the global market determined fair value for these jobs because of immigration controls which shield the lower classes from competition while upper class jobs have to deal with competition at a global level. In a fair world they would be paying less for these jobs, hence the lower class western people who're getting the jobs at the moment are overpaid and yet they have the gall to complain!
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Yes. Too well in fact. Have you heard of antisocial punishment?
To the extent that civilization runs on game theory, it's about iterated games where effective punishment is prosocial. These arrangements reward everyone, but, alas, they happen to reward "better stock" disproportionately – so from the perspective of their lessers who do not observe all inputs or do not care, it's like the ultimatum game.
Antisocial punishment makes sense to me.
Two angles: first, "prosocial behavior" is defection against a local social group in favor of a larger social group. This can hurt the negotiation position of the smaller group: compare strikers vs scabs. From the perspective of the market-based society, the scabs act "prosocial".
Second, if you know your society contains predators, and you're currently in an equilibrium where they're effectively suppressed, prosocial actions attack the social norms that let you keep the predators starving. "Stop helping!"
So even if you're maximizing global payoff, punishing prosocial behavior can be rational.
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