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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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