You'd never make a good rational pirate.

Haha! That's a good game. I'm going to make some people do that at work, tomorrow. If I'm forced to participate in silly management games, I'll at least get them doing something based on Game Theory.

But I've been perfectly rational within my own context. The mistake in the quiz, is to assume a single instance with no relation to the real world. I really don't care if I get ten pounds or not. This sum is insufficient to overcome other priorities such as making sure that the other person (you) respects me and doesn't think he can get away with taking more than his share without consequences. If I behave so poorly as to accept lesser shares for no good reason, then what happens the next time? Or the time after that? However, I have made it clear that I wouldn't accept less than fifty:fifty. Thus future relationships between us are likely to begin from the (correct) premise that my co-operation can only be bought by treating me equally. Bad feelings will hopefully be minimised by the fact that I would, when it is my turn, also offer a fair fifty:fifty.

I'm not sub-rational, I'm super-rational. I'd sooner we got 50% each of a larger pie, than either of us got a larger percentage of a smaller pie (and thus less pie overall). My principle is that if Blade and knasser can develop mutual trust and equality, then we can turn our energies to more profitable goals, e.g. by ganging up on the psychologist and finding out where he keeps these bundles of £50.

"Ah," you say, "but what if it was only one game with one £50?"

Well, in that case, I care even less for the one-off payment of a tenner.

Peace,

K.

But what if the stakes of the game are more significant, like in the prisoner's dilemma?

If you allow yourself to get into the situation of the Prisoner's Dilemma, then you've already made a sequence of judgement errors (and I'm not talking about being guilty as that's not a pre-requisite in an unjust society, I'm talking about getting caught).

However, the problem with the prisoner's dilemma is that it is necessarily a hypothetical scenario. It has to be abstract and without context in order to be analysed as a pure exercise in game theory. And as an abstract mathematical problem I can give an abstract mathematical answer which is that in a one-instance game, defection is the better strategy for harm-minimisation and in an iterative game, co-operation is the better strategy. But even that single-instance game has assumptions built in - that a sure low average punishment is better than risking a probably greater punishment in the hope of minimal punishment. That's likely not true to most people if they were thinking this through for real. Five years is enough to devastate your life and probably saving yourself another five years is not enough to balance the chance that you might only get six months.

The moment we move from the abstract, it all falls apart. What do I know of Blade? Is he the sort of person that would turn on me to save his skin? Has he always hated the police with a passion and would rather die than betray an Internet friend to them? What does he know of me and would he trust me not to betray him, thus influencing his behaviour? And when will my father's lawyer arrive to get me out of there?

For the record, I'd probably go pretty high before I seriously considered altering my behaviour in the £50 quid experiment. What if it were £500 and he tried to keep £400 of it himself? Nah - I'd still refuse him it on principle. £5,000? Well, I'd give it more thought, but it would depend on my mood. Sometimes I get very obstinate. I could see myself refusing £1k because the other person was being greedy. By this point though, I'd also be questioning who was willing to pay so much money to try and mess with my principles.

But principles is the wrong word. If it were a principle , e.g. cheat on a partner, eat food that I have forbidden myself to eat, then I'm not going to break those for money. Demanding fifty:fifty in the above isn't a principle, it's just the inclusion of profits / losses that the constructor of the experiment neglected to consider. At some point, I may decide that I'll take the £100,000 even though greedy Blade gets £900,000 because £100,000 is worth more than the likely benefit of future working with Blade. You'd probably have to go quite a bit higher than you'd normally expect with me though. I'm not hugely materialistic (though more than I should be) and I can also be very stubborn in the face of inequality. If it's a likely to be repeated experiment, there's a good chance I'll take the hit of losing the initial sum just to teach my partner to respect me and treat me equally. After all, the higher the money, the less reason he has to demand a greater share.*

K.

* Someone is going to query the logic of this last sentence. It is incorrect if you assume that money has a non-diminishing value, that more money is more good. But the logic is correct if, as I do, you consider money to be a need that can be fulfilled once you have enough that you're not suffering for a lack of it. After all, you don't say "I've eaten enough now, but more food would be better."

What does it mean if you stop taking the test half way through, at the point where they have you measuring your fingers, because you think it's asinine?

means you don't know much about genetics, i would fancy

Actually, I've chosen £40 just because I was thinking in the lines of the rational pirates game. The only reason I didn't choose £49 was because people would consider £1 as a symbolic value and would be more likely to refuse £1 than to refuse £0: in the first case, they refuse it because the justification (the money they get) isn't good enough to accept the treatment, but in the second case, they aren't paid at all so the justification isn't the money they get but the fact that they do it because they are good and generous. Since the justification is their own invention, they'll accept it better than a small amount of money (because they'll have to convince themselves first). But still, I thought that I could get more chances on my side if I paid with a non trivial amount, according to behavioral economics people won't try to gamble non trivial amount of money. £10 seemed like a good amount to me.

If I was in the position of the other guy, I'd gladly let the first guy leave with the £50 if it was his offer.

Oh and knasser, fifty-fifty with you wouldn't be fair: I'd be charged the conversion rate while you wouldn't.

It probably means you don't have a good ruler. If you'd had one it would have been easy to do the measurement and you'd have done it already. If you thought about it it means it was hard to measure your fingers.



Recently, I went to Bodies, the exhibition where they have preserved human bodies displayed in various poses doing different things, organs on display, various "slices". It was truly amazing.

There were hardly any difference between the male bodies and the female bodies. You could barely tell them apart, besides for the genitals. Looking at skeletal structure and stuff it was really very similar. It blew my mind in light of all the mental energy that has gone into this discussion. Physically it is so hard to tell the difference when we're looking at muscles and organs and the like. How much difference is purely a cultural construct and as such is defined exclusively by culture and not at all by biology?

Interesting question, but that's just covering the physical issues that can be seen with the unaided human eye.

It entirely leaves out things like harmones and brain chemistry. Those are the things that would elicit different behavioral patterns and thought processes. Some of those harmones are so powerful, they actually help produce visible physical changes in the human body. Isn't one of the first steps of male to female gender reassignment massive doses of estrogen? That supposedly leads to the development of breasts which can then be... enhanced (rediculous term for "make big") through simple surgery. Going the other way, large doses of testosterone begin changing the voice. *Remembers back to all the jokes from the late 1980s about the East German women's whatever teams.* Excessive testosterone levels can lead to excessive agression, and so forth and so on ad nauseum.

That's just two of the more basic and powerful natural chemicals produced in the human body that you can't see but that help define how we act and think. It's a seething coctail that modern science is only just BEGINNING to get a handle on.

*Estrogen molecule looks over at Testosterone molecule and gives an evil grin, "Let's go frag something up!" The Testosterone molecule turns it's massive head ponderously toward the flighty Estrogen molecule and laughs menacingly "You go North, I'll go South. Between us, they won't know what the drek hit them!"*

And as to the point about culture versus nature, what about the various animal species which demonstrate completely different behavioral paterns based on gender? They don't have "culture" as we'd probably define the term, do they? If they can have such inborn diferences, why not humans?

Today the most hardcore topical thing happened to me.

To make a really long story short, while I was waiting around outside in a neighborhood for over an hour, an autistic girl approached me and we ended up chatting for a while.

The autistic girl had what I can only describe as very "male" mannerisms, and she awesomely hocked up a loogie and spat while we were talking. I thought that if I didn't know that she was female I wouldn't be able to tell her gender.

It was amazing and hardcore because I'd read that autism equates to extreme maleness on a cognitive level. And here I was chatting with an autistic female, having a conversation, and she was totally exhibiting male mannerisms and the like.

I immediately thought about this thread and decided that I needed to make a note on it about today's autism-related gender adventure.

Love is a wonderful thing. Good luck to you both.

Peace,

K.

Alack, I have been slain by dry British humor!