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Here’s a thread about (lol) politics and (super lol) game theory. Forgive me.
In a 1936 book with a title too long for a tweet, John Maynard Keynes wrote about how prices were set not by each person assessing the value of a thing, but by each person assessing how others will assess it, or even levels beyond: what I think that you think that people think...
So if I look at a stock and know it’s bad, but I know that people think it’s good, then I’m willing to pay a price for it. Maybe the other people know in their hearts, too, and are going along with the charade for the same reasons, maybe they really believe, but it doesn’t matter
Keynes used the example of a strange “beauty contest” game: the object is to pick the prettiest face from a group of photos. But the prettiest face is defined by which gets the most picks from the other players in this game. So you don’t just pick the one *you* think is prettiest
You pick the one that you think will get the most picks from everybody. Maybe that means the one who is the prettiest in the eyes of the average voter, or maybe it means the one who everyone *thinks* would be prettiest in their conception of the eyes of the average voter, or mayb
Anyway, when it gets interesting is the “2/3 of the average game,” which you can read about here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guess_2/3_of_the_average">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gues... You pick a number between 1 and 100, and you win if your number is closest to 2/3 of the average (of all the numbers chosen simultaneously by all the players)
To game this out, you might say
- I can’t pick anything above 67, because that could never win
- but everyone knows that, so the new range is 1 to 67
- so I can’t pick anything above 45, because that could never win
- but everyone knows that, so...
- [repeat]
- I guess I pick 0
- I can’t pick anything above 67, because that could never win
- but everyone knows that, so the new range is 1 to 67
- so I can’t pick anything above 45, because that could never win
- but everyone knows that, so...
- [repeat]
- I guess I pick 0
That’s what you call the Nash Equilibrium. It’s the strategy you’ll arrive at after imagining playing against HAL 9000. The strategy that might not be the best or most profitable in any given situation, but to deviate from it is to take on a real risk of disaster and heartbreak
So maybe that’s what primary voting is like. Instead of picking the guy we want to pick, we think “who’s the guy that other people will vote for?” and then we think “who’s the guy that other people think other people will vote for?” and we end up negotiating ourselves down to 0
