Quote from: af_newbie on July 14, 2019, 06:18:52 PM

Superrationality is not possible because no two brains are the same.

IQ, emotional development, personal experiences, religious or political indoctrination influences ones thinking process. You are a prime example.

With the same input, two rational individuals will deduce a diametrically different result.

Freethinking is the best you can do to remove the cultural, political and religious influences.

That is why the actors must be superrational and not rational. Brains can be very different but still superrational. Failure to completely understand the perspective and needs of of others does indeed create inefficiency. This can be mitigated by communication or if that is not possible by best estimates and modeling of perspectives.

Your current "rational" perspective places you at risk for suboptimal outcomes trapping you in non-cooperative scenarios that can be avoided.

Let me give you an example to help demonstrate this. It is called the Platonia Dilemma and was shared originally by Douglas Hofstader in Scientific American June 1983.

"One fine day, out of the blue, you get a letter from S. N. Platonia, well-known Oklahoma oil trillionaire, mentioning that twenty leading rational thinkers have been selected to participate in a little game. You are one of them! it says. Each of you has a chance at winning one billion dollars, put up by the Platonia Institute for the Study of Human Irrationality. Heres how. If you wish, you may send a telegram with just your name on it to the Platonia Institute in downtown Frogville, Oklahoma (pop. 2). You may reverse the charges. If you reply within 48 hours, the billion is yours - unless there are two or more replies, in which case the prize is awarded to no one. And if no one replies, nothing will be awarded to anyone.

You have no way of knowing who the other nineteen participants are; indeed, in its letter, the Platonia Institute states that the entire offer will be rescinded if it is detected that any attempt whatsoever has been made by any participant to discover the identity of, or to establish contact with, any other participant. Moreover, it is a condition that the winner (if there is one) must agree in writing not to share the prize money with any other participant at any time in the future. This is to squelch any thoughts of cooperation, either before or after the prize is given out."

The prize is real and the award judges honest and unbribable. What is the rational answer to this riddle af_newbie? What would you do? The superrational answer is quite simple and trivial. I saw it instantly and indeed later in the article Hofstader wrote the exact same solution in his article. Can you see it?

Quote from: Astargath on July 14, 2019, 07:06:25 PM

I actually expected something nice, instead its the same bullshit, essentially he found out what, faith? Lol, how the fuck is that an eureka moment...

Yes he did and I am happy for him. You would not understand because you are lost.

Edit: The solution to the Platonia Dilemma is below.

Solution to the Platonia Dilemma:
(By Douglas Hofstadter)

"And what about the Platonia Dilemma? There, two things are very clear: (1) if you decide not to send a telegram, your chances of winning are zero; (2) if everyone sends a telegram, your chances of winning are zero. If you believe that what you choose will be the same as what everyone else chooses because you are all superrational, then neither of these alternatives is very appealing. With dice, however, a new option presents itself to roll a die with probability p of coming up good and then to send in your name if and only if good comes up.

Now imagine twenty people all doing this, and figure out what value of p maximizes the likelihood of exactly one person getting the go-ahead. It turns out that it is p=120, or more generally, p=1N where N is the number of participants. In the limit where N approaches infinity, the chance that exactly one person will get the go-ahead is 1e, which is just under 37%. With twenty superrational players all throwing icosahedral dice, the chance that you will come up the big winner is very close to 120e, which is a little below 2%. Thats not at all bad! Certainly its a lot better than 0%.

The objection many people raise is: What if my roll comes up bad? Then why shouldnt I send in my name anyway? After all, if I fail to, Ill have no chance whatsoever of winning. Im no better off than if I had never rolled my die and had just voluntarily withdrawn! This objection seems overwhelming at first, but actually it is fallacious, being based on a misrepresentation of the meaning of making a decision. A genuine decision to abide by the throw of a die means that you really must abide by the throw of the die; if under certain circumstances you ignore the die and do something else, then you never made the decision you claimed to have made. Your decision is revealed by your actions, not by your words before acting!"

If you came up with this solution and would genuinely do it in this situation you are to some degree a superrational thinker.