Yeah, when I stated that it literally wouldn’t be a dilemma any more it’s because having the prisoners sitting in the same interrogation room would destroy it, the same way playing poker with your cards backwards would destroy the game to the point where it cannot really be considered poker any more.

Wasn’t making a smarter point than that. :)

I guess there’s a reason people argued about this dilemma for so long in the literature. :)

For cooperation to emerge between rational players, the number of rounds must be unknown or infinite. In that case, “always defect” may no longer be a dominant strategy. As shown by Robert Aumann in a 1959 paper, rational players repeatedly interacting for indefinitely long games can sustain cooperation.

Well, sure, it’s if they are in the same room or they can hear through the walls or whatever. An actual flow of information, not just them lying to each other. I assumed that was obvious.

Two prisoners are arrested.

Both are given a choice: Rat out your buddy, and we’ll let you go with one year in prison. Keep your moth shut and we’ll give you four years. If you keep your moth shut and your buddy rats you out, you’ll get ten. If you both rat, you both get eight years.

The dominant strategy of both prisoners is to speak: In either case, ratting on their buddy will lower their punishment. However, if both prisoners choose this strategy, they end up losing collectively: Rather than both receiving four years as they would if they both kept their moth shut, they both yet eight years because they both talk.

That’s the basics of the dilemma. The years don’t matter, just the ranking of preferences.

If the prisoners can communicate, they will know that the other prisoner didn’t talk, and if one prisoner opens his mouth, he will know that the other prisoner will immediately do the same.

I learned the prisoner’s dilemma when I studied game theory. The fact that it depends on a lack of information flowing between the prisoners and that snitching is only the dominant strategy when it’s a single-round game is just parts of the assumptions of the dilemma.

I should also add that the prisoner’s dilemma is only a dilemma when it is played in only one round. Once it becomes a game of several rounds cooperation arises as the dominant strategy.

Then again, I’m not sure how the prisoner’s dilemma is relevant here in the first place, I just thought it was a funny point to make.

The prisoner’s dilemma depends on the fact that the two prisoners cannot cooperate. If you allow information to flow between them it’s literally not a dilemma any more.

So yes.

I currently live in Denmark. I have to admit I’m not following the public debate here very carefully, and there are plenty of backwards people around who will shout loudly about just about anything, but any reversal (or anything else than gradual strengthening) of trans rights would come as a huge surprise to me.

I am open for the possibility that I’m simply not following close enough. But I think the problem with trans rights is that it has become politicized, when it is really not a political issue. The fact that I have not heard about it at all in the public debate here is therefore, in my opinion, a good sign. For sure one can dig up shitty opinions if one starts looking for it, but they have not been given a defining role in the public debate as is the case in many countries.

Yeah, I’m not going to make the argument that people are fundamentally good either, and they are shaped by the media landscape they consume.

I live in a country where trans rights are not really questioned, and where I am feeling confident that they won’t be. Of course it still has ways to go and there are bad people, but trans rights have not become effectively politicized and it’s just not a point of contention.

It’s no fundamental rule of society that we have to go around hating each other. It’s a construct. That doesn’t mean it’s not the case where you live, but it’s something that can be changed.

Leftists and other assorted humanists and progressives are wildly unpopular because most of the public simply can’t imagine not having the sheer bloodlust they have for thy neighbor.

Believe it or not, this is not a necessity of human nature. It’s just your society that’s fucked up. And it’s probably not even that bad if you go out and talk to people rather than judge society by the distorted reflection given on social media.

Social media is probably the most powerful propaganda tool of all times.

In the 1960s you would say the same thing about TV, and you’d be right. Before that it was the cinema. It’s not because the mediums as such are inherently evil, but they carry an inherent power that can be used for evil.

Currently, social media is very much being used for evil.

There is, however, another element to it, and one that is completely new for social media. That’s the illusion that we can actually contribute in a meaningful way by participating.

Nobody believes they are actively fighting fascism by watching TV all day. Yet, on social media, well-meaning people are wasting their time shouting at clouds rather than going out in the real world and and actually achieve anything. They collectively tread in water as democracy dies, all the while they feel like they are “doing their part”. In other words, social media is pacifying as fuck.

I participate in the Fediverse because I have hope that we are building something different here; something that can derail the platforms that are currently used for evil, and something where the organization of actual opposition can be possible. I think it might be. But I am also afraid I am just wasting my time.

Social media is literally just a fairly accurate reflection of us as a species and our civilization.

Strong disagree. Capitalists sell it to us as a mirror, but it’s a distorted mirror that shows us exactly what they want us to see for whatever reason.

If they want to sell us diet pills, they will turn it into one of those amusement park mirrors that makes you look fat. If they want to overthrow democracy, they’ll turn it into a mirror where everyone standing around you suddenly look suspicious and cruel. And if the Russians want to pay them to get control of what people will see in the mirror, hell - that’s just freedom of expression.

Add on top that pretty much everyone on earth is staring mindlessly into the mirror for hours every day, and you got yourself what I would consider to be a problem.

I think it’s a platform independent movement that is now on Lemmy. Not sure it started on Reddit.

Leasing it to a farmer seems like the obvious choice. I’m not sure digital nomads would be all that interested in working in the middle of a field.

I’d love to see land like this returning to nature with native vegetation, but that would take a really long time and doesn’t come with an obvious path to making a profit. Unless you sell it to developers for a higher price in a few years, of course.

I don’t know anything about its history on Lemmy and I haven’t really seen it discussed online at all. I guess I live under a rock.

The one place I have been exposed to it is in this amazing write-up, which I encountered via Mastodon some time ago. For me it provided a perfect introduction to the argument, and gave me a lot to think about even though I am by no means ignorant to feminism and my position as a man in society.

Highly recommend the read, both to men and women. It’s extremely well written.

Where do you see your life going?

Accountability is a bet on a stable routine. You’ll go to work, earn money, go home, spend money. A lot of people are happy with this.

Languages could take you many directions, with endless opportunities to climb into various international organizations and take on a broad range of tasks. If you’re willing to work hard, learn other skills, and move around, you could have a very interesting life. If you want to stay where you are, options are likely to be more limited.

Physiotherapy offers maybe a middle ground. You won’t climb as much, but there’s work, and you can move around if you want to, even though work will not require it. You can have a routine in life, but one that is maybe easier to break free from if you want to.

As you like the idea of a stable monotonous office job,maybe accounting is perfect for you. Personally I need something that pushes me around a bit - I’m terrified of staying in one place far too long.

I can’t avoid politics and shareholders completely, but it really boils down to cutting costs.

They are companies supported by venture capital, basically risk-taking investors wanting a high pay-off. The problem with receiving this money is that the investors end up owning the company, and you have to answer to them. And once they are making money, why wouldn’t the owner feel entitled to their share?

The problem being, of course, that they never really had a strategy for monetizing the platform. So how can you turn a profit? Some try to sell premium features, but for a dominant social media company it always boils down to three things:

1. Operate the platform as cheap as possible
2. Sell ads
3. Avoid regulators

It used to be that point 3 required certain base levels of moderation, but with the current US government, this has changed. Point 3 has become unpredictable. Censorship of political content that can be deemed extremist, such as opposition to genocide in Gaza or sympathy for Luigi Mangione, might help social media companies that are eager to comply in advance.

So basically, platforms now need to maintain the cheapest possible moderation (1) that allows advertisers to stay on the platform (2) in order to maximise profits.

These platforms are huge enough that they do not need to care about individual users - especially sites where users tend to be anonymous. So you don’t really need to introduce expensive checks and balances; just ban users at any suspicion. There are plenty of fish in the sea.

Now, how do you get to a point of suspicion as cheap as possible? Machine learning models is probably your best bet. Reddit observing people’s voting history provides them with useful data to this end. Running some LLM on the user’s comments is good as well, which is how you end up being banned for quoting the Godfather, as I saw one newly recruited Lemmy user report. The more safeguards you introduce, the more expensive moderation becomes.

Advertisers don’t care much about over-moderation. Nobody has any incentive to care about individual users in a site that is as crowded as Reddit. What matters is that there are enough users left to generate content (until AI can take over that as well), and that passive (harmless) users are there to click on ads. This dynamic is the same across all mainstream social media - Instagram just wants to provide you with a sufficiently addictive and toothless feed to have you keep looking at ads.

Last, the question is what needs to be moderated. Is sympathy for Mangione the same as encouraging violence? The regulators/political elites would certainly think so. Is it extremist to support Palestine? Where is the line drawn between legitimate political opposition to a fascist coup d’etat and inciting political violence? These are sometimes hard decisions, but following the above logic of unmonitored over-moderation, you don’t even have to think about it. Just ban at first suspicion.

And then, suddenly, the social media platform is not only seeking profit, but it is also colluding with a fascist state takeover and suppressing the opposition. Which is why people give you political answers to this question even though the answer is really very simple: Bad moderation is cheaper.

All hat and no cattle. Empty threats and empty promises.

America has always been susceptible to bullshit artists and snake oil salesmen. Of course it had to end like this.

We have all these ideas about universal human rights, and we are trying to wish them into existence. So we teach them to children as if they are something they should believe already exists, not as it’s an ideal we are working towards.

I think the idea is that it will make people more protective of human rights, but the flip side is that people seem very reluctant to see the cracks in the fiction they have been sold. And then when/if they realize the state of the world they often become jaded, acting as if the realization that it’s all a fake construct is somehow the greatest insight on earth.

And then, if they’re good people, they start working to make the fiction just a little bit more real.

If we want to talk about why European countries have blood on their hand we could keep going all day.

I’d push back a little against the notion that nobody cares. You don’t have many (any?) political allies who are willing to stand up against dictatorships and let go of their cheap oil supplies, but you do have people and organizations who care.

The International Criminal Court did, among other things, issue an arrest warrant on Netanyahu. I think we have managed to establish international law, but not yet international justice. As a result it’s easy to give up and consider it all to be false promises and lies, and to a degree that’s not entirely wrong. But I nevertheless believe that current-day international law is the greatest achievement we have made since the second world war, and establishing international law is the fundamental first step towards international justice.

I have a lot of friends working for various international organizations, and while it’s one hell of an uphill battle, I can assure you that there are people out there working tirelessly to try to make a change. And despite everything, most European countries are still supportive of the ICC and in favour of establishing an international legal order.

If we want to be hopeful about Europe, it has to be judged by it’s commitment to that promise, and not by the corrupt, narcissistic, or plain moronic leaders who are way too frequently put in charge.