[tristram_shandy]

If one studies history, even casually, one might note that nearly all wars in history have not started as a result of rational actors making optimal decisions in accordance with game theory.

Why, then, do we continue to believe this fallacy -- the fallacy that peace is guaranteed because nobody would be irrational enough to actually start a war?

Wars start through miscommunication, human error, the whims of (usually despotic) leadership, internal crises, and unforeseen Black Swan events that escape our (Gaussian) models. This can be summarized thus: wars frequently start for no real reason at all.

We should be more pragmatic, and look at history instead of borrowing a theory from the dismal science of economics to reassure ourselves, as there are now millions of very real lives at stake. North Korea has become a problem worthy of more rigorous analysis than the pithy comments about MAD.

[duncanawoods]

> nearly all wars in history have not started as a result of rational actors making optimal decisions

Is this true? I see them often as the conflict between local / global goals where the real problem is that each step in the escalation from peace to war is tragically rational - each decision is a lose-lose choice where one path is a guaranteed small loss but escalation offers a chance to win despite the possible apocalyptic outcome. The whole matter is so bad because peace-time power-plays build up an unstable system containing things like interlocking mutual defence treaties deliberately designed to escalate the stakes of minor disputes.

My understanding of game theory may be weak because I don't see how things like the prisoners dilemma have an "optimal solution" instead they just illustrate choices whose desirability match different risk appetites. Your risk-appetite is like a value-judgement, taste or personality - judgements of what risks are rational is personal and relative instead of a mathematical absolute. Even on seemingly simple probabilistic problems where you can calculate expected-value seem fallacious when you only play the game once and you'll be dead within 40 years no matter the outcome. Can game theory prove "Live free or die" is irrational?

[0xcde4c3db]

> I see them often as the conflict between local / global goals where the real problem is that each step in the escalation from peace to war is tragically rational - each decision is a lose-lose choice where one path is a guaranteed small loss but escalation offers a chance to win despite the possible apocalyptic outcome.

This sounds a lot like the dollar auction game [1], which is used to study the disconnect between individual actions being rational and a clearly undesirable outcome. Basically, the game is a variation of an all-pay auction in which only the top 2 bidders pay. A dollar is auctioned off in bids of some fixed increment. At each turn, winning the dollar is a preferable outcome to losing your previous bid. Even after the price goes over $1, winning the dollar represents a smaller loss. In that sense, the rational thing to do is bid indefinitely high. It's supposedly a common outcome with human bidders that the winning bid is over $2.

[1] (PDF) http://www.math.toronto.edu/mpugh/Teaching/Sci199_03/dollar_...

[drawkbox]

Game theory backs heavily on self-interest though. Self-interest runs the world and everything, including you.

If you can solve the self interest for most of the people, things usually work out. If you attack others self interest, then yes, random things can happen when self interest is compromised or when a player loses self interest in favor of extremism or some flavor of "fuck the world, fuck everyone". The solution to that is economics and comfort, people don't go extreme when they have those.

[tristram_shandy]

I'd prefer not to gamble millions of lives on the theory that people or states (especially states that are effectively just one person) are going to act completely rationally.

Here's one example where "rational self interest" doesn't seem to have worked out:

- Kim Jong Un could rationally (in both his and his countrymen's self interest) live the rest of his days in a gloriously well appointed Chinese estate, albeit in exile, perhaps as part of a transition negotation that sees his dynasty exchange their power in Korea for both their own safety and the good of the country.

- If rational action by people and states are as close to a physical law as is so frequently assumed, why has this not happened? Why does he not act rationally, and why do we imagine that he will act rationally in the future?

Here's the fundamental problem with the MAD / game theory / self interest / rational actor tack: the model implies that there's a 0% chance of nuclear weapons ever being used (because it wouldn't be in the self interest of the state), and therefore, the appropriate policy response is effectively to ignore continued accumulation of greater and greater stockpiles of nuclear arms, as no conflict can ever be possible. The MAD theory leads to a political calculus that promotes the proliferation of ever more nuclear weapons, and as we're seeing, ever more nuclear weapons in the hands of ever more unstable actors.

The MAD theory is unsound and fundamentally dangerous. Clearly, the chance of nuclear war is not 0% (a truly absurd idea), and so the policy response that MAD implies (perpetual deadlock) leads us down an even more dangerous road: perpetual stockpiling and proliferation, without any measured guarantees to stability.

We're placing very, very large bets (right now our civilization, soon the human race, one day the entire planet, even the rocks and stones) on an idea that we can't falsify and have never tested.

[hueving]

>Self-interest runs the world and everything, including you.

It doesn't run everyone. Or at least what is defined as optimal self-interest does not correctly model people who have been subjected to propaganda, religion, etc (e.g. see suicide bombers).

[fit2rule]

The only reason wars are stopped is because people rose up and took the reigns out of the hands of those who would wage indiscriminate war, forever.

The point is: if you don't want war, stop fobbing off the responsibilities of sovereignty onto your politicians, and start taking more responsibility for the actions of your own state. Alas, Americans are not quite prepared for this - rather preferring to squabble among themselves over whose 'ism' is the rightest - but in the meantime, the Generals and CEO's who will profit from this warfare are all left, un-checked, hidden behind the curtains and mirrors and smoke that blinds us all ..

[jacquesm]

Wars are stopped because they burn out or because peace is negotiated (if there is a clear victor, which definitely isn't always the case).

What is interesting - in a very morbid way, admitted - is that if you look at how much energy goes into war how little it usually achieves. The only wars that tend to change things in a meaningful way (for better or worse) are civil wars.