[renewiltord]

Sympathize with view in article. But straight things can be made from crookedness. Classic example: Single cake. Two crooked children. Greedy. But rule is one cuts; other chooses. Perhaps argue that humanity stripped. I think not.

Of course, meta-problem: how to ensure that is technique? How to ensure exploitation of technique: "you cut" (because I know you can't cut straight).

Still, meaningless for technocrat to feel "annoyance with the recalcitrant human element, which eludes their total mastery". Behaviour such as this is roughly modelable.

First-order planning is "Here is a plan that will work if all will abide". Second-order planning is "Some will not abide. Here is a plan that will work given that". Third-order planning is "Some will not abide. Both the plan and compliance with it will alter the conditions of the plan. This is how the plan works given that." ad inf.

You can hew great stability out of the unstable: A logical network reliable to some degree out of an unreliable physical network. Nothing is perfect: not knowledge (you can only reach some falsifiability), not networks (you can only get some reliability), not even logic or mathematics (since the proof is subject to our human fallibility).

[anttiharju]

This reminds me of some game design video/article/talk (don't remember) where a MOBA (League of Legends?) was at least attempted to design in a way that there would be the balance of the imbalance.

It boils down to sure, some playable characters are too strong, but given enough characters to select from, the "meta" will shift around because there'll always be something else to counter whatever the other team chose. There might be a lack of balance in a single match, but across multiple matches, there's no one stable winning formula.

Really wish I had a link to the resource I'm trying to reference here.

[dang]

> Single cake. Two crooked children. Greedy. But rule is one cuts; other chooses.

Unlike a lot of more complex models, that one really works in practice. Game theory rises to the level of Solomon. Has it ever failed?

[fragmede]

It works for uniform cake. The failure mode is when the cake is non-uniform, and the children want different things. In this scenario the top of the cake has two pieces of fruit, a slice of kiwi and a slice of strawberry. It's a soft cake, so the fruit can't be split or cut. Child A cuts the cake into two slices, each with one piece of fruit. Which slice does Child B choose? If you're lucky, A likes strawberry and B likes kiwi, and B chooses what they want. If you're not, A likes strawberry and B is an asshole that doesn't care about fruit, so B chooses the strawberry piece knowing that A likes strawberry, and picks that piece just to ruin A's day. That's over the top, mean and spiteful you say? Have you met children!?

[willcipriano]

Don't make a cut you aren't happy with either side of.

[ssivark]

> Game theory rises to the level of Solomon. Has it ever failed?

There’s a reason we study the Prisoner’s dilemma and its failure modes.

With regards to the cake example more specifically, what makes it somewhat trivial is that the state of the world is fully observable, utilities are easily computable (volume of cake), etc.

[s1artibartfast]

I think the author would agree with you based on their conclusion:

>... we can imagine that our crookedness likewise reflects our history: the communities we’ve belonged to, the friends we’ve made and lost, the chance happenings, heartbreaks, losses, and triumphs, the stories we’ve internalized about the world and about ourselves. All that has pulled and tugged on us, worn us down, nurtured us, broken us, and lifted us up. That is our crookedness. The crookedness we must learn to love within ourselves and in one another.