[Nomentatus]

This is a misunderstanding of prisoner's dilemma, knagra - you're assuming that PDs have to be nearly identical to the original example, but actually only the relative outcomes matter to the definition, not an absolute gain or loss. You don't have to be punished, just get a worse result than cooperation/communication could have given you despite both parties acting rationally. And that's exactly the case (now, not I think 100 years ago) with higher education. Foregoing degrees for individual study or other alternative education (such as apprenticeship) and exams would cost everyone less, and result in a better result even for those who did well, in your retelling, by going to university. The economy wouldn't be hurt, it would gain, and those who filled the jobs now requiring unnecessary years of education could also be paid more, not just owe less. The only way to escape the PD classification is to deny the central thesis of Thiel and the Tulip article's author; and assert that higher education is not truly inefficient, so there are no great economic inefficiencies. A hard path by now, it seems to me! So QNED, after all.

To drive the point home, it's entirely possible to construct a PD with all outcomes being rewards, all outcomes being punishments, or a mixture of the two. You don't need prisoner's, see-through mirrors in an interrogation room, or prison sentences, or other punishments in order to create a prisoner's dilemma. Very complex situations can be prisoner's dilemma's, the bibliography of addumbrations of the concept is immense. Perhaps you mean that this is not ONLY a PD. But no-one ever thought, I've never entertained the notion that "PD" was a full description of any situation. Instead, it points out obvious inefficiencies despite individual rationality -precisely the "No Tulip Subsidies" author's point.

[knagra]

I demonstrated that you could still get a worse result with mutual cooperation than you could with mutual defection, which violates the T > R > P > S condition for the dilemma to be a prisoner's dilemma in the strong sense. I demonstrated that at least two of the four possibilities are unpredictable. Mutual cooperation doesn't necessarily give you a better result than mutual defection. Mutual cooperation could give you a much worse result than cooperating while the other player defects. For example, you could get a college degree like everyone else and end up working at McDonald's with $50k in debt through mutual cooperation. But you could also just work at McDonald's without getting a college degree (and the $50k in debt) while everyone else gets a college degree.

QED, sir.

[knagra]

Here's a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#Generalize...

I also wanted to say that several million people would be jobless if everyone decided not to go to college come August. The economy would be shocked by an influx of unemployed professors, etc. That would be a much worse state, relatively, than if some people continued to go to college, as I argued in my first comment.

And there are indeed many valid prisoner's dilemmas in the natural sciences. A clear one I recall is the example of grooming others that Dawkins offered in The Selfish Gene.