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Wonderful Facts and Feats

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Wonderful Facts and Feats

By: Krishna Kumar Singh
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 Game theory is central to understanding the dynamics of life forms in general and humans in particular. Living creatures not only play games, but dynamically transform the games they play, and have themselves thereby evolved their unique identities. For this reason, the material in this book is foundational to all the behavioral sciences, from biology, psychology and economics to anthropology, sociology, and political science. Disciplines that slight game theory are the worse-indeed, much worse-for it. We humans have a completely stunning capacity to reason, and to apply the fruits of reason to the transformation of our social existence. Social interactions in a vast array of species can be analyzed with game theory, yet only humans are capable of playing a game after being told its rules. This book is based on the appreciation that evolution and reason interact in constituting the social life and strategic interaction of humans. Game theory, however, is not everything. This book systematically refutes one of the guiding prejudices of contemporary game theory. This is the notion that game theory is, insofar as human beings are rational, sufficient to explain all of human social existence. In fact, game theory is complementary to ideas developed and championed in all the behavioral disciplines. Behavioral scientists who have rejected game theory in reaction to the extravagant claims of some of its adherents may thus, want to reconsider their position, recognizing the fact that, just as game theory without broader social theory is merely technical bravado, so social theory without game theory is a handicapped enterprise. The reigning culture in game theory asserts the sufficiency of game theory, allowing game theorists to do social theory without regard either for the facts or the theoretical contributions of the other social sciences. Only the feudal structure of the behavioral disciplines could possibly permit the persistence of such a manifestly absurd notion in a group of intelligent and open-minded scientists. Game theorists act like the proverbial “man with a hammer,” for which “all problems look like nails.” I have explicitly started this volume with a broad array of social facts drawn from behavioral decision theory and behavioral game theory to disabuse the reader from this crippling notion. Game theory is a wonderful hammer, indeed a magical hammer. But, it is only a hammer, and not the only occupant of the social scientist’s toolbox. The most fundamental failure of game theory is its lack of a theory of when and how rational agents share mental constructs. The assumption that humans are rational is an excellent first approximation. But, the Bayesian rational actors favored by contemporary game theory live in a universe of subjectivity, and instead of constructing a truly social epistemology, game theorists have developed a variety of subterfuges that make it appear that rational agents may enjoy a commonality of belief (common priors, common knowledge), but all are failures. Humans have a social epistemology, meaning that we have reasoning processes that afford us forms of knowledge and understanding, especially the understanding and the sharing of the content of other minds, which are unavailable to merely “rational” creatures. This social epistemology characterizes our species. The bounds of reason are thus, not the irrational, but the social. Earth Sciences Natural History Nature & Ecology Science
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