Talk:Superrationality

message: Aye guys, the telegram billionaire's case is really easy for superrationals: all of them just need to send one telegram at the same time -  but at the very same time - exactly at that time when only one of them can succeed - deadline minus the time it takes to transfer and decode one of them. Transfer mechanism for telegrams is blocking all incoming reqs until the one accepted is finished, somewhat similar to CB radios.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mightyknight (talk • contribs) 22:10, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

message: Interestringly the theory of superrational beings proves itself wrong by (using or depending on) absolute determinism or perfect universal knowledge.
Thats at least 4 paradoxa to solve first.
Let me bust the idea of a godlike rationalist by saying: "A superrational being can not think of a problem it can not solve."
:What do you mean by "the theory of superrational beings," and how would absolute determinism disprove it? Factitious 06:35, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think that the original poster has not read the article. The article is not on "superrational beings." Superrationality is a strategy for prisoner's-dilemma-type games, not a theological doctrine or philosophy. By the way, the plural of "paradox" is "paradoxes." --67.125.30.218 17:54, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: proves itself wrong

message: The notion of superrationality has exactly one reliable reference--- it is an original idea of Douglas Hofstadter's. Hofstadter's articles in Scientific American as expanded in Metamagical Themas discuss the subject in excruciating detail, illustrated with stories and parables and so on. It seems ridiculous to require multiple sources. Why is the tag up there? Likebox 05:17, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reference Issue 

message: The Prisoner's Dilemma shown on this page is not actually a Prisoner's Dilemma as described on that page, because the inequalities don't hold.  Quote:
 Canonical PD payoff matrix
         	Cooperate	Defect
Cooperate	R, R     	S, T
Defect   	T, S     	P, P
Where T stands for Temptation to defect, R for Reward for mutual cooperation, P for Punishment for mutual defection and S for Sucker's payoff. To be defined as prisoner's dilemma, the following inequalities must hold:
T > R > P > S
This condition ensures that the equilibrium outcome is defection, but that cooperation Pareto dominates equilibrium play.
One article or the other needs to be fixed.
WBTtheFROG (talk) 16:53, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text:  The inequalities are satisfied in the example.
Indeed, the numbers satisfied the inequalities as of March 3, 2024. Nonetheless, I chose to change the numbers slightly, for the following reason. In addition to the above inequalities, it is often required that (C,C) strictly maximizes social welfare. In the previous version, uniform randomization between (C,D) and (D,C) was as good as (C,C). -- Hkfscp11 (talk)  — Preceding undated comment added 15:16, 3 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Prisoner's Dilemma error 

message: Super-rationality is just another way of stating that one or both parties holds a view not by observation or experiment, but by agreement. Rather than trusting to rational discovery alone, there is a convention or decision as to a particular sort of situation and how it ought to be handled. All cultures and societies use such conventional decisions to obtain more optimal results than would be indicated by rational discovery alone. In the Travelers' Dilemma (TD), a large group of persons might form a convention in which all parties agree to bid $100, and thereby obtain a shared optimum for the benefit of all players observing the convention. Similarly, the Prisoners' Dilemma (PD) is often resolved in real life by having all parties observe a convention of not defecting, and those who seem unlikely to observe the convention face exclusion or other dire consequences. 
Conventions with mostly symbolic value to the group, but that are costly to the individual observing the convention are often used as a means to establish "proof" of loyalty to the convention, and to the group which holds that convention as a group value. Other more practical conventions, for which proof or evidence may be difficult to produce or establish, then can be assumed to be likely to be observed, as defection can be punished and cooperation can be rewarded, offsetting the benefits or costs of breaking or honoring the convention. Thus conventions allow individuals to obtain an optimum available only to a group, by becoming a member of that group, with the assurance that any member of the group not observing the convention will be punished by any, and perhaps all members. Defection becomes more costly, as the defection is not against a single competitor, but against a host of competitors. TheLastWordSword (talk) 13:42, 1 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  No it isn't. Superrationality makes sense with a community of two people, without any enforcement and punishment, only as long as both people are superrational. The enforcement and such is for the real world, where there are always some idiots who aren't superrational, and so need to be punished, to make the superrational and rational equilibria coincide as closely as possible.74.73.177.13 (talk) 11:19, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Super-rationality as social convention 

message: Removed:
Despite several attempts reported in his book Metamagical Themas, Hofstadter failed to obtain experimental results that would lend support to the claim that under specific circumstances human individuals do reason as described by the concept of superrationality. Proponents of superrationality argue that in a group of people with similar wishes and incomes, superrationality may explain the existence of: 
# Charity, because while one person not contributing does not hurt the charity, everyone not contributing does.
# Voting in elections which are not close to even, because while one vote does not matter, the bloc of similar people does.
# The Mutual Assured Destruction strategy of nuclear deterrence during the Cold War, which made defection a much worse situation for each player even if it would provide the slight advantage of being the last to die.
In the first two cases, superrationality may be seen as an antidote to or opposite of the Bystander Effect, or more generally diffusion of responsibility.
On the other hand, game theorists believe that all of this behavior can be understood on purely rational grounds. People may give to charity because they have altruistic preferences; others may vote because they find value in exercising their civic duty; and the Soviet Union's and United States' disarmament could be explained by each fearing being obliterated by a retaliatory nuclear strike.
This has been labelled as an "Unreferenced section" for over two years (November 2012). It sounds like the musings of the editor or editors, rather than anything that has been written on the subject by any third party. -- Oliver P. (talk) 17:26, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed section: Possible real world cases 

message: The comparison between superrationality and Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative was  with the rationale "sources are a very brief review and a math paper, nothing from a philosopher". I disagree, and have reinstated the paragraph. To be quite honest, there aren't a whole lot of proper sources covering superrationality at all. Among the ones there are, more than one have claimed that superrationality is a form of Kant's imperative. Of course, I welcome a broader selection of sources discussing this issue. But in the state the article is currently in, the removal of these sources based on the fact that their authors are not philosophers is, in my mind, unwarranted. Gabbe (talk) 08:27, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comparison between superrationality and Kant's categorical imperative 

message: If we are to speak of "superrationality," we cannot say that the key to it is assuming by A that side B is superrational. Side A must know from the beginning that B is at least as intelligent as A, and hence A may already reasonably assume that B will reason in the same way as A. However, this means that "superrationality" is just rationality with additional the condition that A and B have more knowledge about themselves. Then the use of the usual expected value is wrong, because the weights of both events depend on each other. I think iteratively can be shown that the weight of one event will be 1, and therefore the other 0. So this article did not show the concept of superationality, but only rationality under additional conditions.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.183.226.236 (talk) 02:55, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  It's still just rationality 

message: I've rated this article as Start-class for WikiProject Game Theory, copying the quality rating from WikiProject Philosophy (which I agree with, since although the article is so long, much of it is suspected to be original research). As for importance, I think superrationality is a fairly important concept because it explains why people cooperate in the prisoner's dilemma, among other things, so it's at least High-importance - but I didn't rate it Top-importance because apparently this concept is not well accepted among game theorists. Please review; thanks. Duckmather (talk) 14:30, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rated article