Brain drawing some connections because i should be sleeping.

Prisoner’s dilemma:

You and another person both have to make a choice. “Which option is the best for you to choose” will depend on which option the other person chooses. And that person knows this, and is experiencing the same dilemma in relation to your choice.

Classic example:

Two people are arrested and questioned separately. Each is offered the chance to testify against the other. If neither talks, they both go free. If both talk, they both get convicted. If one talks and the other doesn’t, the one who talks goes free and the other is convicted.

What is the prisoner’s best choice? Depends on what the other prisoner is going to do– and if they know each other well, their theorizing of each other’s thought processes in this dilemma will factor heavily into it.

Massively multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma #1.

Roko’s Basilisk.

A hypothetical AI that, if created in the future, will study records of the past and seek to destroy all those humans who did not assist in its creation.

(In theory this would not even have to be a conscious entity. Just any large automated system with access to some form of power over people’s lives, whose designers made it to follow the aforementioned directives. For all we know, present-day health insurance could be Roko’s Basilisk.)

Anyway assuming you live in a time when this does not yet exist, you have the choice to try and stop this thing from being created, or to try and help create it.

It is better for people in general for this thing not to exist, and so the best choice for humanity to do as a whole is not create it. All the people trying to stop its creation are working from this logic.

But if you knew it was going to exist, the best choice for self-preservation would be to help create it, because then it would spare you. All the people trying to create it are working from this logic.

What choice gives you the best chance of survival? That depends on how many other people are doing what, and which side is gonna win.

Massively multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma #2.

-U.S. electoral system.

The two main parties are not great, but one is better than the other. The best option for our government would be a third party that was better than the two current ones. Best outcome would be if enough of us voted for that.

But up until that threshold of “enough votes to win,” any increase in votes for a third party is a bad thing, because it typically increases the likelihood that the worse of the two major parties will win.

What is the best choice for a voter individually? It depends on how many other voters are making which choice. And of course, this is complicated by the fact that all the other voters are faced with the same dilemma, and making their own choices based on it.

conclusion: i don’t have one. Except that if your country chooses its government in a way comparable to both Roko’s Basilisk and a prisoner interrogation, there is probably something wrong