very interesting. i forget the name of the book bu...

2008-06-30T16:36:00.000-05:00

very interesting. i forget the name of the book but the author was on one of the comedy central talk shows discussing the exact same thing.

i've been thinking about this recently as well. it seems to me that the entire human organization/existence can be explained in terms of the struggle between "self interest" and "cooperation." i know, we guys want to be more complicated than that but the more i think about it the more i'm convinced that we lead our entire lives moving from one end (utter self interest) to another (total cooperation).

while on the surface it seems like all individuals are driven only and purely by self interest, which is perhaps true...think about it, the best case scenario (using your game theory language) for an individual's survival function would be when all other individuals' survival functions are also maximized. therefore, one could argue that it's in your BEST self interest to cooperate.

but we focus so much on the short term and on being one-up on our neighbors that we forget that :)

hope i am making some sense there...if not, we can establish at least one thing...drinking at noon is a bad idea :)

h.

A colleague compared these ideas to Durkheim's fun...

2008-06-28T17:12:00.000-05:00

A colleague compared these ideas to Durkheim's functionalism.

For the focus on equilibrium, this is quite an apt description. However, I would break with modern functionalism by disagreeing that social institutions exist and persist because they serve a function.

Instead, I would identify with the
Conflict Theory point of view that views many social institutions as rooted in power struggles.

Admittedly, I am glossing over a lot of ground in a short space, but the equilibrium bit is dead on.

Comments on Communication and Cognition: A Game Theoretic View of Politics

very interesting. i forget the name of the book bu...

A colleague compared these ideas to Durkheim's fun...