I'm sharing a comment from Reddit here because I think this will be a common response.
You lost me at this sentence:
The core issue is the assumption of independence between the players.
That assumption is built into what the prisoner’s dilemma is. If the independence of the players is not there, it as a genuinely different game. This is either because the utilities are shifted in some way (either by external forces like a threat by the mob, a contract), or by one’s own ethical sense (violation of one’s ethics can be compiled into loss of utility in players utility function, as the guilt/shame of behaving contrary to one’s ethic).
... (read more)One of the important takeaways
"The man who is cheerful and merry has always a good reason for being so,—the fact, namely, that he is so." The Wisdom of Life, Schopenhauer (1851)
Descriptions of the Prisoner's Dilemma typically suggest that the optimal policy for each prisoner is to selfishly defect instead of to cooperate. I disagree with the traditional analysis and present a case for cooperation.
The core issue is the assumption of independence between the players. Articulations of the game painstakingly describe how the prisoners are in explicitly separate cells with no possibility of communication. From this, it's assumed that one's action can have no causal effect on the decision of the other player. However, (almost) everything is... (read 6885 more words →)
Again, from Reddit:
... (read more)