Prisoners' Dilemma
Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of speaking to or exchanging messages with the other. The police admit they don't have enough evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge. They plan to sentence both to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the police offer each prisoner a Faustian bargain. If he testifies against his partner, he will go free while the partner will get three years in prison on the main charge. Oh, yes, there is a catch ... If both prisoners testify against each other, both will be sentenced to two years in jail. The prisoners are given a little time to think this over, but in no case may either learn what the other has decided until he has irrevocably made his decision. Each is informed that the other prisoner is being offered the very same deal. Each prisoner is concerned only with his own welfare—with minimizing his own prison sentence.
This leads to four different possible outcomes for prisoners A and B:
- If A and B both remain silent, they will each serve one year in prison.
- If A testifies against B but B remains silent, A will be set free while B serves three years in prison.
- If A remains silent but B testifies against A, A will serve three years in prison and B will be set free.
- If A and B testify against each other, they will each serve two years. Wikipedia
Both prisoners always rat-out the other because regardless of the decision made by the other prisoner, (in the absence of retribution) ratting always benefits the rat.
This is hard for somebody from a high-trust, team-first society to wrap their heads around, but even TH-TF believers buckle when the stakes are high enough and enough opportunities are thrown their way.
An old joke
A seventy-year-old billionaire was chatting with a lushly endowed young lady. Out of the blue, he asked her "Would you sleep with me for five million dollars?"
"Oh YES!" she squealed
"I only have five dollars in my wallet. Will you settle for that?" he pursued.
Indignant, she spat back "What do you think I am, a common whore?"
"We already settled that point" the billionaire responded. "Now we are haggling about the price".
All in
Three minute video clip from the movie Venom which shows a "Protection Racket" in action.
The Extortion or "Protection Racket" involves threatening people, often business owners and demanding payment to ensure "something bad does not happen to fill in blank ." The explicit "service" offered is that the thugs will protect the business against outsiders but the implicit threat is that the thugs will burn down the business or rape the wife and daughter or slaughter the livestock.
This source of revenue only works if they are successful in intimidating every business in the neighborhood. As soon as one business successfully resists them, all the businesses stop making payments. That puts a very, very high incentive to smash any business that MIGHT resist to serve as an object lesson.
The legacy media is in a pickle similar to a protection-racket where the marks are refusing to pay. There are too many marks rebelling for them to enforce their scam. This was never part of their business plan and they lack a graceful way to exit since it seems unlikely that the government will not back-stop their loss of profit.
ERJ - To your last point, had the Blue party remained in power (and perhaps been able to gain a majority), there might have been some driver for some sort of additional support in terms of direct grants or even taxes to keep up "the critical function of the media". That opportunity is past now. Instead, they are facing declining viewership and readership in an era where media is largely owned by corporations, which report to shareholders. At some point the shareholders should (and hopefully will) start coming after the parent companies for fiduciary irresponsibility.
ReplyDeleteThey have one small opportunity - right now - to reinvent themselves as a neutral third party pursuing actual news and truth. That said, my bet is that they squander that opportunity because they cannot overcome themselves.
Change is hard. Changing when you are older and set in your ways is harder. That is why most people and businesses never do it.
Snort...rats gonna rat... And yes, MSM is dead now.
ReplyDeleteI' m good with the lamestream media eating shit and dying. Couldn't happen to a more deserving crew.
ReplyDeleteSomething better will rise from the ashes.
Game Theory is a fascinating science. Back in the day a psychological experiment was done where the subjects played a game based on the prisoner’s dilemma. The subjects were told they were playing another human but they were actually playing a computer. In the game it was possible to give the computer the shaft and realize a short term benefit. But the computer could do the same to you. You could also play nice with the computer and it could do the same with you in return.
ReplyDeleteThe testing revealed that when the computer took the high road and refused to reciprocate the predatory betrayals of the human - the players all took the low road and screwed the computer on every turn. Then they set the computer to shaft the human player on every turn, and they both took the low road screwing each other at every opportunity. They found that both players did the best when the computer instantly reciprocated anything the human player did. If you screwed the computer in the game, it screwed you right back and just as bad. If you gave the computer a break, it gave you one.
Essentially it proved the truth about the old biblical nickel about trading an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat#Game_theory
DeleteTit-for-tat has been very successfully used as a strategy for the iterated prisoner's dilemma. The strategy was first introduced by Anatol Rapoport in Robert Axelrod's two tournaments,[3] held around 1980. Notably, it was (on both occasions) both the simplest strategy and the most successful in direct competition. Few have extended the game theoretical approach to other applications such as finance. In that context the tit for tat strategy was shown to be associated to the trend following strategy.[4]
Legacy media was a very willing and treasonous propaganda arm of a successful coup.
ReplyDeleteThey should stand trial at best or be hunted for sport at worst.
I suggest you read a copy of The Cornbread Mafia by James Higdon. Kentucky boys raised and sold hundreds of tons of marijuana over the years. No one ever testified against anyone when caught, so the fed could never bring RICO charges on the group.
ReplyDelete