Where I teach game theory and piss people off
I thought of a great way of teaching game-theoretic equilibria today. The scenario is emo internet people.
Let's say you have a friend who leaves an entry that's like, "A Final Note: It's the end of the road for me. Everything has sucked so much I can't carry on." with tags of sigh;bitching;handgun_in_mouth
Now, you as an individual have to assess whether or not to take some kind of action. You can either intervene, or do nothing. Let's set up a game matrix
I'm not editing my box to correct the misspelled word that I Ctrl+C'd to double up on. Also, maybe instead of embarrassment, they get mad at you and you lose that friend, but we'll disregard that because really, "Fuck you. Sayonara, if you're going to be mad at me for that." Otherwise, the outcome is that you're losing the friend anyway, so why save them?
The top of each box is their outcome. The bottom of each box is your outcome. Now, you do not know whether or not the person is serious, so you have to assign probabilities to whether or not they're actually suicidal. Should you call the cops?
Well, you want to look at what you should do in the event of each move they can make. If they are suicidal, your choice is between doing nothing and feeling guilty forever, or stopping them. Clearly, I believe, you'd want to stop them.
If they are not suicidal, your choice is between being embarrassed and nothing. Now, you probably would nothing in that case, but if you're sick of their whining and think it would be good to show them why their behavior is obnoxious anyway, then you'd want to call the cops, in which case you'd call the cops in either case and that's your dominant strategy and clearly calling the cops is optimal.
But say it's not. Say if they weren't suicidal, you'd rather do nothing. Do you call the cops or not.
Well, let's say that you think them being suicidal is a tossup. If you do nothing, there's a 50% chance they die, but a 50% you forego the embarrassment. If you call the cops, there's a 50% you're both embarrassed, but a 50% chance you've saved their life. Either way, you want to call the cops if you weigh their life as much as the embarrassment. In this case, you'd call the cops.
Now assume you think there's a 90% chance they're not suicidal, and a 10% chance they are. Well, now you want to call the cops if saving their life is at least 9 times as important as avoiding embarrassment (since the probability they're not suicidal is 9 times as high as the probability they are). For most people, this would still be true.
So as long as the relative weight you put on stopping someone from killing themselves is greater than the probability they're not suicidal divided by the probability they are suicidal, you should call the cops.
Moral: If you don't want your friends to call the cops on you, don't make LJ posts that cause people to assign non-zero probabilities to the chance you're going to kill yourself! You're basically making your friends choose between embarrassing you or living with the fact they could have done something before you blow your head off. If you want to kill yourself, just do it and leave your friends alone about it. It'll make it easier on them in the long run.
The above is a one-shot game. If it's repeated, each time through you reduce the expected probability the person is going to kill themselves (the Boy Who Cried Wolf effect) and you reduce the cost to you of them killing themselves or of you embarassing them (the Annoying the Shit Out of You With Drama Erodes Your Friendship effect). Eventually, over enough iterations, the dominant strategy will become to do nothing because you assume the odds are negligible...and you stop caring very much about it anyway.
Let's say you have a friend who leaves an entry that's like, "A Final Note: It's the end of the road for me. Everything has sucked so much I can't carry on." with tags of sigh;bitching;handgun_in_mouth
Now, you as an individual have to assess whether or not to take some kind of action. You can either intervene, or do nothing. Let's set up a game matrix
I'm not editing my box to correct the misspelled word that I Ctrl+C'd to double up on. Also, maybe instead of embarrassment, they get mad at you and you lose that friend, but we'll disregard that because really, "Fuck you. Sayonara, if you're going to be mad at me for that." Otherwise, the outcome is that you're losing the friend anyway, so why save them?
The top of each box is their outcome. The bottom of each box is your outcome. Now, you do not know whether or not the person is serious, so you have to assign probabilities to whether or not they're actually suicidal. Should you call the cops?
Well, you want to look at what you should do in the event of each move they can make. If they are suicidal, your choice is between doing nothing and feeling guilty forever, or stopping them. Clearly, I believe, you'd want to stop them.
If they are not suicidal, your choice is between being embarrassed and nothing. Now, you probably would nothing in that case, but if you're sick of their whining and think it would be good to show them why their behavior is obnoxious anyway, then you'd want to call the cops, in which case you'd call the cops in either case and that's your dominant strategy and clearly calling the cops is optimal.
But say it's not. Say if they weren't suicidal, you'd rather do nothing. Do you call the cops or not.
Well, let's say that you think them being suicidal is a tossup. If you do nothing, there's a 50% chance they die, but a 50% you forego the embarrassment. If you call the cops, there's a 50% you're both embarrassed, but a 50% chance you've saved their life. Either way, you want to call the cops if you weigh their life as much as the embarrassment. In this case, you'd call the cops.
Now assume you think there's a 90% chance they're not suicidal, and a 10% chance they are. Well, now you want to call the cops if saving their life is at least 9 times as important as avoiding embarrassment (since the probability they're not suicidal is 9 times as high as the probability they are). For most people, this would still be true.
So as long as the relative weight you put on stopping someone from killing themselves is greater than the probability they're not suicidal divided by the probability they are suicidal, you should call the cops.
Moral: If you don't want your friends to call the cops on you, don't make LJ posts that cause people to assign non-zero probabilities to the chance you're going to kill yourself! You're basically making your friends choose between embarrassing you or living with the fact they could have done something before you blow your head off. If you want to kill yourself, just do it and leave your friends alone about it. It'll make it easier on them in the long run.
The above is a one-shot game. If it's repeated, each time through you reduce the expected probability the person is going to kill themselves (the Boy Who Cried Wolf effect) and you reduce the cost to you of them killing themselves or of you embarassing them (the Annoying the Shit Out of You With Drama Erodes Your Friendship effect). Eventually, over enough iterations, the dominant strategy will become to do nothing because you assume the odds are negligible...and you stop caring very much about it anyway.