second protester: drops caltrops, hopefully on a slow-driving road
state: huffs and puffs, but won’t find the person
That wouldn’t be a smart way to play this game. :( As long as civilized protest gets the goods (or has some effect), one should always prefer that. It’s short-sighted to remodel the playing field to make it dangerous.
I hope the sentence will be something ridiculously small, because otherwise state is sending out a signal “you shouldn’t get caught, consider real sabotage instead of civilized protest”.
Since we’re talking game theory, a basic rule in any competitive game (from chess to League of Legends) is that focusing on loss prevention is a losing tactic.
We’ve been doing peaceful protest since the beginning of the environmental movement. It’s not getting the goods and the earth is dying. What we need it’s a diversity of tactics.
Exactly. While the majority of human social games are nonzero sum, playing against the oil industry is zero sum. In order for human life to continue to exist, the oil industry must not exist. This is an extermination game.
Within a zero sum game, there’s no room to deal or ask for concessions because the survival of each side depends on winning. Corporations focus on immediate profits, so they don’t account for the long term. It’s useless to think about them as rational actors, because they are not. They have one objective and they are not capable of accounting for the long term effects of that because if they did, they couldn’t exist anyway. If the political system is poisoned by the oil industry, then protests can’t really work. This game is the same game as nuclear war, after the war has started. Asking to stop the war at that point wouldn’t make any sense. The only way to survive is to destroy the enemy, as fast as possible, by any means necessary. To not do everything possible to end petroleum is to accept death.
An exercise in game theory:
That wouldn’t be a smart way to play this game. :( As long as civilized protest gets the goods (or has some effect), one should always prefer that. It’s short-sighted to remodel the playing field to make it dangerous.
I hope the sentence will be something ridiculously small, because otherwise state is sending out a signal “you shouldn’t get caught, consider real sabotage instead of civilized protest”.
Since we’re talking game theory, a basic rule in any competitive game (from chess to League of Legends) is that focusing on loss prevention is a losing tactic.
We’ve been doing peaceful protest since the beginning of the environmental movement. It’s not getting the goods and the earth is dying. What we need it’s a diversity of tactics.
Exactly. While the majority of human social games are nonzero sum, playing against the oil industry is zero sum. In order for human life to continue to exist, the oil industry must not exist. This is an extermination game.
Within a zero sum game, there’s no room to deal or ask for concessions because the survival of each side depends on winning. Corporations focus on immediate profits, so they don’t account for the long term. It’s useless to think about them as rational actors, because they are not. They have one objective and they are not capable of accounting for the long term effects of that because if they did, they couldn’t exist anyway. If the political system is poisoned by the oil industry, then protests can’t really work. This game is the same game as nuclear war, after the war has started. Asking to stop the war at that point wouldn’t make any sense. The only way to survive is to destroy the enemy, as fast as possible, by any means necessary. To not do everything possible to end petroleum is to accept death.