Anarchy

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Really? Then why is there so much strife in the world and so much un-cooperation?

People will cooperate in small family groups and kin groups. Cooperation is not so evidence among strangers.

ruveyn

Not sure if you're replying to the right person, but it tends to be:

Does working with this person come out positively in the cost benefit analysis as opposed to going at it alone?

With kin and family groups altering the input in the cost benefit analysis.

No, not putting enough pressure on people in your experiments when working with empirical evidence skews your results. Put 2 unrelated families in a locked cage with only enough food for one of them to survive and you'll see your theory come to pieces faster than the weaker family.

It's the same basic issue as with deception detection, unless there is something at risk, people tend to not show the signs of lying when they do.

That's odd. My experience is that rational choice theory is the only usual social theory after I left the sheltered existence of the university. I must not live in the real world.

Oh, and I find it hard to contemplate *any* war which was not in someone's interest....

So you have no experimental results because of bad experiments?
This my friend is the hallmark of pseudo-science.

* did you intend another word here because what you said does not make sense.

(1) The requirement is not for it to be in someones interest but in most participants interest.
Name me the war were this was true.

Rational choice is an Irrational and anti-empirical dogma and folks should be laughed at for even bringing it up.

Do you have issues reading? I said and I quote "No, not putting enough pressure on people in your experiments when working with empirical evidence skews your results. "

If there is a "tit for tat" going on, IE both actors get a larger upside by cooperating rather than competing, people will mostly cooperate. However, if there is a prize on the line for the winner, both sides tend to go for the win if the prize is meaningful.

I didn't make a statement about me having experimental results, you can in fact find quite a few in the field of game theory. However, the limits to those experiments that do show that humans are more likely to cooperate are flawed in that the favored strategy in a vast majority of those experiments per game theory is "tit for tat".

If you want a true view into human nature, look at how people behaved in places like Auschwitz. The ideal experiment would be a binary zero-sum experiment with death being the outcome for one participant and life for the other.

So long as we are not dealing with physiological needs as per Maslow's hierarchy, your experiments are invalid.

Point taken. I meant *useful* not *usual* (major typo). I guess that posting sprees guarantee quantity with much greater success than quality. My mileage might vary.

As for (1) the point is moot. Since this is an anarchy thread (or at least started out as one) even a small preference for war over peace may result in war, as there is no external constraint on violence.... wars can only avoided with complete certainty if there is no one interested in instigating war.

Oh, and despite further attacks against rational choice (irrational (?) and anti-empirical), you haven't provided empirical proof of such, nor demonstrated a superiority of an alternate approach...

If am to be laughed at for making use of an approach which has worked well for me, I would at least like an explanation...

As I said, Syria lacks a "clear, vertical authority structure." Competing virtual authority structures lead to anarchy.

You have the burden of proof on this one. Experimental work has found 0 evidence for rational choice, practical games never reach the nash equilibrium ever.
Do you want a list of papers to this effect?

If John Nash sez there is a teapot in orbit around the Sun is it my job to prove him wrong?

Truth concerning the burden of proof.

But if Ostrom, North, Weingast and others observe the same teapot through a telescope, you should perhaps stop being mean to a guy who has Ed Harris screaming in his ear .

IMO, experiments are mostly useless in the social sciences, by the way, due to Hawthorne/experimenter effects. Statistics - with all of its flaws - is probably the only tool capable of arriving at anything remotely scientific in this field...

Oh, and both Elinor Ostrom and Douglass North were awarded their Nobel prizes for their empirical work on rational choice. So was the the Asperger economist Vernon Smith, but like I said - I am not impressed by experiments in the social sciences...

Burden of proof (other relevant authors are Gary Miller, Xavier Sala-I-Martin, Robert Barro, Ernst Fehr and Bruno Frey):
Ostrom, Elinor - Governing The Commons
North, Douglass & Weingast, Barry - Constitutions and Commitments: The evolution of institutional governing public choice in seventeenth-century England
North, Douglass - Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance
Weingast, Barrh & Mark Moran - Bureaucratic Discretion or Congressional Control: Regulatory Policymaking by the FTC.

In other words, I have two Nobel prizes providing empirical support for rational choice, and I wouldn't be surprised if Barro took the third... Can we shift the burden of proof to the alternative theories, now?

It leads to anarchy in the "chaos" sense, but it is not anarchism itself. Competing [didn't you mean vertical?] authority structures are still vertical authority structures. Anarchism is not about the "clear", but about the "vertical". From the point of view of a lowly individual, all of these competing structures are still an "outside", a dominating power lording over citizen-subjects.

I think we are arguing a bit past each other, though.

Okay, but which version of anarchism are you contrasting Syria against?



Yes, vertical. I just saw my typo.



I understand your definition of anarchism. However, it is not the only one. For instance:



Syria lacks a "central overarching authority."



Well, arguments about semantics can only go so far.

One which has almost never been used in actual practice. I'm mostly thinking in anarcho-collectivist terms myself, but I'm very open-minded. AFAIK, no real anarchism has destroying one actual vertical structure without replacing it with a new form of organization as an objective,

I understand that it is a utopia, but utopias are fun. I never said that anarchism could be created, only that it could work if it were implemented.


In that sense, yes, but I find this definition incorrect. It is not an operational definition because it is too broad and includes (as I said) the negative absence of "central overarching authority", where that is just lacking (Syria), as well as the positive one, where that was replaced by another kind of solidary organization (anarchism).

It's both unfair and misleading to describe both with the same name.

I think you may have to insert a whole bunch of "In my opinion"s in that it have it make any sense.
You seem value theory over empirical data and continue making irrational assertions.
That is what astrologers do that is what homeopaths do that is what rational-choice hacks do.

You have no Nobel prize winners that believe in rational choice. For two reasons first Elinor is famous for saying there are no panaceas and what works in one place does not work in a another . I assume you have not actually read Governing the Commons. (I had to she was my advisor)
Both of them are institutional economists not rational choice hacks.
Doug said


Neither of them won the Nobel Prize there is no nobel prize in economics.

So I suggest you actually read the reading list you gave me.

p.s. Appeal to authority while a logical fallacy works much better when the authority you are appealing to actually agrees with you.

p.p.s. Statistics also do not back-up rational choice.