07/13/2026
Continue discussing Steven Pinker’s Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, July 25, 2026, from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM Central Standard Time using Google Meet.
On July 11, 2026, our group of four examined the games people play while exploring Steven Pinker’s Rationality and found out how game theory is used to study interdependent decision-making. Almost any human, economic, or biological interaction can be modeled as a game. Every game contains three elements: Players, Strategies, and Payoffs. Players are the decision-makers that can be individuals, companies, political parties, nations, or even selfish genes. Strategies are the complete set of choices, rules, or actions available to a player. Payoffs are the reward or utility a player receives at the intersection of both choices. To analyze a turn of a game, one can map out choices using a Payoff Matrix, laying out pairs of opponents’ decisions in each square and determining each player's gain or loss.
A player anticipates the actions of opponents, partners, or competitors, also knowing that the opponents are trying to anticipate the player’s next move. The Nash Equilibrium, named after mathematician and Nobel Laureate in economics John Nash, is when no one has an incentive to change their strategy unilaterally. Every player is making their absolute best possible move, resulting in stability or a stalemate. A single player cannot improve his/her outcome without others to choose cooperation. The equilibrium is a trap where everyone loses out on a better deal because they cannot trust each other to switch together.
Zero-Sum, Positive-Sum, and Negative-Sum Games are the foundational types of games. Zero-Sum Games (Win-Lose) are situations where the total amount of resources or wealth is fixed. For one player to gain an advantage, the other player must lose the exact equivalent amount. There is no room for cooperation because your opponent's failure is the prerequisite for your success. The Scissors, Paper, Rock Game is an example where the two opponents have three choices. On a 3-by-3 grid, where each opponent’s choices are laid out, there are nine possible outcomes. A player and his opponent each have three grids that yield a win, for a total of six to net only a point, and three situations where there is a tie, where no points are awarded. The number of points does not increase.
In a positive-sum game (Win-Win), the total pool of resources or utility expands during the course of the interaction. When adding up everyone's payoffs at the end, the net sum is greater than what was there in the beginning. While players might still compete over how to divide the newly created wealth, the primary strategic driver is working together to make the collective pie as large as possible. Pinker tells a story about mice deciding to put a bell on the cat to warn them when the cat is nearby. This creates the volunteer’s dilemma, a brutal trap illustrating how a group of rational actors can fail to achieve a positive-sum outcome, even when everyone agrees on what the ideal outcome should be. Who will break the Nash Equilibrium to volunteer to take the risk of putting the bell on the cat when it is napping?
In Negative-Sum Games (Lose-Lose), the aggregate value, resources, or wealth of the system shrinks or is actively destroyed. The Tragedy of the Commons is an example where the over-exploitation of a shared resource destroys it for everyone. Mutually Assured Destruction, all-out nuclear war, inflicts horrendous costs on both sides, and the best option for both players is not to play this game. Also, one can start a war with dubious goals, without knowing all the responses the opponent may make, which can turn an apparent win into a stalemate or loss. The first law of holes: if you are in a hole, stop digging. As a commentator said about the Iran War, "All this to stop a nuke that didn't exist and open a strait that wasn't closed."
In economics, what would be the best choice of game to increase the wealth of nations? To play the Win-Lose game, will only a few gain? To play the Lose-Lose game, will everyone lose the benefits of progress? To play a Win-Win game, will there be a challenge of learning to cooperate? This is a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and Thomas Hobbes offers his ideas on cooperation. Everyone surrenders some of their liberties, breaking the Nash Equilibrium, to form a social contract so all lives are not short, nasty, and brutish. As a corollary, one of us said, “Make decisions that allow you to make more decisions.”
In our next meeting, we will dive into how to discern correlation from causation as we continue to discuss Steven Pinker’s Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, BF441.P56 2021, on July 25, 2026, from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM. Send a request for the meeting link, and I will send it to you. I create a new Google Meet link for each discussion. Captions are available on Google Meet. Anyone can enable closed captioning for their screen, and I will show how to turn on captions for each meeting.
I hope to see you on July 25, 2026,
Kang
