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Tit-for-tat might work when it's only one individual vs another, or if it's something like nuke strikes where only a handful of people have access to the Big Red Button. But it's just flatly not going to work in cases of big amorphous coalitions for all the reasons I listed. Also, the Left hardly had their behavior for "free", they plausibly lost 1-2 elections because of it, and the specific woke subfaction that is most loving of cancel culture hasn't been this politically irrelevant in a decade or more.
Tit for tat leading to large diffuse groups wanting to come to the table obviously happens. It’s so common and predictable that we have a term for it: “war weariness”. War weariness is not just leaders deciding to compromise, it’s an attitude shift in the entire population. It takes a lot of time and a lot of pain, but it does happen. Cancel culture may not be high intensity enough to induce war weariness between the right and left, but you can’t dismiss it out of hand.
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If you're saying that game theory doesn't apply to groups or coalitions, then I have to disagree. If you're saying that the grudger strategy specifically doesn't work, well, sure it does. It may be mathematically non-optimal but it is a strategy that fits into most people's moral intuitions.
As they say, hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue. The old social trust has been dynamited: there is likely no escape from this partisan cycle. This is the post Christian world that the postmodernists wanted. We now hate our enemies and wish the worst for them, as the president says.
This is true, on both sides. Only a small minority of actual liberals hold to anything else, but no one is listening to them anymore. Your arguments are made to a people whose ethos no longer exists.
Yes because Christians were famously tolerant of their enemies. Human's have hated their enemies since we had enemies to hate. The thin veneer of civilizing flavor has never been much of an impediment.
This would be a good example of political hypocrisy, thinking that one's side is near blameless and is full of virtue and the other side is daft villains and rapscallions.
Christians were tolerant, and that's where the social trust came in. They were tolerant of those they still saw as their own. One side decided they weren't Christian anymore, which was one thing. Then they decided they weren't just non-Christian, but anti-Christian. Then they decided that whiteness (not necessarily white people, but kind of) was the problem. A smaller segment wasn't just non-white, but blatantly anti-white. Another small segment wasn't just non-straight, but effectively anti-straight. Then another segment decided they weren't capitalist anymore, but seize the means of production anti-capitalists. The right wing has its fair share of insanity and intolerance, but nearly all of these newly held philosophies on morality and economics and race are all on the Democratic side.
We were a flawed unit that, despite our differences, saw each other as part of the same group because we all basically had the same moral, and somewhat social, and somewhat cultural foundations. That rug was completely ripped out from under our society. We decided to teach our kids critical thinking for years, and boy are they critical now, of everything. They grasp onto ideas over material reality. Hop on over to reddit if you need a reminder of how important critical thinking (critical theory) is to those people.
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I never said game theory broadly doesn't apply to coalitions in any scenarios, I said the fundamental assumptions that would make tit-for-tat a dominant strategy are broken. Most game theory arguments assume a small number of competitors and perfect information. Cancel culture of one coalition vs another is a case of millions of competitors sort of half-playing the game (along with dozens of other games simultaneously), also the pieces and the board are shrouded in fog.
This type of stuff is accelerationism, which I addressed in the post.
What are you talking about, the most famous prisoner's dilemma is actually built around absence of information. You have games which are so huge that they are named as social dilemmas with potentially millions or even billions of players such as tragedy of commons.
The classic prisoner's dilemma is one of complete/perfect information about the game, including the opponent's payoff information. There are a variety of incomplete/imperfect information games (some people distinguish between the two), where a player may lack information about the environment, their own payoff, other parties' payoff, some form of secret goal/intention/capability/etc.
You are right that there is one piece of information that is lacking, namely, what specific strategy the opponent will, in fact, choose. Given that this is generically a feature of almost all games that are considered in the field, it is usually not a feature that gains the moniker of "incomplete/imperfect information". That is reserved for those other games, and things like the classic prisoner's dilemma are, indeed, called "complete information games".
Games in which one knows what specific strategy the opponent will pick are, in my own view of the field, not even properly called "games". They are simply optimization problems.
Sure, you however even have variants of prisoner's dilemma that are mapped for real world situations - such as iterated prisoner's dilemma that can be used to study problems like nuclear arms race. You can even include various real world information asymmetries - e.g. lack of information about opponents capabilities, their confidence and information about your capabilities, their level of "spite" so their willingness to act erratically etc. You have different games modeling economic behavior used to construct various types of auctions between many players etc.
The point being, that your original claim of how most game theory arguments assume a small number of competitors and perfect information is incorrect. In fact you could model the cancell culture as an arms race variant of group prisoners dilemma between two coalitions.
I was not the original commenter, so I made no such claim.
The extent to which game theory maps well to real world situations with humans participants is hotly debated, even among expert practitioners. My experience is that it is phenomenal how you can sometimes get abstractions for some particular problems that are quite beautiful and genuinely aid with intuition. However, as you increase the realism and complexity, many methods run into difficulty. Naturally, that's why we have a lot of work in those domains, to try to extend the set of formal problems where we have methods that work. There might be upper-level undergrad courses which can somewhat survey the simpler settings and mayyyybe touch a bit on the rest of the field, but I think it's most likely going to be a grad class, if one exists at your uni (you'd be surprised how rare they are), and honestly, it probably is still difficult to really survey the lot of it.
I don't know what the other commenter would say, but I personally have seen a ton of extremely shitty appeals to game theory when it comes to politics or morality. I haven't harped on the former yet (though it's been on the back of my mind to do so for a while), but I've definitely harped on the latter. The vast majority of folks who appeal to it for these purposes do not have any idea about these features of the field. The vast majority of them have, like, heard of the prisoner's dilemma. And that's sort of it. They know approximately zero more and just imagine the rest of the effin' owl in their mind.
I'll note the kind of funny bit that the classic iterated prisoner's dilemma is two participants, complete information. Yes, one can do imperfect/incomplete information or multiple-player, and there's a lot of interesting work there. Good luck if you think you're going to find someone in a forum like this who has a reasonable sense of the state of those parts of the field and is able to use it to usefully inform their view of politics/morality. It's always, over and over again, just repeats of arguments about chump-level understanding of variants of the iterated prisoner's dilemma.
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The fact that its a big, amorphous coalition that has differing values just indicates the retaliation has to be stiffer than might otherwise be required, and that appropriate targeting is required.
The problem the left has at the moment is that moderates just don't matter- they are drowned out by the extremist voices, and policy proposals become about pandering to the loudest wing nuts.
Cancel all of the far left nut jobs, and you give space for the center left to actually have a reasonable conversation.
I think its pretty big stretch to say cancel culture actually lost the left any elections. Maybe didnt have as much of an effect as they were hoping, sure. But outside of some cheap "they tried to cancel him! Next they'll cancel you!" propaganda, I dont know what concrete bemefit it actually provided to the right.
This just exacerbates the third point I made why retaliation to re-establish deterrence doesn't work: it'll be perceived as uncontrolled escalation by the other side. At this point you're just throwing gasoline on the fire.
This is so much less true today than during peak woke (roughly 2017-2020).
The mainstream left is protecting leftists who are calling for the murder of right-wingers. Moderates still don't matter aside from being complicit by staying quiet.
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