Sveinbjorn Thordarson

Ég hef undanfarið fylgst vandlega með bloggsíðu sem heimspekingurinn Robert Wolff hefur haldið úti: Formal Methods in Political Philosophy. Þetta er röð af færslum um leikjafræði og misnotkun hennar í stjórnspeki. Vel þess virði að lesa ef menn eru á annað borð áhugasamir um slíka hluti. Best að byrja á fyrstu færslunni og lesa síðan áfram í tímaröð.

Niðurstaða hans:

The appeal of Game Theory to social scientists, philosophers, and others, is that it offers a powerful analytical structure. That power is achieved, as I have labored to show you, by making a series of very precise, constraining simplifications and assumptions. As soon as you start relaxing those assumptions and simplifications, you rapidly lose the power of the analytical framework. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. By the time you have loosened things up enough so that you can fit your own concerns and problems into the Game Theory conceptual framework, you will almost certainly have lost the rigor and power you were lusting after, and you are probably better off using your ordinary powers of analysis and reason [mín áhersla]. Otherwise, you are just tricking your argument out in a costume, in effect wearing the garb of a Jedi knight and carrying a toy light saber to impress your children.