Prisoner's Dilemma

William Poundstone

2 annotations • data

First annotation on Aug 10th, 2025.

Chapter 1

Dilemmas like this are sometimes discussed in college ethics classes. There's no satisfactory answer, of course. It's a cop-out to insist that you should do nothing (don't push the button and allow the machine to kill the spouse) on the grounds that you cannot be "guilty" for doing nothing at all. You can only decide which of the two you like better and spare that one. Choices are even more difficult when someone else is making a choice, too, and the outcome depends on all the choices made. A similar but more thought-provoking dilemma appears in Gregory Stock's The Book of Questions (1987): "You and a person you love deeply are placed in separate rooms with a button next to each of you. You know that both of you will be killed unless one of you presses your button before sixty minutes pass; furthermore, the first person to press the button will save the other person, but will immediately be killed. What do you think you would do?"
Game theory is a study of conflict between thoughtful and potentially deceitful opponents. This may make it sound like game theory is a branch of psychology rather than mathematics. Not so: because the players are assumed to be perfectly rational, game theory admits of precise analysis. Game theory is therefore a rigorous branch of mathematical logic that underlies real conflicts among (not always rational) humans. Most great advances in science come when a person of insight recognizes common elements in seemingly unrelated contexts. This describes the genesis of game theory. Von Neumann recognized that parlor games pose elemental conflicts. It was these conflicts, normally obscured by the window dressing of cards and chessmen and dice, that occupied von Neumann. He perceived similar conflicts in economics, politics, daily life, and war.