Is game theory as insightful as it's made out to be?
Is game theory as insightful as it's made out to be?
I've seen game theory brought up as being incredibly useful for understanding reality, like the new cold war and the Al Aqsa Flood. Pretty much everyone I've seen praise it has been a lib though.
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I don't know extensively about it, but I have engaged with crossover science/biology/economic topics that deal with modelling "rational agents" to derive predictions. I find it overly reductive and hyper-individualist. It uses weird justification from "human nature" and static ideas of "conformity", "cooperation" and "non-cooperation" that only concern form and quantitative measures, depriving it of symbolic and meaning content. Its games and experiments are hyper static, isolated scenarios where real world implications and (material) relations are cast aside as "irrational" or unimportant factors, whereas for real humans these factors are central to their decisions and worldview.
I never understood how anyone can talk about "human nature" in a vacuum. People behave based on their material surroundings. Its human nature to have a certain portion of the population be serial killers, but most societies punish that kind of behavior. People raised in relative poverty are more likely to do crime. People that are racialized have difficulty getting better jobs, and thus many of them are in poverty. "Human nature" is an abdication of reason.