Quote:
Originally Posted by newguy1234
What I mean is, 10 extra bux, although it's +$ev, does not help this individual gain, if it deviates the entire world he/she lives in towards war.
oooooooooooooooooooh, i see the problem. You aren't counting deviations in isolation the way you are supposed to.
When someone says "player A can deviate and improve his score" that carries with it an implicit assumption of already knowing that the other players do, ie that they don't deviate. So in the quoted example, Player A gets 10 extra bucks. There is no rest of world deviating towards war. Player A changes, rest of the world stays the same.
Now i get that you are just trying to say that "well, if player A deviates, then player B would also deviate in retaliation, and now they are both worse off". Right? Is this your point? So when you say "Player A can't deviate and be better off" you really mean "Player A can't deviate and be better off because player B will also deviate in retaliation and things continue to spiral downward".
These are not at all the same thing.
Assuming that this actually is what you mean, they were right when they said you don't understand what a Nash Equilibrium is, because if you are using it in this way, you are completely wrong. You need to only look at changing 1 action, not changing all actions.