Slashdot Mirror
Climate Treaty Negotiators Are Taking the Wrong Approach, Say Game Theorists
An anonymous reader writes "Climate treaty negotiators would do well to have a little chat with some game theorists, according to this article. The fundamental approach they've been taking for the last several years is flawed, these researchers say, and they can prove it. From the article: 'The scientists gave members of a 10-member group their country’s “treasure”: a 20-euro national savings account, plus a fund for spending on emissions reductions that consisted of 10 black chips worth 10 cents apiece and 10 red chips worth one euro apiece. Each person could then contribute any number of these chips to a common pool. The contributed chips represented greenhouse gas reduction strategies that were relatively inexpensive (black) or expensive (red). Players could communicate freely about their plans for how many chips they intended to contribute.'"
I think there is already quite enough gaming in the Climate Treaty discussion.
But who's going to "give" the treasure and what will be the source of the funding? Serious question.
And to what end since China will *never* play the game. They have no reason to - they own everything.
A good read: Death by China... (Also a movie narrated by Martin Sheen.)
The negotiations must fail, because they're all based on blame and negativity. Fingerpointing between the first world and the developing world is not at all useful. Every premise we've seen so far has been based on the lose-lose more strategy of negotiating.
We're fucked.
...take Game Theory to heart? How did that work out?
Once one is shown Carbon reduction projects are only 30% effective with a situation where for every euro spent on the actual Carbn reduction, a euro goes to the investment banker class one comes to understand why reasonable people are opposed.
30 percent – Investment banks often buy up carbon offsets before a project is up and running, and they take an average 30 percent of the total in profits and operations.
Further from the report:
15 percent – Shareholders of the companies putting the offset project together tend to take 15 percent in profits.
15 percent – Taxes, bank interest and fees.
10 percent – The margin normally taken by the retailer of carbon offsets, who sells them to corporations, individuals and other entities.
I wonder if the game included one very powerful player who will lose his power and profits if the reduction strategies are implemented.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if the researchers let the players form assurance contracts, either the normal or "dominant" version. I don't know if it would work, but this is exactly the problem they're supposed to solve.
Think about it... there can only be two kinds of people who behave according to "game theory":
-Economists
-Psychopaths
I'm planning on watching this BBC Documentary this weekend; it looks like the first segment discusses game theory.
It was a geography class and we were supposed to be countries working together. If everyone in the group chose A, everyone got 1 point, but if anyone chose B, they got several points while everyone else lost points. If everyone chose B, everyone lost points. In only took a couple of rounds before we lost all trust for each other and always picked B, so at least you only lost the same as everyone else. Kind of sad that international politics is often so similar.
Enjoy post-apocalyptic and singularity science fiction? Check out www.demonarchives.com, a new online graphic-novel.
You can't just take a paragraph at random from the article and throw it up onto the screen. I mean, you can, but it's not useful. Having read the article it's an interesting experiment, but the summary gives me no information about the other important piece: when the number of chips to avert disaster is set at 150 and known, the players cooperate; while when that number is unknown except for "between 100 and 200" everybody skimps on contributions and loses 15 euros plus whatever they contributed.
On the other hand, the summary could just be missing the last sentence, "And that's how I became the prince of Fresh Air."
Your brain is not a computer.
In frustration, I read the linked article, because I couldn't tell what the actual was about, from the Slashdot summary. Here's a better summary:
Researchers gave each person a national treasury of €20. In order to avert catastrophe, a minimum of €150 in the main pool had to be collected total. If catastrophe is not averted, each player's account is depleted by €15. Players got to keep any remaining money in their national treasury. In almost every game, people contributed enough money to avert catastrophe. It was only when the catastrophe was made more unpredictable that the game collapsed. Instead of requiring €150 to completely avert disaster, the catastrophe had a chance of happening based on how much money was allocated. In the second scenario, people promised enough money to minimize the risk, yet they did not allocate it, thinking that the odds would not be significantly increased if they underfunded the mitigation. Because so many people "embezzled", the odds were significantly affected and the catastrophe invariably occurred.
Basically, the players should have studied their Kant.
Sounds like cap 'n trade to me.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
What describes the situation best is the Principal-Agent problem
Example from the Wiki: "Consider a dental patient (the principal) wondering whether his dentist (the agent) is recommending expensive treatment because it is truly necessary for the patient's dental health, or because it will generate income for the dentist."
Set your phasers on "funky"!
The given scenario states, that we are all doomed, because there is no fixed point of disaster. However, they missed one thing. If if we had a fixed point. The point is outside of our lifespan. The effect of our doing will hit our children children. Therefore, the game has to be changed. You get the money and can spend it on green stuff. And when enough of the others do the same, the next group of people who plays the game gets the money.
environmentalism like this is just a sham to make the public believe politicians care. it even greated a big field for shark economists. would you make treaties about how much you could rape/kill/murder/burn someone over a timespan ? could make a great game: "i sell you my right to rape her ..."
"Think about it... there can only be two kinds of people who behave according to "game theory":
-Economists
-Psychopaths"
That applies to de-facto mainstream game theory as held by (most) economists who work in the corporate world.
But in academics there is an alternate view about game theory, that says the best approach is to cooperate rather than to compete. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_game
I was kinda hoping that they suggested the climate negotiators pick up the Pentagram of Protection and Quad Damage then go after them with a rocket launcher or super nailgun.
In my experience the difference between psychopaths and the rest of us is not in how we behave, but in how we feel afterwards.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
For another set of graphics see: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/
Well, It is true that is "Hard to know whom to believe" if you can choose the graphics and facts to support your "gut feeling".
I agree completely. For example, most people would panic less if they knew that those graphs you linked to combine some of highest quality measurements we know how to make today, with other data points that are not really measurements of temperature at all, but merely a product of highly uncertain conjecture. Some of that content is practically useless as a presentation of scientific knowledge; but if it showed error estimates, then it would become useless as a tool to promote climate hysteria. And we can't have that. So it continues being what it is.
Don't blame math for the people misusing it.
You've phrased that incorrectly, because all people can "behave according" to game theory, but they may not be aware or else each be playing at a different game. In their example, they demonstrate incetive based reasoning with clear short term and long term benefits. They found that most people chose the short term benefit because they couldn't justify the value of their contribution to the more intangible long term benefit. So they took their chances on being able to weather what they considered a lesser loss.
If, in this game, they were told to play three times where after the first game the chips they had left were passed on to their children to use in the next, they could more realistically see the results of their decisions. If they did not contribute to the pot, then the threshold would never decrease, and they would be able to see that their children did not have a chance, no matter what they did. If their incentive switched from being able to keep a few coins to ensuring the survival of their children, the results might have been dramatically different.
Many people will do less than they possibly can because of the idea that someone else somehow pick up the slack, that their contribution in the grand scale of things doesn't matter, or that it's a waste of time and energy to tackle such small problems when they have so much else to do, which may be true in many cases. We have street sweepers, so why pick up the litter along the gutters? Why make a mock up of those projections myself, if I'm pretty sure Erica is already doing them? Why shouldn't we keep drilling for coal and oil and then converting it to CO2, we've been doing it for centuries and the planet is still here?
Conversely, there are also people who think primarily in the long term and make decisions which are designed to avoid expected future issues. However, it is a difficult position to justify, uphold, and perhaps monetize when others are already gaining profit from the things you've intentionally abstained from doing. Game theory is practical in this sense, because it demonstrates outcomes of decisions that rely on deeply human nature and gives us a chance to either meet it or rise above it; we use it to see realistically how we use our intellect.
Because a Slashdot poster says that's the thing to do.
Seriously, you guys think too highly of yourselves.
If model and reality disagree then reality must be wrong.
Only the Daily Mail's article you so desperately want to be a true was, in fact, a lie:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/16/daily-mail-global-warming-stopped-wrong
"Hard to know whom to believe" is a fair comment, but the answer is very rarely "The Daily Mail".
It is a trashy tabloid that styles pretends it is a serious broadsheet. Pretty much a joke to most people in the UK.
http://www.mailwatch.co.uk/
Math is not a model of anything. You should learn game theory before bashing it.
Much simpler generalizations are pimped for all manner of ideology in philosophy, politics, economics, education, ...
For important issues, apparently, we just have to choose the right mission statement and let the divine hand of providence guide us to safety.
Mind the pun, but I am curious. The oil company in charge of Canada for the last while keeps pushing this bizarre (to me, at least) idea that because we have so much land, it doesnâ(TM)t matter that we are the worst per capita greenhouse gas emitters.
Clearly, it is self serving. Did they just settle on the population density because it is convenient and sounds vaguely valid? The footprint already accounts for the carbon sink of all that vegetation...
According to the Guardian article you linked to, some people have detected a tiny upward trend in the dataset, but it occurs entirely within the margin of error, i.e. within the noise. I'm sure Professor Curry at Georgia Tech feels duly rebuked. :D
Per the article "the trend is not statistically significant". In other words, the Null Hypothesis of no temperature change remains valid.
Let's do real science. Don't tease out a 0.01C/year trend using statistical tricks and crappy thermometer citing and call it a catastrophe.
The "How Skeptics View Global Warming" chart is retarded. They cherry pick 50 years for their graph.
They don't show how it was hotter both 1000 and 2000 years ago.
This sounds essentially like the Tragedy of the Commons only instead of taking out resources we're talking about voluntary putting resources in. It's an interesting analysis to explicitly demonstrate what I think we already implicitly knew.
Yes it is. The whole damn point of *actual* math is, that it is about finding useful abstract patterns in reality that are applicable to a whole host of very interesting other things. Just like, by definition, every other science. But nothing is as abstract as math, since math focuses on those patterns that don't need *any* special physical context. A really beautiful thing. And as invisible as its usefulness is to laymen, as extremely useful it is in reality.
The notion of math having "no point" or being its own point, is spread by idiots who thing what is told in school would be related to math. It's about as related as color-by-the-number is related to real painting (art).
The CO2 per capita is a completely specious argument. The only question is your net CO2 consumption, but all the figures thrown about are the gross production. According to this book: http://www.amazon.com/Bottomless-Well-Twilight-Virtue-Energy/dp/046503117X , North America is the only continent which consumes more CO2 than it produces. It can do this largely because it is sparsely populated, and has a large amount of forests and vegetation compared to its population. It should be self evident that a given land mass can only support so many people given a particular level of technology. My suspicion is that Europe and China are over that limit, and the USA is under. As others have mentioned, much of the world outsources their agriculture to us, and we outsource much of our manufacturing to others, so we can't just say everyone gets so much CO2 per square foot of land. But we also can't just say every person gets so much CO2. It is a complicated global problem, and the best we can do globally, is to make sure that the cost to maintain our CO2 at healthy levels is incorporated into the price of the goods and services produced. The problem is that, while the task can be stated simply, it is quite complicated to implement.
This is starting out with the premise that the countries agree to chip in x dollars to fight climate change
The U.S. is not going to do that and without American leadership nothing is going to happen
So they need to come up with a game theory that will compel the U.S. to lead on climate change - without U.S. leadership it just becomes a muddled international treaty without teeth (this isn't to say the U.S. is the superpower of the past but its the glue that can make all the other countries stick together)
Sounds like a multiplayer version of this. Cooperate and receive a payoff, don't and you all lose.
One problem is: he current models don't make useful predictions and so the contribution necessary to avert future 'disaster' or how that contribution is to be spent isn't certain. Or even if the results of that spending might make things worse rather than better.
The other problem: The outcome is in the future and is uncertain. Prisoner's dilemma only really works if the game is trusted. That is; if it is known what the outcomes will be for any given combination of moves. The climate models don't predict this well enough to make reasonable decisions.
Have gnu, will travel.
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/83468/global-warming
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
But in academics there is an alternate view about game theory, that says the best approach is to cooperate rather than to compete.
Cooperation and competition are not mutually exclusive. We call them coalitions.
"His name was James Damore."
This assumes perfect intergenerational altruism, which is not observed in practice. The experiment shows that an unknown threshold removes on Nash equilibrium. Multi round games would eventually reduce to a one round game at termination. Only if there is no known endpoint does threat against the future look credible.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
Nicely cherry picked data combined with a outright lie about what the natural forcing is.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
They're working towards a different desired outcome. The climate treaty negotiators are politicians, their goal has nothing to do with climate change. It's a combination of ego, kickbacks and self promotion. The sooner they finish arguing and come up with a solution, the sooner they stop getting paid.
I'm planning on watching this BBC Documentary this weekend; it looks like the first segment discusses game theory.
I'm planning on watching it, too. For anyone else who wants to make plans to watch BBC's The Trap:
https://torrents.thepiratebay.se/3795702/The_Trap__What_Happened_To_Our_Dream_Of_Freedom__(Adam_Curtis.3795702.TPB.torrent
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Game Theory is wrong. Has always been wrong and that is not going to change. It is best ignored and avoided in all cases.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory
It's irrelevant to the control of global warming, but it *is* relevant to the fairness of the regulations. There are, however, other factors. Enough other factors, that I'm dubious that people could come to an agreement on what was fair even in the absence of strong economic incentives to argue.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I'm planning on watching this BBC Documentary this weekend; it looks like the first segment discusses game theory.
Perhaps not quite up there with some of Adam Curtis' other stuff (e.g. Pandora's Box), but definitely well worth watching.
Unlikely. Return to the Dark Ages would promptly unleash the 4 Horsemen - conquest, war, famine and death - resulting in a drop in population, resulting in a drop in emissions. And probably most people would stop complaining about anything but the lack of food. Which, come to think of it, fixed the problem of people complaining about global warming or whatever it is we're arguing about.
But i'm with you, i think - i'd rather keep living. I'd die pretty quickly outside a modern society.
Wow that BBC special looks great... thanks for the tip!
I believe that the problem here is that we divide the stakes based on political entities, namely 'the nations'.
Besides that, the system of the game is so buggy.
Conceptually, there are two kinds of identities in this game: the referees and the players. However the referees are just themselves the players right now, It can't work anyway.
So the point is: the players should not be based on nations, because there is no supervisor above these ones. Expecting them to regulate themselves is just a dead end. In addition, imposing punishments on a country of people as a whole is rather unfair, considering that normal citizens have to share the bill with transnational corporations. However poor people(in terms of CO2 producing, the majority) would emotionally connect their interest to those giant CO2 producer belonging to their nation and strive to protect the fake ego if we all think about it in nation-to-nation way.
If the players and referees are separated, the two parties' interests can be unnecessarily aligned, so that it's much likely to have some incentives for the players and referees to approach the goal: to alleviate the climate problem.
Another tired re-hash of the Prisoner's Dilemma doesn't prove anything.
Even if you accept AGW as a fact, TFA itself says a key part of the problem for the game players is the uncertainty in determining at what CO2 level problems start. In real life even the extent to which global warming is harmful is highly debatable--New York might go under the waves, but parts of Canada could actually become livable.
The solution is obvious to anyone except mathematicians: add some dice. Then the game becomes interesting. Roll a three and you lose a major city unless you have at least 30 Euros in the pot. Roll seven and collect 5 Euros from everyone else because you now have the most productive granaries in the world. Roll snake-eyes, and a comet impact sends everyone back five turns.
Not only is the game more interesting, now it's more like real life. Analyze that, mathematicians.
Game theory is fine, and games can highlight many things, but the climate treaty problem's bigger problems lay elsewhere
Put aside, for the moment, any arguments about whether global warming is real and whether man is causing it....
The parties at the table negotiating have no common/overlapping interests and are not even legitimately able to negotiate.
First, the bigger industrialized nations are being expected to give more either "because they can" or because they have some supposed advantage... but the majority of their citizens do not feel able to take the hit and many have the "advantage" NOT because somebody external gave it to them but rather because their cultures encouraged development... the less-developed are free to build better cultures any time they want.
Second, smaller nations expect to give less (many hope to actually benefit with aid that will help them develop) ... but activists in the developed countries who champion the negotiations often oppose developing these nations "up" to the the levels their citizens would like; the activist crowd has a parallel agenda of de-development of some countries with a permanent cap of stunted development of the others.
Third, almost none of the negotiators is legitimate; Many are from countries run by royals or dictators who act on behalf of those leaders and NOT the populations. Most of the rest were appointed by elected politicians who were themselves elected by slim majorities, and for whom the choice of negotiators was not an electoral issue (so it's possible that the choice of negotiator was not even popular with the majority of the the portion of the population who selected the politician who selected the negotiator). Even if a man like Obama were to sit down at the table himself (bringing the legitimacy of being an actually-elected person) he still is opposed strongly by nearly half his population and many in his own party might well oppose him on this issue;
The basic problem is that these negotiations are generally desired and proposed by the left... and carry the presumption of a pure left/right political divide... (which can sometimes be "powered-through" by determined politicians with a few bent rules, like Obamacare) but the truth is that this subject is divided along many fracture lines (left/right, rich/poor, western/non-western, representative/dictatorial, industrial/non-industrial etc), many of which cross each other at odd angles, with not only the obvious negotiating issues but also many people viewing the agenda, issue, proposed solutions, and/or participants as illegitimate. Translation: this is not going away any time soon, and no little game will help isolate a quick fix.
There seems to be a way around the whole climate/energy problem.
Power satellites have long been dismissed because of the high cost of lifting parts to GEO.
But if you build just one with expensive conventional rockets and equip it with propulsion lasers, the cost to get the parts up for enough to end the use of fossil fuels goes to under $100/kg and the cost of power to under 2 cents per kWh.
At that price, the oil companies can make all the synthetic, carbon neutral gasoline they want for a dollar a gallon.
If you want to know more, ask, especially if you know someone who could lead a hundred billion dollar project. hkeithhenson@gmail.com
End MGM. Get prospective parents of boys to Google: Men do complain
But, we humans ARE chimpanzee groups in a loose sort of way.
This is my sig.
The numbers the Guardian cites are somewhat dated and don't reflect the very recent American switch over from coal to natural gas. Many electricity operators have converted their coal plants to burn natural gas instead, because hydrofracking has made natural gas so cheap in the USA. This trend will continue and the result has been a net reduction in CO2 emissions, so much so that right now I believe the USA is on track to beat the EU at the CO2 reduction game (kickass!), because the Germans are retiring their nukes and using coal now in the winter.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428947/a-drop-in-us-co2-emissions/
and, while I disagree with this article about the risks / rewards of fracking, it is worth pointing out that as America switches to natural gas, the Europeans are buying our coal...
http://www.zmescience.com/ecology/environmental-issues/co2-drop-us-25092012/
This is my sig.