337 | Kevin Zollman on Game Theory, Signals, and Meaning

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. You might have noticed that human beings tend to have this thing that happens where one person will interact with another person, bumping into them, talking to them, perhaps exchanging goods or services, or maybe just exchanging pleasantries. Who knows? Very often, one is tempted to say always, you can judge how well such interactions went from the point of view of person a or person b. If you wanted to try to quantify it, you could assign points or value to how well you did on the basis of the choices you made during the interaction. Indeed, you could think of it as kind of a game where there was a score. Even if the score is not completely manifest and quantitative, we have a feeling that, oh, that interaction went well or this other interaction didn't. And you know, it's not just human beings that we're talking about here. Animals interact with each other in a more broad sense if you wanna be forgiving about the term. Species interact with each each other, plants interact with each other, maybe even single celled organisms, maybe even genes in your body interact with each other, maybe companies or countries interact with each other, and also have a feeling of reward or preference that they can quantify and say, yes. That interaction went well. Maybe even I won that interaction or I lost that interaction. There should be a theory, some sort of general principles that enabled us to talk about all of these games all at once. I mean, of course, there is. You read the title of the podcast. You know what we're talking about here. The idea is game theory. Game theory has, an interesting reputation out there in academic circles widely. Many people swear by it. They use it all the time. They develop it. They prove theorems. You know, it goes back to the mid twentieth century, Oscar Morgenstern and John von Neumann and others thinking about both economics, but also games of chance, playing poker and things like that. In other corners, game theory has gone too far as far as some people are concerned. It is an expression of a sort of natural but, resistible urge that human beings have have to overly quantify everything and and turn everything into numbers. Don't think about it as a competition or a game. Just think about the warm human interactions that you have with people. I don't I think that those latter people are a little bit off base. I mean, sure, you should not quantify everything in life. Sometimes you should just enjoy things as they go. But the fact that someone else wants to quantify things doesn't get in the way of you having the warm human interaction with another person. The question is, as a as far as scientific understanding is concerned, can this idea of seeing interactions as games …