Ah. I feel like this is a less elegant teaching solution for the Prisoner’s Dilemma but a great introduction to Hanlon’s Razor (and possibly the perils of compulsory voting).

Now you know that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.

Ah yes, the world is imperfect and people are imperfect for an innumerable amount of reasons.

I’ve got to say my respect for the professor has gone up. Alison has been repeatedly attempting to judge everyone in the world to her standards and it’s causing her no end of personal angst. It’s interesting the professor is highlighting how wrong-headed it was to abandon the superhero way because she refuses to accept that being a hero is EXCEPTIONAL rather than the norm. A philosophy which expects perfection and punishes mistakes can only be one which destroy, not help.

Never think everyone thinks like you.

Don’t overestimate or underestimate your peers, there will be those more intelligent than you, those who are less intelligent.

And remember life is always “completely stupid”.

Sooooo… that’s what? One person who didn’t listen, one who didn’t understand, and a know-it-all who may have understood but because they figured other people would put up white stones, they went for the self preservation option.

I think. Not sure about the last one, dunno which ‘he’ she means.

Most professors use a “Prisoner’s Dillema” demonstation as purely a thought experiment, and not ACTUALLY as the grade. If Professor Guwara is truly doing this, then… wow.
In fact, this is so arbitrary it can reasonably get him fired in this university setting. Especially with Allison in the class, and especially considering Professor Cohen.

In a way, Guwara himself is “putting up the black stone” risking his career by doing something so arbitrary in front of Allison to “prove a point” and better the class. He has everything to lose by not “playing it safe” using conventional teaching methods, and everything to fear.
Unless he has some biodynamic power up his sleeve…

Sadly, because it’s the diploma and not the actual knowledge that’s needed to get hired in a high paying position.

I am so glad I never did philosophy in school.

I wonder what would have happened if John had refused to put a stone down. “Put one stone on your desk and leave the other in your hand” was the instruction. Not “You must put one stone on your desk.” John would have been complying to the original instruction by leaving one stone in his hand.

I’m sure the professor would have somehow justified failing him anyway. This particular lesson seems to be targeted and getting under Alison’s skin rather than addressing the entire class.

He has a strong point, but the next logical question is this, are tyrants always bad? In most cases, yes they are, but there are a select few in which Tyrants done great things and have been positive forces.

Either
1. they didn’t care about the guy with the black stone, and now are trying to weasel out, or
2. they’re actually that dumb.
Both options are true are excellent arguments for tyranny :^)

Heraclitus had a hard life.

I think I see where Allison went “wrong”. It isn’t wrong to assume people will be inherently good and try help each other if convenient, but it IS wrong to assume a group of strangers will join in solidarity against threats to individuals. The first day of class, no one knows each other so there is no social contract.

Allison might have turned this experiment around if she had put down a black AND given Davenport her white stone. This would placed the risk cost of helping him solely on herself instead of whole class.

Davenport would then have the choice of putting down a white and saving himself, or trying to help Allison in return by keeping his black. Seeing their exchange may also have guilted the students who paying attention into putting down black stones. Interaction begetting togetherness.

Ultimately that would still have failed due to people not paying attention, but Allison would have shown that people can stand together without a tyrant forcing them, and that it is worth trying. Instead of losing faith in humanity when EVERYONE chose to abandon Davenport.

“We are mutinying against you!”

“On what grounds?”

“Failure to prevent a mutiny”

He seems a bit old. Recall, the people with powers were connected to a storm about 20 years ago, which is why all the supers we see are just leaving their teens behind at this point.

so, uh, davenport goes and gets the teacher fired? “the professor literally failed me for no reason other than to spite another student”

Oh yeah, for sure.

Astro City and Kurt Busiek.

A-MAY-zing!

Er… libertarians are not anarchists. Libertarians still believe in rules, just the limitation on those rules when exercised by government, in order to preserve liberty of the populace. Just because someone does not want everything ordered for them by the government does not make a person an anarchist.

Right. Also, the formal term for someone with the power to dictate the outcome of a vote is “dictator,” not “tyrant.” More to the point, the voting method and propositions themselves were arbitrary and unfair, so it’s hard to say that the addition of a dictator to a system where everything has already been artificially constrained to be arbitrary and unfair would actually add any wrong.

How about a majoritarian system? How about a system where the participants get to choose the propositions they’re voting on rather than only being allowed to make those choices the person in charge lets them make?

The real world requires a unanimous vote for almost nothing; requiring unanimity in multi-participant Prisoner’s Dilemma-type situations becomes increasingly unrealistic and unfair to impose as an arbitrary constraint as the number of participants grows. Even in non-voting situations modeled in this way, there’s usually a practical limit to how much value a bad actor can actually extract from the system, so if a sufficiently large majority attempts a perfect solution, they can still come out ahead.

But the participants not discussing it means that it can only model a limited set of interactions. For example, in a democratic government, we get to have the marketplace of ideas prior to a vote to see which idea won.

I can’t agree with this. First of all. The classroom here is a small sandbox, and Guwara’s little game a tiny microcosm. What anyone chooses to do, or even whether they choose to act at all, they cannot escape the consequences of the world. We are all, indeed, in this together, whether we like it or not.

Second, when you examine the motives of the students participating here, most of them actually were trying, in their own way. Those with a limited understanding of the rules did not succeed due to that. The one girl who understood the rules and still chose only to help herself out of the class did so by weighing the risks carefully and deciding that they were too great for her to bear, *considering factors outside of that sandbox*.

Third, Alison is not being a tyrant in her philosophy. She knows full well that not everyone is as invulnerable as she, and that not everyone can make the same choices that she can, and that not everyone can participate in the same ways. I don’t think Guwara gives her enough credit.