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Monday, November 20, 2017

Vox Popoli: Game theory and civic nationalism - (What is Civic Nationalism?)

Tipsy explains how logic dictates that civic nationalism is intrinsically doomed to failure in any multicultural society.

Civic Nationalism is doomed to fail in a multicultural society because it represents an unstable pareto-optimal equilibrium of the game of resource optimization through democratic politics. The non-cooperative Nash equilibrium, i.e., everyone out for their own group, becomes more stable when a democratic political system is overwhelmed by disparate ethnic groups.

For those inclined to read further about the distinction between these two equilibria, here's an example of game that admits both types of equilibria. Suppose we have two players, A and B, who are playing a croquet game on a level field. Both players have a croquet mallet that can hit a ball exactly one foot in any direction and they get to hit it exactly once per round of the game. For each round, Player A is rewarded $1 for each foot the ball goes North and player B is rewarded $1 for each foot the ball goes West.

They both start the game willing to cooperate, and thus they decide to employ the Pareto-optimal solution, so they both hit the ball to the Northwest. They ball will go 2 feet Northwest and both player A and B will both get $1.41 (i.e., round(100*sqrt(2))/100).

Now, suppose in the next round, player A hits the ball to the Northwest as agreed upon, but player B decides to no longer cooperate. After player A hits the ball, player B hits it due West. Player A ends up with $0.71 and Player B gets $1.71 for the round.

Player A then gets pissed, and decides not to cooperate. So, the next round he uses a Nash strategy and hits the ball North and the still uncooperative Player B hits it West. They both end up with $1 for the round.

Note that the Pareto-optimal (cooperative) equilibrium yields the most money for both, but it is leaves each of the players vulnerable to the other cheating. The Nash-optimal (non-cooperative) equilibrium leaves both with less money, but structures the game in such a way that minimizes the consequences of the other cheating.

The Left has been using a Nash strategy for years, and "Conservatives" have been duped or shamed into using a Pareto strategy. The alt-Right is finally saying "Ok, you want to play that way, we will too." This pisses the Left off, because they liked the marginal advantage that cheating in a cooperative game gave them. The alt-Right doesn't care, goes full on Nash, because it understands the "game" is fundamentally non-cooperative now.

The scary thing is that the situation is even worse than he explains it. There have actually been THREE players, a Pareto player, a Nash player, and an anti-Pareto player. The anti-Pareto player has been playing to either a) hurt the Pareto player or b) help the Nash player, as he has no interest in money, but simply wants the psychic reward of achieving either (a) or (b).

What has changed is that a new Nash player has entered the field. This modeling is probably too complicated to bother with, especially since any numbers assigned would be arbitrary to the point of complete fiction, but regardless, both Tipsy's original description as well as the more complicated version suffice to demonstrate that civic nationalism could never survive once sufficient Nash players were on the field.

There is nothing cooperative about US politics now. This is both an observable reality as well as a logically dictated consequence. Civic nationalism is now every bit as discredited and thoroughly disproven as communism, and any intellectually honest man will have to admit as much. Ironically, most of those still attempting to disprove it will achieve little more than revealing that they are actually Nash players hiding under a false Pareto front.

To sum up the discussion from last night in the other thread, it is observably better for a nation to be atomic-bombed, militarily defeated, and occupied by a foreign power than for it to adopt civic nationalism and mass immigration.