Institute of Semantic Restructuring

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Semantic Restructuring is the pursuit of enlightenment, enlivenment, empowerment through the creative re-arranging of the building blocks of meaning. For a better description, Start Here.


2007:02:04

Nonsense in Damasio's "Searching for Spinoza"

With a footnote pointing to "A neural basis for social cooperation," Neuron 35 (2002): 396-405, Damasio says of the Prisoners' Dilemma:

...the Prisoner's Dilemma, an experimental task that effectively separates cooperators from defectors.

I will need to revisit this to explicate the flaws in such a statement, and I'll have to track down the original reference material before I can ascribe the error to the original researchers rather than to Damasio. But, in simplest terms, it is a long-standing peeve of mine that so many people who should be thinking a little more precisely about such matters keep framing the Prisoners' Dilemma as inherently exemplifying the "social wisdom" of cooperation. If you haven't already seen it, you can get a taste of where I'm going with this here.

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