I wrote a piece called The game theoretical knowledge of Good and Evil, where I equated game theoretical knowledge, understanding the incentive structures that you are in, and how they shape human behavior, as a sort of 'fall from the Garden', a loss of innocence in how people live in the world.
I can better articulate the impulse that made me want to write that, in a far more concise and useful manner now, which is that virtues are embodied and spontaneous, in a way that game theoretical analysis simply is not. Think of some of the most important qualities in human life, such as love, courage, or morality. What would you think if your lover said that they have performed a rational analysis of your relationship, and concluded that it is in their best interests to stay with you? Or what would you think of a man who freezes for an instant at the sight of a person who seems to be drowning, doing a quick cost-benefit analysis of the whole thing to see if it is 'rationally' a good decision or not?
Clearly, there is something about analysis that gets in the way of being a good person. Conscious sacrifice, the kind that great stories depict (not to be confused with being a doormat and pretending to be good because of it), is direct. The same way that we can know directly when we have been talking too much in a conversation, courageous and loving people directly express their quality through their action, without the mediating effect of the mind interfering in the process.
When I was working at my office job, I was keenly aware of all the incentives that dictate office work, the main one being that doing a good job is not in my best interests, because it will only lead me to get assigned more work, create more attention around myself, and build higher expectations around what I can do, resulting in me receiving more work, and ultimately burning out for something that I do not care about to begin with. The main problem is of course that the environment sucks in the first place, (although all office jobs suck in that similar manner, so I couldn't simply change jobs) but there is something kind of tragic about this sheer knowledge of what will happen or not.
The reason why this is tragic is because it homogenizes away heroism, and instead reduces everything to a sensible, cookie-cutter strategy. It takes away all of your agency and individuality, and turns you into some automaton who is running a script. And who wants to live such a life? Who wants to live a life where only the expected thing happens, and the rational behavior is done, all of the time? Is it not the eccentic aspects of those around us that we end up loving the most? Is it not the strangest events of our lives that we remember the most? And is it not the seemingly irrational dreams that we hold that end up shaping our lives the most?
As Dostoevsky puts it in Notes from Underground:
Even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object—that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated—chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point!
This makes me think of the tragedy of Eren from Attack of Titan, who had the ability to see the future, and yet who was utterly shackled by what he saw, instead of empowered by it. He knew that no matter what he or his companions did, the conflict that he was a part of would not be settled peacefully, which is what led him to commit the atrocities that he did.
There is a bleak form of moral determinism that arises from his ability and character, and I have felt some of that in my life too, especially when it comes to societal collapse, and the fact that I know that nothing, and nothing whatsoever could prevent it, only slow it down, and create a nicer transition to the inevitably lower energy future that awaits us.
The good news is that we are not rational beings who have to obey some imperative to maximize utility (however you define it). The bad news is that living consciously is incredibly painful, at best ignored by our society, at worst heavily punished by it, because comfort and certainty are about the self, not the conscious I.
The appeal of game theory, and other similar forms of rational pornography, is that we can do away with all of the 'messy' aspects of human life, such as uncertainty, responsibility (it's not me who made the decision, it's the rationally correct choice!), sacrifice, fear, and even perhaps death (the wet dream of the transhumanists).
Back on planet Earth however, what we see is that rationality has hardly done anything to make people more moral or loving, because those are conscious qualities, and not abstract concepts that we can literally define, or quantifiable metrics that we can optimize for.
This is why it hardly matters whether modern societies can transition from a world run by adversarial game theory, and all of the externalities and sub-optimal attractors it makes us run into 1, to a world run by cooperative game theory, where we focus on making society as a whole run well. It doesn't matter because it is still an analytical, literal version of what 'good' constitutes, though it certainly would have far less downsides than our current belligerent, short-term societies have.
Cooperation is not love. Likeable is not loveable. And sensible is not moral. The rationalist sneers at all of those wishy-washy romantic notions. He asks: why should we care about outmoded values such as courage and freedom if we can rationally design a world that doesn't need those to begin with? Well the problem of course is that such a rationally designed world doesn't exist, because rationality comes from how the mind interfaces with Reality, meaning that there is no solid ground to rationality, and likewise no solid foundation to any literal worldview.
You cannot make people conform to a rationally designed society, because human beings are in touch with something far deeper than what the mind is capable of reaching. Love, true, conscious love, is not grounded in subjective sentiments, as the rationalist would say, it is grounded in an intimate experience of the other.
Game theory is fundamentally unable to reach to the other, instead what it does is it projects the other onto a mind-graspable concept or interface, in this case a mere quantity that can be maximized for, which is why rationally-minded people have nothing to say about the uniqueness of individuals, because they hardly perceive anything unique to begin with.
Quantification is one of the many moves of the mind that homogenizes away reality, a move which is useful in certain contexts, the same way that maps are useful because they remove most of the details of the territory, but spend your life looking at maps and you will miss what is not on them, the astounding beauty of the trees, the gentle drift of the clouds, and the bewildering fact that anything exists at all.
The reason why freedom, morality and love, amongst other conscious qualities, are so important is not because they 'solve' this or that problem, or because they used to be important in the past, it's because they are reflections of what it means to live fully, which is to say, live consciously. We are mortal beings with our prejudices, our flaws, and our selfishness, but even the most lowly amongst us find themselves ennobled when they act selflessly, which is why we can excuse a lot from someone who acts for the good of others when it matters most, but we feel disgusted by selfish cowards, even if they are very clever. 2
This is why the type of stories that touch us at the core, the stories that resonate through time because they point to realities beyond the self, are about sacrifice, freedom, courage and love, and not about ennacting the sensible choices dictated by game theory, or some other rational theory of human behavior. As Darren Allen writes, 3 a great story "expresses the immortal truth of mortal man", which is why stories inspire us in a way that (rational) analysis never can, because the latter is necessarily bound by the self, whereas the former can point beyond it.
1 Countries need to spend resources on their military, because they need some type of power in order to retaliate if any country (or group of countries) were to decide to go rogue and try to invade other ones. If we could all agree to not wage war on one another, we could spend all of our resources on building things instead. This is one example of the long list of sub-optimal attractors that game theoretical dynamics lead to at scale.
2 Distinguishing here between intelligence and cleverness.
3 From 100 books to read before the end, part 3, the section on Shakespeare.
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2026-07-11