Are You Going to Get Screwed by the System?

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evolutionary models show that you'll end up at inequitable conventions a lot of the time. But if you look at the group getting less at every stage of the way they were changing, like learning and adapting in ways that made completely perfect sense given the situation they were in. Is it an accident of history that you end up in this unequitable, inequitable division? Or was this sort of a more globally rational, its just sort of an inevitable thing that some people are goin to get screwed by the system? Well, so here's the kind of dialectic i go through in this book.

You can’t always get what you want, as a wise person once said. But we do try, even when someone else wants the same thing. Our lives as people, and the evolution of other animals over time, are shaped by competition for scarce resources of various kinds. Game theory provides a natural framework for understanding strategies and behaviors in these competitive settings, and thus provides a lens with which to analyze evolution and human behavior, up to and including why racial or gender groups are consistently discriminated against in society. Cailin O’Connor is the author or two recent books on these issues: Games in the Philosophy of Biology and The Origins of Unfairness: Social Categories and Cultural Evolution.

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Cailin O’Connor received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California, Irvine. She is currently Associate Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science at UCI. Her works involves questions in the philosophy of biology and behavioral science, game theory, agent-based modeling, social epistemology, decision theory, rational choice, and the spread of misinformation.

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