Is there any marxist/leftist prescriptive on or criticism of game theory?

Ebola-chan captcha

Psychology isn't really part of game theory. That's behavioral economics. Game theory (at least what I've been exposed to) assumes rational actors - otherwise the concept of equilibria wouldn't make sense

What does rational actor mean? How do you act irrationally? I mean I've been mad off my ass before and done dumb shit but how is that irrational? Anger is just an emotion that influences your actions/thoughts, no? Is that just not what they're talking about? And if it is when do you find a rational actor? Do you just find someone not too affected and just ignore the error? I mean it's not ridiculous….

rationality is subjective
Its just as how each person views (through their eyes and experience) the world they live in

A rational actor is a person who lives in game theory and bourgeois economics models. They more or less try to maximize their utility given what other actors are doing. In game theory you of course assume the other actors are rational as well. It's more clear what the word means of you work through a game theory problem, so you might want to look up the prisoners' dilemma and similar games. "Rational" is just a liberal magic word for autistic.

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Okay I get it, so it's like you're on a game show and you try to win, because you are a rational actor. This does sound like a "common sense" and "unquestionable" idea that liberals would love that justifies anything you want.

I don't understand what you are saying. My understanding of rational is making logical decisions, which everyone does, even when failing logically, no? For example if I believe my light flickering iz sign of the devil coming to reap my soul, it is "irrational" to believe that, but running away from my house in fear isn't an irrational action, so I'm still a rational actor, no? I misinterpreted data and reached a wrong conclusion, but I still reached that conclusion with faulty logic and acted on it with logic, faulty or not, which all seems pretty rational. Unless you defined irrational as someone acting towards/with non truths which is everyone all the time, which kind of shits on the applicability a little.
Sage because I'm rambling.

Game theory > Dialectics
Read Gerald Cohen.

He is telling that model of "rational thinker" is overly simplistic and simply does not correspond to the way humans behave. Most of the time people don't think their actions through, and even when they do, their actions are incredibly biased in some way. I.e. they operate under completely different assumption than it is assumed by the model of "rational thinker".

Except the "rational thinker" model doesn't know what your irrational beliefs are.

Mathematics is a formal science

Basically the heirarchy is like this

Natural Science > Social Science > Formal Science > Immortal Revolutionary Science

You will like analytical Marxism

That's not what rational actor means. A rational actor is someone who acts based on first-order reason. They look at prisoner's dilemma and pick Always Betray because in all cases betray has a better outcome than Cooperate. Game theory pretty explicitly says that rational actors are frequently self-destructive through their simple individualism.
Game theory scenarios are usually "won" through super-rational actors, who analyze the game itself on second-order reason and attempt to make decisions based on projected final outcomes and usually pick strategies like Tit-for-Tat, or actors working on third-order reason that analyzes other strategies and pick Tit-for-Tat with some forgiveness.

Game Theory doesn't say that most people are or should be rational actors. In fact most people usually work on second or third order reason.

That's not true since you can model higher order logic in epistemic game theory. A rational actor in general is an actor that acts the way a modeler wants it to. In your everyday game theory that means maximizing utility in the way I described. There is no good definition for a rational actor.
You're also talking about the iterative prisoner's dilemma and I was referring to the one-shot game. I should have been more clear.

So much for le advanced economics meme ;^)

Watch Adam Curtis' documentary The Trap, it's got a lot on the origins of Game Theory.

youtube.com/watch?v=y97Ywl7RtUw

To be fair, you have to have a very high Autism Level to understand Game Theory. The theories are extremely complex, and without a solid grasp of pop culture most of the theories will go over a typical viewer's head. There's also MatPat's optimistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his tweets - his personal philosophy draws heavily from Narodnaya Volya literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these theories, to realize that they're not just interesting- they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike Game Theory truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the meaning in MatPat's symbolic catchphrase "but hey that's just a theory a Game Theory," which itself is a cryptic reference to Turgenev's Russian epic Fathers and Sons I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as MatPat's genius unfolds itself on their screens. What fools… how I pity them. 😂 And yes by the way, I DO have a Fnaf tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only- And even they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 Autism Level points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand.

Math is not any kind of science you idiot

Where does a good materialist place mathematics? It has been bothering me for a while now.

Nowhere special.

It's not like it's idealist to say that mathematics is its own branch of human study. It can and frequently does overlap with other branches, but it's its own thing.

Except you objectively can.
This is literally an ad hominem attack.
Sauce

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Interesting. The obvious conclusion then is that most actors aren't actually rational.

It means it acts rationally. Since the actors are selfish, a rational actor will always attempt to act in its best-interest, maximizing some objective function. The objective function can be anything, money, happiness, shitposts/hour, etc.
If one actor were to pick the option that (as far as it knows) isn't the best for it then it's irrational.
No, the actors are perfectly rational and perfectly selfish. As you hopefully realized by now they're theoretical, not real, and are meant to model real-world behavior. If an actor is optimizing for cash only, and it can earn $1 by murdering the whole planet the rational option is to do it because that increases its score.

The other user is correct. Mathematics is a formal science you retard. He's wrong in that social sciences are still science, that was only true ages ago.

A good way to illustrate the difference between theoretical scenarios and the pesky real-world is a game where each actor picks a number (up to 100 for instance), and the one who chose the number closest to the average wins. Pretty simple game, and the only rational choice given all actors are rational and selfish is to pick 0. But in the real-world very few people do that (and, consequently, those who act as if everyone were rational lose).
The modeling does work when it's something the actors can think through, so simple problems for average people or more complex ones for governments or big companies.

how can they lose? if they always pick 0 nobody never wins since it'll always be as close as the other guy's number to the average?

It allows for multiple winners, so if everyone chose the same number everyone would win. But in practice (not in theory) those who choose 0 lose since the average is much larger than that (because most people will only think one or two steps ahead, meaning they think they're thinking one step more than the other players).
See nytimes.com/interactive/2015/08/13/upshot/are-you-smarter-than-other-new-york-times-readers.html for an example. Some of the guesses there are obvious bullshit, like the few 100s, but the distribution is similar (except the huge numbers) even when there's a money prize.

ah, that's different, I thought it was always 2 guys competing

Not only that. It has to be constantly repeating variant (or the one with indefinite ending) because having definite ending of the game means that the last round is no different from one-shot. And, since the last round will not be cooperative, there is no reason to cooperate during the previous round. And so on, and so forth. In the end, even if you have a million round game with definite ending, "the only logical choice" is to Always Betray.

Used as is, Game Theory is flat-out bonkers.

Which makes the whole thing inapplicable, since you must know what this objective function is - and you can't.

Rational is not subjective given the constraint of a problem in game theory. I wrote a simple AI this spring for solving 3d tic-tac-toe. The whole basis of writing a good AI under those constraints is assuming that your opponent will always make the best possible move in any game possible game board state in order to achieve a win state. That is what is meant by rational actor in game theory. Where did subjectivity enter into that problem?

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Math is just logic applied to number, quantity and space. A materialist doesn't need a special definition for maths.

Formal science my ass. What is your criterion for demarcation.

I've participated in paid behavioural economics experiments many times (pay is based on performance and isn't too bad, average 15/hour) and noticed how many of the other players were not one bit rational and it was frustrating to me as they could've optimized their actions in a way that would've resulted in greater earnings for the both of us

behavioural economics are a meme