Ethics is just a Game - the Twitterdoc Saga

Nice article by Jeremy Toeman about the recent hacking of Twitter Secrets, and the decision issue for for various blogs to publish or not treated as Game Theory - and the Nash Equilibrium being to publish. Referring to the diagram above he explains why the equilibrium is driven to be defective behaviour (where the top right and bottom left quadrants should be reversed in the diagram by the way):

But this is par for the course if your job is breaking news as fast as possible, as there is no reward for being late nor is there a penalty for being inaccurate.

In my opinion the race to be first is full of nothing but losers, as it is utterly unsustainable as there is no loyalty being built by readers who will simply follow a trail to the news, rapidly forgetting who was first yesterday or the day before. While the publishing industry has never exactly rewarded accuracy, modern technology and communications tools are clearly worsening the problem for us poor souls who simply want to be informed.

For any ambitious editor, the decision dynamic is "in the long term we are all dead" (or they at least have moved on, leaving some other sap to count the chickens coming home to roost)

This is actually a model of most "cheat" games, from purloined Twitter documents to greedy merchant bankers - and what it shows is that a system with these dynamics is incapable of reforming itself - hence the existence of laws and regulations.

Now, one objectionette - he has only modelled a 2 party game - in an N Party game, you can have a situation which "nudges" you towards ethical behaviour if the vast majority of other players decide that there is more mileage in heaping opprobrium on the defecting party/s. Not easy in a 2 party game, but let us - for a moment - assume that every other major blog and media operation called TechCrunch a bunch of skanks and called for mass boycotts.

Or, in an age of Social Media, if there was similar from a mass of Twitterers, small cap bloggers etc who are not bound by the same game rules, but whose kudos comes from being ethical.

Plus ca Change in that case........

But nice one - wish I'd written it.....