I've just searched what are now 58 comments for the phrase "prisoner's dilemma" and got zero hits. WHAT!
Higher Education is now a prisoner's dilemma, and that's really the point of the tulip article, even if he didn't use the phrase. Rational actors will want their children to have a college education and then higher degrees, even though everyone choosing that makes society worse off, not better off. Classic prisoner's dilemma. (Also a "Tragedy of the Commons", I would argue.)
Perhaps the most profound argument against our present system of higher education is that despite his philosophy degree (and I'm guessing at least 70 or 80 other degrees amongst the commentators) neither the author nor anyone else has said the two words "prisoner's dilemma." It's a simple concept, taught in every University, most undergraduates supposedly know what it is, and yet nobody can manage to recognize a gargantuan real world example! (I have yet to see the term PD applied to this subject in other media, either.) Time to scrap them crenellated white towers.
The top post [1] mentions the "Meditations on Moloch" post, which is basically a generalization of the PD/Tragedy of the Commons/arms race. I assume most posters are aware of the relevant dynamic.
PD shows up as one of ten examples of traps in that long article. Note too that not every local minima is going to be a PD, or even close! Equilibria are sometimes now confused with PDs, due to the publicity given to Nash's Equilibrium, but that's a popular confusion.
Let's assume the situation with higher education is a prisoner's dilemma. I, as a player, decide not to go to college (cooperate), while everyone else decides to go to college (defect), resulting in me paying a sucker's payoff since my opportunities are reduced while those of everyone else are expanded. So far so good. Next, I decide to go to college while everyone else also goes to college (defect & defect), I pay a not insubstantial amount of money, as does everyone else. So far so good. But I manage to get a job as a software engineer at Google making $125k/year while several of Everyone-Else-in-the-World only get jobs as clerks at 7-Eleven, making $15k/year. So, the punishment scenario doesn't pan out since I didn't have a sucker's payoff while several others in the world did. That's okay. Let's keep going. Next, I decide not to go to college while everyone else decides not to go to college (cooperate & cooperate). All of a sudden, there are thousands of recently fired professors, instructors, deans, janitors, cooks, etc. on the job market. I can't find a job along with many others of my generation who decided not to go to college. Many of us have a sucker's payoff during the reward scenario.
The situation with education is not a prisoner's dilemma. Q.E.D.
The situation with education is not a tragedy of the commons. There is no central, collective resource that is being exploited by individuals for their own benefit, without regard for the future of the resource. Now, there might be a tragedy of the commons if higher education was universally free and everyone decided to pursue higher education endlessly, with new institutions popping up continuously, which would dry up the treasury and halt the program of universally free higher education. But there is no universally free education.
The situation with education is extremely complex, with a variety of intricacies and unknown unknowns. It can't be distilled into a game or an aphorism.
This is a misunderstanding of prisoner's dilemma, knagra - you're assuming that PDs have to be nearly identical to the original example, but actually only the relative outcomes matter to the definition, not an absolute gain or loss. You don't have to be punished, just get a worse result than cooperation/communication could have given you despite both parties acting rationally. And that's exactly the case (now, not I think 100 years ago) with higher education. Foregoing degrees for individual study or other alternative education (such as apprenticeship) and exams would cost everyone less, and result in a better result even for those who did well, in your retelling, by going to university. The economy wouldn't be hurt, it would gain, and those who filled the jobs now requiring unnecessary years of education could also be paid more, not just owe less. The only way to escape the PD classification is to deny the central thesis of Thiel and the Tulip article's author; and assert that higher education is not truly inefficient, so there are no great economic inefficiencies. A hard path by now, it seems to me! So QNED, after all.
To drive the point home, it's entirely possible to construct a PD with all outcomes being rewards, all outcomes being punishments, or a mixture of the two. You don't need prisoner's, see-through mirrors in an interrogation room, or prison sentences, or other punishments in order to create a prisoner's dilemma. Very complex situations can be prisoner's dilemma's, the bibliography of addumbrations of the concept is immense. Perhaps you mean that this is not ONLY a PD. But no-one ever thought, I've never entertained the notion that "PD" was a full description of any situation. Instead, it points out obvious inefficiencies despite individual rationality -precisely the "No Tulip Subsidies" author's point.
I demonstrated that you could still get a worse result with mutual cooperation than you could with mutual defection, which violates the T > R > P > S condition for the dilemma to be a prisoner's dilemma in the strong sense. I demonstrated that at least two of the four possibilities are unpredictable. Mutual cooperation doesn't necessarily give you a better result than mutual defection. Mutual cooperation could give you a much worse result than cooperating while the other player defects. For example, you could get a college degree like everyone else and end up working at McDonald's with $50k in debt through mutual cooperation. But you could also just work at McDonald's without getting a college degree (and the $50k in debt) while everyone else gets a college degree.
I also wanted to say that several million people would be jobless if everyone decided not to go to college come August. The economy would be shocked by an influx of unemployed professors, etc. That would be a much worse state, relatively, than if some people continued to go to college, as I argued in my first comment.
And there are indeed many valid prisoner's dilemmas in the natural sciences. A clear one I recall is the example of grooming others that Dawkins offered in The Selfish Gene.
Higher Education is now a prisoner's dilemma, and that's really the point of the tulip article, even if he didn't use the phrase. Rational actors will want their children to have a college education and then higher degrees, even though everyone choosing that makes society worse off, not better off. Classic prisoner's dilemma. (Also a "Tragedy of the Commons", I would argue.)
Perhaps the most profound argument against our present system of higher education is that despite his philosophy degree (and I'm guessing at least 70 or 80 other degrees amongst the commentators) neither the author nor anyone else has said the two words "prisoner's dilemma." It's a simple concept, taught in every University, most undergraduates supposedly know what it is, and yet nobody can manage to recognize a gargantuan real world example! (I have yet to see the term PD applied to this subject in other media, either.) Time to scrap them crenellated white towers.