337 | Kevin Zollman on Game Theory, Signals, and Meaning

Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. You might have noticed that human beings tend to have this thing that happens where one person will interact with another person, bumping into them, talking to them, perhaps exchanging goods or services, or maybe just exchanging pleasantries, who knows? Very often, one is tempted to say always, you can judge how well such interactions went. from the point of view of person A or person B.

If you wanted to try to quantify it, you could assign points or value to how well you did on the basis of the choices you made during the interaction. Indeed, you could think of it as kind of a game where there was a score, even if the score is not completely manifest and quantitative, we have a feeling that, oh, that interaction went well or this other interaction didn't. And you know, it's not just human beings that we're talking about here. Animals interact with each other in a more broad sense, if you want to be forgiving about the term, um, species.

interact with each other. Plants interact with each other. Maybe even single-celled organisms, maybe even genes in your body interact with each other. Maybe companies or countries interact with each other and also have a feeling of reward or preference that they can quantify and say, yes, that interaction went well. Maybe even I won that interaction or I lost that interaction.

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