In so far as game theory is a mathematical tool that can be tinkered with to suit any situation involving things that engage in rational strategizing, then of course game theory can apply to governments, in which case economists can interpret government regulations as collective bargaining.

Economists can interpret regulations as collective bargaining because regulations are coordinated boycotts, and boycotts are a form of bargaining. Game theory only enters into the matter to explain why coercion is necessary to make the boycott effective. But one can explain a Prisoners’ Dilemma without ever invoking anything more than common sense: so long as “If I don’t do it, somebody else will” is an excuse for bad behavior, people will do the thing in question. If government removes that excuse, people do the right thing. Boycotts fit that paradigm. Game theory models this fact of life, but it was a fact of life before there was game theory.

In that case, though, game theory would be unfalsifiable and its interpretations or prescriptions would be neither true nor false, nor objectively right or wrong.

Game theory is no more or less falsifiable than Euclidean geometry. It works where it works.

Indeed, if the game theorist permits herself the talk of “as if” or counterfactual rationality, of patterns that look as though they might have been produced by ratiocination even if they weren’t, then all natural order which scientists explain in terms of mindless causality can be deemed “rational optimizing.”

No, but incomplete processes of that sort can be predicted to end up where ratiocination would put them. We know that the stones in the creek will be rounded and flat because that is how an intelligent God would make them. That line of reasoning does not imply that an intelligent God makes stones round and smooth, but it suggests that if you are making a container for brookstones, it should be made, sight unseen, to accommodate stones that are round and flat. That’s all economists do: they predict how the macroeconomy will act based on how it would act if its participants had the values that the economists, rightly or wrongly, put into their prognostication machine.

Similarly, the psychological egotist redefines “selfish” to include behaviour that seems on the contrary selfless, by positing an unconscious pleasure taken in helping other people.

Self-esteem is a thing. My history professor in college attributed the entire US Civil War to the Southern Radicals’ need to maintain their self-esteem despite their commitment to chattel slavery. But I think the game-theoretical approach says that altruism is a form of cooperation in a plus-sum game in which self-esteem is the coordinating force. I don’t know why that analysis is troubling. (I don’t have a comment on “information.” I’m not here about that.)

Those conceptual “tools” are intriguingly similar to the religionist’s unfalsifiable, self-reinforcing delusions which enable her to explain away all contrary evidence and interpret all events in a way that reinforces her presumptions.

Maybe, maybe not. I have no idea why you think so. But lies work because they are “intriguingly similar” to truths, so I don’t see how that feature of an argument impugns it.

I know you said you don’t take game theory to be scientific, but it’s got the word “theory” in its name and it’s closely associated with economics which is supposed to be a social science, so that’s a problem.

It’s not a problem for me. I didn’t name it. Economics is full of “laws” and “principles” and “rules” and even “paradoxes,” many of which don’t line up exactly with dictionary distinctions. Game theory is a way of quantifying pay-offs from choices. It does what it does without worrying about its name.

What counts as irrational in game theory? Can’t you tinker with the model’s assumptions to interpret every single event that’s ever happened as “rational,” as an attempt to establish an optimizing means-end relationship? If nothing’s inherently irrational, the word “rational” becomes meaningless.

It’s a matter of reference frame. Oliver Sacks wrote a book called The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. That man behaved irrationally by our lights, but rationally by his own. A game theorist might be able to tell you both what the man should do (because his wife isn’t a hat) and what he will do (because he thinks she is a hat and is otherwise a rational man). In colloquial English, we can label as “irrational” any behavior that results from valid reasoning from unsound premises, but that’s really not game theory’s problem, because game theory is just math.

Again, the empirical work of cognitive science refutes all this talk of rampant rationality.

That seems to me more wordplay. Empirical works shows that some actions are not ratiocinated and some are based on unsound premises, with the result in some circumstances that a model based on “as if” rationality is itself incorporating unsound premises. Economists can be wrong about what matters to people.

You say game theory wouldn’t whitewash the foundational American atrocities. Really? Assessing slavery as rational doesn’t at least implicitly of unconsciously lend some dignity to that atrocity?

Game theory explains; it does not excuse. Clearly, there was an economic advantage to slavery for those perpetrating it. But game theory explains the end of slavery just as it explains its imposition. Pay-offs, including self-esteem, changed, and game theory shows how that might play out. Whitewashing hides the truth; game theory reveals it. Whether we can handle the truth is a separate question.

But this is only a side-issue, since the main savagery that game theory is meant to whitewash is the free-market destruction of the planet (that is, the unsustainable, largely sociopathic pursuit of eternal economic growth).

I refuse to believe that game theory has any political agenda. As I said, you’re just doing what the Germans did with Jewish physics. You don’t like where it goes, so you attribute it to bad people, and then you pretend not to be arguing ad hominem. I make no excuses for people who misuse a tool. But I don’t fault the tool. (I also asked about Nash and Von Neumann. Whose pocket were they in?)

I don’t see how it’s fallacious to argue that game theory covers up rather than helps overcome the objective catastrophes we commit in the name of capitalism, consumerism, and neoliberalism.

It’s not fallacious; it’s just wrong. I use game theory to explain the catastrophes, not to cover them up. The catastrophes are there. Game theory explains them and points the way to preventing them by changing the pay-offs through legislation (aka enforced universal boycott). Stop blaming fire for arson. Blame the arsonist.

Is the right-wing denial of those damages supposed to be taken seriously or as ingenuous rather than as a component of a fraud literally steered by sociopaths who can’t feel straight?

Liars lie, and fools err. What’s that got to do with rationality?

Forgive me, but when there’s a good-versus-evil dimension to an intellectual conflict and I perceive something as being on the wrong side, I don’t let that side off easily.

Think with your spleen if you like. Not my thing.

If that’s wrongheaded of me, could you show how game theory can be used to justify socialism at the expense of capitalism and the free market?

You’d have to define the terms first. My “free market” includes government as a powerful monopsonist, so powerful that I have no trouble saying that all societies are “socialist” in that the use of private property occurs entirely at the sufferance of the electorate, which means that the people “own” the means of production to the extent it really matters. If we don’t like the allocation of profits, we can tax them. If we don’t like the allocation of wealth, we can tax it. How is that not “socialism”? Game theory is fine with all of that.

But assuming the company is owned by a transnational conglomerate,

Then the government is not a democratic exercise in self-government. A rational populace with access to good information would throw the bastards out. If you want to say that our government doesn’t work as a government, that’s a wholly different conversation than one about whether a well-constituted government is an economic actor in a free market.

Isn’t the (merely instrumentally) rational bargaining position, rather, to pander to the masses and pretend to be serving them, while behind the scenes kowtowing to the plutocrats who have more money than God?

Periodically, yes, and it happens. But, as I said, my view on government as an economic actor presumes that the government is doing its job. Your dreaded free-market types are not complaining about a government that is owned by plutocrats. They are complaining about the one that passed the Clean Air Act and Dodd-Frank and OSHA and NLRA and FLSA and the Civil Rights Act and the ADA and the ADEA, all while owned by the moneyed interests. The “empirical work” suggests that you are over-stating your case just a tad.

To the extent that the rest of your post posits bad government, it is irrelevant to the discussion of the role of good government. I’m not assuming that the government is good; I’m suggesting that the solution to problems that you trace to bad government is restoration of good government, not a rejection of the intellectual structures (e.g., game theory) that assume good government.

If game-theory’s instrumentalist, amoral, bloodless notion of rationality implicitly favours the status quo

It doesn’t. You just want it ever so badly to. Game theory favors whatever the universe is serving up as a plus-sum opportunity based on whatever the political system determines to be the pay-offs. If you don’t like the determinations, work to change the pay-offs. Game theory is inherently dynamic because pay-offs change with technology.

Perhaps my parenthetical insinuations are “snotty,” as you say. That doesn’t make them false

It does, however, make them inappropriate to a civil discussion. Either you are implying that I am complicit and responsible for these depredations, in which case I have no interest in continuing to engage with you, or you are not, in which case the tone is wholly gratuitous and unhelpful.