imagine this game - you’re in a group of people and you have to write downa number from 0 to 100, both inclusive. the person who writes the number that is 2/3rd of the average of the group wins.

if you think through this, you’ll realise that the nash equilibrium is when every player writes down 0. but that’s not what actually happens when this is played in the real world - the average comes out to be near 30 so the correct answer is 20.

but while reading the wikipedia page for this, i read something interesting that is obvious but i hadn’t thought of it -

Grosskopf and Nagel’s investigation also revealed that most players do not choose 0 the first time they play this game. Instead, they realise that 0 is the Nash equilibrium after certain amounts of repetitions. This was shown by Camerer as, “[when] the game is played multiple times with the same group, the average moves close to 0”.

this can be thought of as that not everyone in the group understands the nash equilibrium, but we learn. with repeated interactions, we converge to the nash equilibrium.

same is with life. my hypothesis then is that people in the same profession converge to the same behaviour. elderly civil servants will converge to a similar behaviour. so will elderly doctors or any profession. this assumes the enviorment and the payoff remains same, which is rapidly changning now.

we also know that there are wildly different people even in the same profession. so a better framing would be that the variance of behaviour distribtuion for a cohort decreases with age.

what’s also extrapolatable is that ancestral humans must be very similar in behaviour. because each of them had the same payoffs and environment.