It's easy enough to ground this in game theory to make the analogy more explicit.
Say there's a street with two houses. In the event of a crime, people in the houses can volunteer information to the police. They don't know ahead of time whether their information is pertinent to the investigation or self-incriminating. Crime goes down by half if one house regularly snitches, and crime is eliminated if both do.
The expected cost of self-incrimination when volunteering information (with all probabilities worked out) is 3. The cost of unchecked crime in the neighbourhood is 4, applied to each house. The payoffs, then:
- If neither house snitches, payoffs are -4/-4.
- If one house snitches, payoffs are -2/-5 (against the snitch)
- If both houses snitch, payoffs are -3/-3.
This is classic prisoner's dilemma. I thought the general idea was clear enough in my initial post, but at this point the analogy I was making should be impossible to miss.
I don't disagree with your third paragraph. A lawyer will decrease your personal expected negative payoff without compromising the societal benefit of coming forward.
Say there's a street with two houses. In the event of a crime, people in the houses can volunteer information to the police. They don't know ahead of time whether their information is pertinent to the investigation or self-incriminating. Crime goes down by half if one house regularly snitches, and crime is eliminated if both do.
The expected cost of self-incrimination when volunteering information (with all probabilities worked out) is 3. The cost of unchecked crime in the neighbourhood is 4, applied to each house. The payoffs, then:
- If neither house snitches, payoffs are -4/-4.
- If one house snitches, payoffs are -2/-5 (against the snitch)
- If both houses snitch, payoffs are -3/-3.
This is classic prisoner's dilemma. I thought the general idea was clear enough in my initial post, but at this point the analogy I was making should be impossible to miss.
I don't disagree with your third paragraph. A lawyer will decrease your personal expected negative payoff without compromising the societal benefit of coming forward.