Again, I’ll focus on what I think are the main points that are emerging here, thanks to your helpful responses. First, a quick clarification: when I talk about the hijacking of game theory in economics I’m not talking about Ayn Rand or the Objectivists, since they’re juvenile nobodies (excepting Alan Greenspan). I’m talking about neoliberalism and neoclassical economics. Those are mainstream, dominant positions, so in so far as game theory is applicable to economics, it’s being dominated by those mainstream views which in turn are excuses for plutocratic outcomes (I would say those outcomes are zero-sum, incidentally, contrary to the trickle-down canard).

You say the math or “geometry” of strategies itself is neutral, not loaded to bolster plutocratic (i.e. neoliberal) economies. Of course, the math itself should be neutral, but here we return to our main disagreement. Your answer on this point was quite curious. I surmised that we’re using different languages and that we’d each think the other language presupposes our favoured one. You disagreed slightly with that analysis, but your analogy with arithmetic confirms what I said. When it comes to mathematical relationships, math is logically deeper than natural language. So you’re saying that when it comes to strategies, game theory is deeper than philosophy. You made the move I said we’re each tempted to make because we’re beholden to our languages (or to our conceptual schemes).

But you did more than that, since you showed inadvertently how I can make the same move, thus fulfilling both sides of my prediction. For arithmetic to be deeper than natural language, you must be talking about mathematical relationships. Likewise, for game theory to be deeper than philosophy, you must be talking about the proper domain of that theory, which is the domain of formal games in which strategizing literally happens. But game theory has been extended far beyond that domain to explain economics and the evolution of life itself.

I submit that that extension is not itself mathematical or scientific, but philosophical. Therefore, when you’re using game theory as a mere metaphor to talk about the pseudo competition between strategies, you’re doing philosophy disguised as logically deeper math.

This is the very same scientism that it’s in Dawkins’s selfish-gene theory. That metaphor is literary and philosophical, not biological. The question is whether Dawkins adds anything useful to Darwin’s theory of natural selection when we strip Dawkins’ book of every single trace of the foreign, philosophical metaphors (the “gene’s eye view,” etc). Only what remains when every last anthropomorphic comparison of genes to selfish people is obliterated as a smokescreen would we have something that could fittingly be called nonphilosophical biology.

You suggest that what’s left is a point about the distribution of genes in organisms which can usefully be explained in terms of a genetic as-if or approximate “strategy” (to use Dennett’s spin). But we don’t need game theory to explain that distribution, do we? Natural selection as a causal matter does fine. Moreover, if the utility of this metaphor that extends a theory is a social matter, that is, if the extension has no overwhelming scientific advantages, we need to weigh those benefits against the social costs of that potential obfuscation.

Social Darwinism has had dramatic societal costs, as I said. So the question is whether Dawkins’s gene’s eye view does more good than harm. Does the metaphor allow us to make scientific predictions we couldn’t make without it? If not, we have here a time bomb that can fuel social Darwinism, neofascism, etc. Is the dubious philosophical metaphor worth the risk?

Likewise, the extension of game theory to politics in the Cold War provided excuses for the antisocial, paranoid mindsets of the US and Soviet militaries. Far from being useful in reducing the chances of nuclear war, that mindset exacerbated the conflict since the Soviet Union was ready to collapse, and Reagan prolonged the conflict with his triumphalism and paranoia. Arguably, the game theory metaphor did more harm than good.

That metaphor may be doing so in economics, too, by rationalizing the winner-take-all mindsets of the sociopaths who work on Wall Street who are promoting what looks for all the world like what Marx called an ideological superstructure.

Politics is not a game, nor is the human business of buying and selling, nor is life, nor is the evolution of life. When you think of them as games, you’re thinking philosophically, not mathematically. And when you strip away the metaphors—and I mean removing them ruthlessly for the sake of mathematical rigor—I doubt the geometry you’d be left with would be much use to the power elites.

I suspect, rather, that the math came to prominence not because it’s scientifically useful but because it’s socially so (for some people much more than others). The math is a tool that helps economics be something quite other than a science since economics is NOT a science and hasn’t become more scientific with all this obscurantist math. What late-modern economics needs isn’t the bare-bones math but the literary extensions of that math that provide quasi-philosophical, scientistic excuses for a certain economic arrangement, namely for the zero-sum farce of neoliberalism.