Does this account for the possibility that the shrimp aren't necessarily "bluffing", but might just be hopped up on a testosterone-analog and have no idea of their true abilities?
I've seen a small yippy dog go into a frenzy trying to attack a much larger dog, and when it slipped its leash, it DID attack the larger dog, and was promptly tossed in the air.
If you bluff in poker and are called, you lose your chips. That doesn't make it less of a bluff. Intention really doesn't matter here, and anthropomorphizing the shrimp clouds the issue (or to paraphrase Wittgenstein, "If a mantis shrimp could talk, we couldn't understand him")
To say it another way, even if the shrimp were automata with nothing remotely like what we'd call consciousness or intention, it could still make sense to talk about "bluffing" in a game-theoretic sense.
What's important is that it occurs with something approaching an equilibrium frequency. If all weak shrimp always bluffed, strong shrimp would start to always fight, and the weak shrimp would be wiped out. But if they only bluff sometimes, the probability of losing a fight may still be high enough to prevent this from happening. The baseline frequencies of strong and weak shrimp in the population also matter here -- weak shrimp could afford to bluff more in a strong-shrimp-rich population, assuming physical characteristics couldn't reliably identify them as weak.
> "Bluff" has a very specific definition, and it requires that the person bluffing knows they cannot successfully follow through on the bluff.
From a game-theoretic perspective, this is incorrect (even though it accurately describes everyday use of the word).
Think about a poker bot which bluffs. It makes no sense to talk about "knowing" here. The GTO strategy to poker is just a solution to a gigantic series of equations.
My point was that talking about "thinking" and "knowing" is missing the deeper point. You can talk about bluffing without those concepts.
We would want to see what a bluffing shrimp did _when called on its bluff_. If it ran away then what's happened is different to the small dog which appears to actually _believe_ it's bad enough for the fight. And in this case I would say that the shrimp had managed to "tell a lie", while the small dog had managed nothing other than total honesty.
Google gives "an intentionally false statement" as the definition for lie.
Wikipedia says "A lie is a statement that the stating party believes to be false and that is made with the intention to deceive".
Gilfoyle: Why would Dinesh lie about having friends? Why would Tara lie to me about fucking other guys when we have a totally open and hedonistic relationship that allows for behavior like that? Because people like to lie, Richard. It's a war of all against all. The history of humanity is a book written in blood. We're all just animals in a pit.
Strange title. It has long been known for example that squirrels pretend to hide nuts in certain places when they see other squirrels watching. I think they mean exclusively the aggressive stance here.
I've seen a small yippy dog go into a frenzy trying to attack a much larger dog, and when it slipped its leash, it DID attack the larger dog, and was promptly tossed in the air.