Introducing International Relations (Sep. 30th)

The last few weeks of class predominantly consisted of studying politics (also called political philosophy/theory). Some well-known examples being, fascism, capitalism, socialism, communism, and dictatorship. Settling on one idea and negotiating with the people of our nation was already difficult enough, but international relations was another level of difficulty. The lesson learned today was how complicated it is to have to negotiate with people who have entirely different point-of-views, backgrounds, intentions, cultures, etc. International relations is a totally new concept for me and so the experience-based learning process that happened today was essential for me to comprehend the concept. What we focused on was the prisoner dilemma, but instead in a school situation to help us get accustomed to studying international relations. If we were only given the definition of a prisoner dillema, which would say something along the lines of "dictators have an incentive to opt for a less than optimal outcome for the individuals as a group (paraphrased based on the investopedia)" which makes very little sense. 

Moving on, another activity was pairing up with "weird" people and discussing tactics to overcome an assignment. My first partner was someone I do not know entirely and from my perspective, slightly incognito. However, I am pretty close with the people in my bigger group (4 people). Putting this in an international relations situation, I realized that not all countries are always equally close or equally hate each other. There could be plenty of chances that there is one country you are particularly in favor of, and the other countries, not so much. Moreover, when in pairs the negotiation was relatively smooth and manageable, but things started to get a little more awkward and stressful with more people. Regardless, the activity of deciding on how to conduct and execute the team assignment is where I had a plethora of interesting realizations. 

In my group, for both discussions, all four members opted to work as a group in carrying out the task. As written below, there were abundant justifications I could think of for working with all four of us. In my condition, not only was it a good group in general, but also I would not want a bad grade and feel obliged to blame no other than myself. Since for both rounds of the discussion, no one in our group even thought of betraying the remainder team members, I was surprised that other discussions had betrayers.  Notwithstanding, this is only an imaginary situation and the impacts of our decision only affect ourselves. So, if the responsibility of our decision escalates, our decisions may start to differ. This only accentuates the complexity of our thought process in making decisions. This time around, our group had too good of a luck so blindly believing that all negotiations do not have betrayers could exacerbate the matter and our own future. At the end of the class, Mr.Paterson said that working out a way to predict the people you work with is difficult but can be improved with thorough research. Notwithstanding, regardless of how much research is done, I think there still can be misperceptions. And this time it affects the country's future, so I am excited to learn about actual events that have happened in the past regarding international relations and dig deeper into politics since it is a popular talking point in contemporary society. 

Would you cooperate (written in class)? 

In this situation, I would cooperate with my team and receive one bonus point. If I neglected the assignment, there is a high chance others would try to do the same and create a domino effect, which could lead to the worst-case scenario of everyone getting deducted a grade. Adding on, my team consists of members who have high skills and seem to be successful in previous semesters so working with them could advance my skills moving forward. Also, working with the entire group would probably speed up the process. 

-feel bad if you got a good score and did not contribute. if the original score was bad there is no one to blame, they are people you will have to see for the rest of our life, 

-even if I betrayed and became the boss, I would be a very disliked boss. gain no trust from fellow workers. and a part of me wants to stay pure and clean without causing any fraud. 

Notes: 

ex. fascism, capitalism (money creates power), socialism, communism (opposite of capitalism), dictatorship

happens when countries have to negotiate together. that brings up a different system called international relations (a study on how countries operate with each other)

prisoner dilemma - one person 

politics - working out how to create a better society, you know the people you are working with. 
international relations theories - trying to working out a way to predict if the people you work with are trustworthy. how we can judge and predict the behavior of nations, to predict what to do moving forward. 

this time it was too safe and no betrayal happened, so that was actually dangerous for us.