It was July, 2008 when Christopher Nolan released his second part to the Batman Trilogy - The Dark Knight. I’m sure we all vividly remember all the quotes of the Joker and the voice of the Batman. However, I was struck by “Rigging the Ferry”. The Joker rigs two ferry with explosives and gives the passengers on each boat the trigger for the other.
One boat contains average civilians, but the other contains prisoners, and therein lies the moral quandary; he informs them that one of the boats must blow up the other before midnight, or he’ll detonate both, killing them all. The Joker assumes it’s inevitable that one of the boats will blow up the other, because he believes that most people are like him: only out for themselves.
I was a very young student at that point and failed to derive any fundamentals from it. It was however a few years later that I realised that this setup is very closely related to the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” - a scenario in the study of Game Theory (a branch of Microeconomics - John Nash, a major contributor to this study - received a Nobel Prize in 1994).
No matter how much we fail to admit but we often end up binge watching at some point of the day. If we could rather relate such setups to our fundamental learnings, we would carry the concepts for a longer time and know its application right to its point.
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