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Cooperation Works if Majority Can Punish Freeloaders
plasmid writes: "Some Swiss economists ran an investment game... they found that if the majority could punish freeloaders, cooperation flourished. I think this has implications for cooperative peer-to-peer systems and, to a lesser extent, for open source development. I'm so inspired I plan to go out an punish someone right now, as a matter of fact." I had just read this article the other day (go memepool), so this Nature piece seems oddly apropos.
In the most recent Scientific American (I just got it in the mail a couple weeks ago; I don't know if it's on the stands yet), there is a long detailed article about this exactly. The article covers a lot of examples and guesses a lot on the reasons for the behavior.
How the HELL is this News? This is such an elementary part of human nature that I can't believe that anyone has failed to notice this.
So it takes a high bunch of high flying Swedish economics to realize that if a community contributes to create something and others can derive benefits from this creation without helping to build it then OBVIOUSLY the people who contribute will be less motivated to contribute or stop entirely. On the other hand if a mechanism exists to punish free loaders then more people will be motivated to contribute?
WTF??? Who didn't know this?
I learned this by the time I was age 10 and we used to have a neighborhood watch. I slowly realized that the people who didn't participate in the watch still got the benefits of people looking after their belongings. So few people actually participated counting on the fact that others would watch their cars and apartments but even at that age I realized that if we decided to only watch cars and belongings of those that participated in the watch and allow the property of the non-participants to be vandalized and stolen [thus punishing them] then this would give them incentive to join the watch.
I can't remember the last time I saw an fp that was actually mildly substantive. +1 for novelty.
Rather amusing, though, that it takes an academic study to conclude that people are less likely to cheat if they'll be punished when caught.
I guess we'll start seeing bigger upload/download ratios on Warez servers now... :(
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
Gee, what an enlightened statement.
:-)
Folks like to ostracize and hurt people. Very lord of the flies. Once they get rid of the first freeloaders they'll find they like it too much and then keep on selecting somebody else.
Jesus, how bold -- who can make a statement about punishing people with a straight face?
Somehow I don't think that's what Jesus and/or Socrates had in mind
Isn't this the problem faced by developers who resort to begging users to send money?
Likewise, an art website I frequent has recently opened up a subscription service (ostensibly to pay for bandwidth costs) on top of the basic free membership. As there is no tangible 'punishment' for non-paying members, the only real incentive to shell out the cash. I have no plans to do so myself, and according to this study it is exactly that mentality that kills voluntarily cooperative ventures.
Now, the question in my mind is if Noosphere and flames count as a reward/punishment system? ^_^
we won't do anything unless we're afraid we'll get punished if we don't?
We suck.
Is this article somehow applicable to Open Source or even Free Software? I'm too tired to think. Someone please answer me.
Funny that Swiss Economists should come up with this conclusion.
Swiss - Sit back and watch the rest of the world fight tyranny and just rake the money in wherever and however it was attained
Economists - Earn money based on pseudo-science and predictions which are as reliable as those gained by examining chicken entrails.
Therefore should'nt we just punish Swiss Economists
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
I would say he is.
What, then, is the source of this urge to "punish" freeloaders? Could it be the resentment of the brutish toward the clever? Where was most of the hostility toward the peer-to-peer file-sharing masses emanating form, if not form the hard-working, tech-ignorant, "ordinary joe" segment of society, so brainwashed into spending their hard-earned dollars on Backstreet Boys CD's that they saw the rise of Gnutella, Kazaa, and Audiogalaxy as a threat to their very beings?
And so, like Socrates being forced to chugalug that hemlock forty, those responsible for file-sharing software find themselves on the business end of some truly fierce lawsuits. The stoop-browed, grunting element of humanity is, as is its nature, attempting yet again, to crush those more ingenious than themselves, through raw force. When will they learn? When will they learn?
I seem to remember a statistic back in the old napster days that the majority of the people were freeloaders e.g. they just downloaded without offering anything themselves.
Now if we apply this swiss theory to p2p applications you know what will happen?
1) if the majority of the users are freeloaders then there is little chance that they are going to kick other freeloading users off the service
2) assuming that only contributors to the community get a vote then they will be faced with a massive task of getting rid of the freeloaders
3) once you lose all the freeloaders you are left with the people who adopted early and helped the service become massive, but you will have lost the majority of the userbase
4) once a service gets a bad reputation it sticks, and since these services gain popularity through word of mouth rather than regular channels you lose a lot of the potential users
5) lastly a particular p2p service may be good but there are a large number of services which are just as good and which wouldn't support this concept of co-operation.
Just my 2c
A similar set of ideals has been previously applied in psychological and darwinian non-zero sum games where there is a reduced personal gain but higher group gain from cooperation. These games challenge participants in finding an optimal outcome for both in cases where there are multiple iterations of choices to cooperate or 'defect' from cooperation - the website details only a new variant of these.
One model is that of the cold war. If both countries cooperate in an arms reduction treaty, they both win some, but for the individual country, a win can be made if their competitor cooperates and they 'defect' and build more arsenal.
This game has a matrix of possible points scored by each side depending on their individual choices.
. . . . . coop . . defectcoop . . . 3,3 . . 5,0
defect . . 0,5 . . 1,1
In the above situation, the two scores delimited by commas indicate the score for each country. If the countries both cooperate, each receives three points. However, if they disagree, one country will win, but the sum score is less. The interesting situation is if both defect - the value placed on these scores may also determine how the game is played through multiple iterations by two players.
Another variant is the prisoner's dilemma game. Two criminals are captured, and the DA will cut one of them a deal if they squeal on the other. Of course, if both squeal on each other, both loose big. If both are quiet, they will get a lesser charge. The dilemma is that the best group outcome is that they will both fare better if they are both quiet, but they don't know what the other will do.
The article listed is similar to this, but different that there is a cost involved in punishing the 'bad' player that doesn't pay into the investment pot. Here the game asks you to punish the uncooperative player with costs now, but the punishment might make them more likely to contribute in future rounds of the game. Interesting.
they can't do that. michigan cybercourt will rule against it.
strangely like the monvie. try reading the book. it's good.
Well, spammers have the opposite situation, a small cost for them (sending 10000 copies of the same mail) costs much more to others (bandwidth, time reading and deleting junk).
The correct application of this work (although not to the letter) would be to 'punish' those who spam us with lawsuits such as is allowed in Washington State. Although it is a personal cost to call ISPs, file suits and such, if everyone were to make such small pains, we would all benefit greatly.
Then of course next there would be the freeloaders who do nothing to help but profit from our spam-eradicating work that need to be punished ....
This "game" sounds like a development of one which I read in The Economist a few years ago.
In that, the idea was a group of people had 10 beans , of which some were added to the pot and the rest were kept by the participant. At the end, the he pot was shared amongst all, and the goal was to maximise the indivuduals holding (with no concept of punishment).
This was carried out at a university (where else?) and it found that while students of most disciplines did the same thing, kept five and shared five, (only) students of economics kept 9 and shared 1. The summary of The Economist wondered whether this was cause or effect of studying economics.
I wonder if people like Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, ESR et al would keep 1 and share 9, and whether Bill Gates and co would behave more like economists.
If the other sources somehow become slashdotted, NewScientist also has an article up on this.
It's up under the title "Anger plays key role in human cooperation".
--R
I myself kill every single upload I see going out of my gnutella client, the main reason is that I need all the bandwidth I can get for my own selfish pleasure. But also, when I kill these uploads, I always get a little satisfaction of ha, you're not getting that from me. I know this goes against the whole P2P concept, and if I had a T anything instead of 674k/sec DSL, I think I'd let all those uploads alone. But then again, I'm not on gnutella 24 hours a day looking for beastiality-teen-incest-orgy.mpg, I only look for those hard to find Skinny Puppy songs. But my point is, as long as helping others puts you at a disadvantage, people will always choose themselves. It's our nature. Of course we know we suck, but as humans we have the luxury of not giving a shit.
Shift happens. Fire it up.
In the case of file sharing, this is an interesting proposition. How (and why) do you punish someone when the resource is not scarce?
Money, food and other physical resources are scarce by nature, but files and information are infinitely copyable; the exact opposite.
Limewire tries to do something like this, where you can refuse connections from clients that are not sharing a certain minimum number of files. The "punishment" being that you are locked out of the rich parts of network because you are not sharing your files.
Wether making a network smaller by punitive measures is beneficial to the whole community is another question. The dynamics of filesharing are different from physical commodity and financial networks.
There will always be "leeches". When there is nothing to loose by letting them exist and leech, and where the machines they run expand the network simply by being connected to it, its probably better to keep them included and un-punished, rather than decrease the size of the network.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
the problem of freeriders is more or less
taken care of nowadays. What I see more as
a problem in p2p is people who only share
the folder created by their client, so
that there is only "nonoriginal" stuff in it,
files that can already be found elsewhere on the
network. One should advantage people who share
folders of say Morpheus and Gnutella at least,
and add files of their own.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
Professor Peter Fragobritz and University of Northern South Dakota in 1979 developed a computer program on the C64 to model the human behaviour exhibited by catatonics. No matter what you typed into the programme, it wouldn't respond. He found he could port his programme to an IBM Selectric, and indeed even to manual typewriters. Proves a lot, doesn't it?
I hope it's just the beginning of some research
that would lead to goals that you mention.
It might seem obvious but in science you need
some statistical data to make it accepted.
People will pay to punish - suggesting that their
notions of fairness outweigh selfish considerations.
This quote reminds me of an experiment. It runs something like this: A group of people is divided into two groups of equal size. Then each group is asked this simple question: We will either give both groups $2 per person or we'll give each of you three bucks and each of them four bucks. What would you prefer?
85% of the participants go for the two bucks.
There is a certain intuitive logic to this. In an economy that punishes freeloaders, there comes a higher opportunity cost to freeloading. Basic economics say that fewer people will do something if the opportunity costs of doing that something goes up.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
How do we punish the freeloaders of open source?
Do we even want to? I don't contribute much, but any programming I do on my own time is automatically gpl'ed. I don't even think to make it proprietary... just because I might want to sell it someday. I won't hoarde it. Its an attitude I've developed due to the good nature of others. SOMEDAY I might contribute something more substantial than the code snippets I do now, but without the right mentality, that day may never come to be.
This is also a slightly different analogy. In a shared investment game, freeloaders reduce the total profit for everyone. However, if I write a program and gpl it, if there's 1 user or 1 million users using it without returning anything, it makes no difference to me. I should have such a problem.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Won't work because it's not you who makes the decision to punish. Yes, you can file a suit but it's not you who decides who wins the case.
Contrary, in the described game the player could punish whoever he wanted and the punishment proceeded no matter what! It was a self regulating system. No one even wanted to punish a good contributor! The rule of the game - be nice to others. In today world the nasties wins
This is an example of what most elites have nightmares about... the "masses" deciding for themselves what to do, through concensus and free exchange of information. This is the horrible, to-be-avoided-at-all-costs thing that many refer to as "too much democracy". The key is this: it only works if those with an interest/stake both get a place at the table and the ability to punish people who waste their time with lies and greed.
I'm convinced this kind of democratic, community-oriented "anarchy" could work at any scale. As long as everyone feels they are part of something meaningful, and that everyone else is taking it seriously, then you can actually get "competitors" to agree on strategies to maximize the Common Good.
A major stumbling block has been the desire to "punish" criminals by sending them into isolation (or rather, creating isolated COMMUNITIES of criminals), instead of focusing on a more "healing" punishment which would require the community to confront, shame, and supervise the trangressors's rehabilitation.
For example, look at the pyros in Australia. Doesn't it just sound right that they should walk through the destruction, meet their victims, and generally confronted the effects of their crimes? Is it really better to lock them away where they can learn how to hate society even more? How can they be accepted into society again if they aren't genuinely seeking to make reparations?
Just like laughter--a social sanction against rigid codes of behaviour--punishment should bring people together. As weird as that sounds, everyone has to share in the duties of rewarding and punishing members of society: the only way to find a common good is to have everyone agree on it. Don't let anyone tell you that you should leave it to the "smarter/better" people to make this decision for everone else. What is best for those with privilege and power is not necessarily best for all.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
No. Punishment is a purely selfish strategy: spend money punishing someone, so they will invest more, so your profits increase. All this shows is that the people playing the game were able to come up with vaguely intelligent long term (selfish) strategies.
If they wanted to prove that people will 'pay to punish', they should have setup the system where the cost of punishing someone was so high that overall profits decreased - and seen how long people kept on punishing.
Patent it now, it must be patentable since it's blindingly obvious, and a simple deduction from the Prisioners' Delemia. :)
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Play with my webcams and lights at http://206.54.177.105
Hey, that was actually kind of fun. I need to get a doorbell cam! It's probably in the FAQ and I missed it, but how much did all this x-10 stuff cost?
Hammer of Truth
This happens on the online forums, /. included.
The people who make an effort to make valid contributions, and are "punished", either by being flamed, or by spiteful moderation.
Very little is gained by knowing that punishment works as form of behaviour modification, the real gain would be knowing how to keep the vigilantes in check.
Thad
Communism works in theory, in theory marge, in theory.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
So next time I get moderation priveledges, I'm going to mod down people who haven't posted anything :)
Very good point. In all cases the individual maximizes the function "individual gain" playing with all the variables it can access. If punishment is one of those and it plays a role it'll get used as well.
I've been wrestling with the article's issue, on a game-theoretic level, for years. For example, many people simply do not understand what I say when I discuss the events and aftermath of
What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
It's far deeper than ego or "personal", which are superficial reactions I get. In game-theory, the Prisoner's Dilemma teaches us that that individuals have an incentive to defect in terms of cooperative resources. Now, having said that, what then? What follows? How does one go about organizing a cooperative venture with this knowledge in mind?
To quote the article:
This is the exact argument I made passionately regarding the necessity of making there be some penalty for Michael Sims' actions in destroying censorware.org. It's the flip side of enlightened self-interest. Cooperation cannot be supported if someone can defect without penalty. But:
Indeed. It's not costless to create downsides. This makes it tempting to ignore their role in maintaining cooperation. They're unpleasant, to say the least.But what if it's nigh-impossible to have a penalty? This is an aspect where I think about "the power of journalism". As a programmer who has worked with journalists (many times unhappily), I'm acutely aware that as a general rule, journalists can harm me with manipulated coverage, much more than I can punish them via semi-futile protests about their actions. This is in fact my number-one publicity worry about anti-censorware work and how I'd ever get covered nowadays in Slashdot if I ever were to be sued like Dmitry Sklyarov.
So in the end, I don't have a solution. But the implications of this problem are NOT abstract, in fact are very immediate.
Fundamentally the game is based around an infinitely repeated prisoners dilemma game, in which scenario the rational choice is to collude (i.e. work together for a greater payoff). This is different from a one shot game where the Nash equilibirium (named after the economist who discovered this effect) is to not collude (given the invcentive for the others to do the same). There are different outcomes in these two scenarios as in the infinitely repeated game the prospect of punishment for the rest of the game is enough to force collusion, whereas in the one shot game this prospect carries no weight.
The only thing new about this research is the fact that people will actually positively act to punish the offenders (as opposed to effectively punishing them by choices in later iterations of the game).
As such this study has just found that humans can have a collective sense of fariness that they are willing to enforce.
I agree.
I tried it once but gave up because a) of all the 11 MB of the Java runtime library and b) it took me a while to realise that for some reason the java code was embedded in a java-specific archive format (jar? what's wrong with tar?!) and had to be extracted first and c) never could it get to work because the fucking java interpreter wouldn't accept the code.
After that experience I swore I'll never use Java again.
Because of one element they left out of the test :
investing doesn't open you to a $250,000 fine and three years in prison - sharing files on Gnutella does.
Along these lines, the file sharing program Edonkey2000 limits your download rate according to how fast you set your uploading rate. It doesn't enforce that you share any files though, except the files your are downloading at the moment (which it automatically shares)
http://www.s4biturbo.com/
You are the weakest link...
...goodbye
Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit!
$5 for the appliance modules and $40 for the setup kit. Since this is completely off topic, bug me on the page or email me at pmathis@dfw.net if you want to know anything else. Thanks. :)
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
...is combated pretty well just by the program's default configuration to share the download directory. the majority of morpheus/kazaa/gnutella/etc users either don't know that they're sharing files or don't care.
i see this a lot at school when people wonder why their connection was rate limited. almost always, if the person doesn't know why their computer did a lot of traffic, it's because they installed a p2p filesharing program, downloading some stuff, and left it running with all their downloads shared. given the current state of the p2p filesharing userbase, i don't think any drastic measures really need to be taken to ensure availability of files.
that said, i was surprised to note that limewire allows you to control who can download from your machine according to the number of files they have shared. so even if it's not required to keep the system running well, at least one of the more popular programs already has a system in place to reward those who contribute.
So if I do not wish to take part in killing someone just because the group is drunk and have their wrath set on him, the group will punish me?
Thats a retorical question in case you are in doubt.
Their discoveries can aid in explaining why we act as we do, but it can absolutely not be used as a guide. There are way too many factors not meassured in order for the results to be conciderer very scientific.
Eg. one of the factors used in group building. A type of leadership can arrise around a person who use another as dummy/whipping boy to put fear into the others. Old ways though, at least in the western world. Sort of
A lighthouse is for the common good, but can't exist without being charged for. However, due to its nature (it just emits light), you cannot deny service to those who don't pay - they'll see light regardless of whether they've contributed.
The dilemma is - as a ship owner, you have no incentive to pay for upkeep as the service is delivered to you anyway. This works right up until the moment the lighthouse has to close, at which point it becomes in your best interest to ensure everyone pays. Note that - everyone, not just you. If only you pay, you're still at a disadvantage.
Can't remember the exact terminology they used - I think it's a form of 'free good', but I'm prepared to be corrected on that. Why these researchers felt the need to reprove a very old and established theory is beyond me.
Cheers,
Ian
PS: 'A'-Levels - the exams in the UK taken when you're about 18.
Trains are on strike in the UK now because of "differentials". Basically the company (SWT) gave drivers a huge pay rise (because of supply/demand), and has offered the station staff a medium (more than everyone else in the country is getting!) pay rise. The union called a strike because it meant the "differential" between workers would increase. So they are on strike pissing off hundreds of thousands of real workers. I'm sure you can find many examples of this in the past in many countries.
Red propaganda on /. ! All your hard work are belong to us !
while it is still burning :-)
Err..... based on past experience I think ESR would try to convince the more gullible players to invest their beans in his great new company. Who needs boring stuff like business plans when the MIGHTY POWER of open-source will guarantee success!
Well, if you download the source code of a program and modify it to satisfy your needs, you have an advantage over "freeloaders" who only use the software but contribute nothing. These guys "punish" freeloaders because they scratch their own itches but freeloaders have no power over new features.
On the other hand, very few people customize their OS software and it's more and more uncommon when we get to very complex software like Mozilla or the Linux kernel.
The true freeloaders, however, are those who get the sources, modify the software to serve their purposes but don't give the modifications back to the community. I don't necessarily mean selling the software here (which is IMHO OK), or releasing a closed-source version (which is semi-OK). Lack of contribution from people who get a customization or financial advantage is the worst form of freeloading.
A punishment that seem to work to some degree is using a license that require contributing the changes. Some OS licenses don't require it (BSD), some do but allow not contributing modifications if the modified (binary) version is never released in public (GPL).
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~axe/research/Evolvi ng.pdf
There is a lot in this book:
Axelrod, Robert: The Evolution of Cooperation
which is relevant to this discussion and also to how open source development works, particularly if you read it alongside Eric Raymond's stuff.
I've seen many people abort transfers (I've done so myself) if someone starts downloading from you that is offering no files herself.
Instant punishment.
Then, send them a message with the built-in chat system explaining why you aborted the transfer.
And while I don't agree that this "freeloading" is a bad thing*, I think that the case of a single app is not what the article author was getting at.
Where this model is relevant is for open-source development. When you release free code (free as in beer), it becomes part of the resource pool available to all developers. However, cooperation in this way does not flourish, unless we find a way to punish freeloaders, i.e. those who use free code but do not contribute.
And we've found one. Its called the GPL, and should (if it ever gets upheld in court) force those who want to use free (as in speech) code to contribute.
indecision
* even the most non-active user still contributes by adding to download stats if nothing else and therefore providing an indicator of how popular an app is
Sounds to me like some variant of this could be useful in P2P file-sharing rigs.
It is interesting considering the article in terms of the SPAM problem. I found the following quote particularly interesting:
The research may hold lessons for policymakers attempting to build social cohesion, he believes. Decisions may be more acceptable if they come from within the community and not from a remote central government.
I have to agree with their conclusion here. I'm less than thrilled with the prospect of moronic politicians attempting to solve the problem. Their track record of internet related laws is absolutely horrifying. Local laws isn't going to solve the spam problem, and asking for anti-spam laws just encourages them to pass other bad internet laws.
The other option is action within the community. Networks dropping data or entire connections with anyone who carries SPAM. Black hole lists. Etc. Punnish anyone who carries spam.
This causes some temporary inconvienences and data loss. Some people even try to call it censorship and worry about abuse. I say it's a non-issue, not censorship, and any abuse is self limiting. You can always send your data over another network. If someone tries to abuse a blackhole list, people wont subscribe to it.
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Interesting that this post should come up at the same time that "Beautiful Mind" is in the theaters
The finding of the Swiss Economists is close to the very premise of pure democracy and why forms of it have by-and-large overcome monarchic states. Combined with the assumption that game theory and John Nash's work is based on(see Beautiful Mind -- or better, read his research) "that equilibrium can be predicted when you take into account that each player acts in his/her own self interest", you have good theoretical evidence supporting the findings of this research.[Actually both Game-theory and Nash tend to start with the presumption that people will act in their own self-interest first and foremost]
In order for the majority to have the power to punish freeloaders, they must first have power to begin with. With majority vote and regular turnover, the opportunity to enact this is provided for. If everyone acts in their own self interest and they have the power to vote, then freeloaders MUST be punished.
If the majority are freeloaders, then those that contribute least will be punished. (Napster is shut down, but everyone who knows how to contribute still has access by some means). If this "freeloader" society is self-sufficient, it will eventually turn itself around if it is interested in self-survival. In the case of government, democracies turn themselves around because the cost of non-cooperation is death. Napster and p2p are bad examples becase the cost of community-death is not as dire as individual-death.
The summary of this rant: community works if either 1) the act of cooperation is equivalent to the act of acting in the majority's self-interest and/or 2) acting in the majority's self-interest does not lead to the destruction of the community. True democracy allows for consistent societal change in both of these directions.
In fact edonkey available at www.edonkey2000.com also has a few anti freeloading features. One of them is that it divides any file that you download into chunks. As and when you hav a complete chunk, it is automatically shared. This is one really good feature, with a few surprizes. This spreads the files faster on the network, and anyone who is downloading the file automatically becomes a distribution point for that file till it is completely downloaded. Another neat feature that i really like in edonkey is that if u put limits on the upload speed, then depending on the speed your download speed is also limited. This is one feature that i really like. And these 2 features combined makes the edonkey network really good for large files.
For the game to make sense, there should be some kind of "community reward" for sharing, say, doubling the pot before splitting it. Otherwise, what is the point of the game?
"Public good" is the phrase you're looking for.
:)
The same applies to national defence, roads, hospitals, fire stations, and everything else which most individuals can't afford on their own, but which benefit everyone (or many people) indiscriminately of who pays.
Hence... taxation.
These sigs are more interesting tha
I don't believe I indicated that this audience is immune to this behaviour. Geeks are as bad as anybody else. Nothing worse than a Geek on a power trip... ;)
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
and I am most offended by this . . .
Uh-oh, that sounds like an angry mob. I'm outta here!
"If being a geek means being passionate about something, then I pity those who aren't geeks." - Pike65
Punishment is a purely selfish strategy: spend money punishing someone, so they will invest more, so your profits increase.
Incorrect - In the actual experiment, if you chose to punish a `freeloader' then you paid out of your own profits, and no one else's. The games were not iterated (played repeatedly with the same cast of players), so any consequent change in the freeloader's behavior would not be to your benefit. Perhaps on the next time around, the freeloader would have a change of heart, but even if s/he did this was not likely to be to your own benefit.
Thus in the context of the game, choosing to punish was a very counter-selfish act - not selfish at all, but quite the opposite. That's what makes the research so interesting.
-Renard
Let's say we have a central user database (without this things get more difficult, maybe not impossible). Each user has a score. Everyone starts at 0. It must be made be very difficult to create multiple accounts for the same user.
Whenever a user (provider) successfully "uploads" a file to another user (requester), the score of the provider is increased (based on the size of the file), the score of the requester of the file stays the same. So users who offer a lot of files get a high score.
Users with higher scores should get a higher priority/speed for downloads at other users. Like this a high score would get a reward. A score of 0 should give just usable rates (say 20 minutes for one mp3 file), negative scores under 10 should give rates of nearly 0. Positive rates over 10 should result in the maximum rates. No-one wants elite users who can get faster downloads than anyone else, we just want to get rid of freeloaders. The goal ist hat every regular cooperative user should get the maximum rate while newbies get a low rate and freeloaders get nearly no downloads at all.
OK... we know that users would pay for punishing. So let's allow users to pay with their score to decrease the score of others who they recognize as freeloaders. This would give trust to users who offer a lot. On the other side freeloaders get a bad priority/download rate very soon. Maybe one should give new users a certain time interval (2 weeks) in which they can neither earn nor lose points so that they can build a certain library and will not be recognized as freeloaders.
Do you think this might work?
michael at slashdot.org: The real answer is that a couple of the slashdot authors are sick.
stupid ass name that's for sure.
I'm not an academic but I've become really interested in Complex Adaptive Systems research recently (I was interested in this before I knew what it was but that's another story). One of the books I came accross was "The Complexity of Cooperation" by Robert Axelrod. In it he discusses much of the research that led them to Tit-for-Tat and many other strategies for the Iterated Prisoners Delima. Very good read, check it out.
A classic (if now considered somewhat unethical) experiment in the 60s by Milgram shows the dangers with telling people to administer punishment to others... especially where they're told that they should do so (in short, when told to administer punishment to a level that could cause serious permanent physical damage to a stranger, two-thirds of people will tend to do so if sufficiently emotionally detached).
A lynch mob is never too far away, try Canetti's Crowds and Power too...
T
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
Imagine a group of starving apes.
....
Divide them in two groups.
You either give two portions of food to each member of each group or you give three portions of food to each member of one group and four to each member of the other group.
In the first case you end up with a bunch of slightly hungry apes.
In the second case you end up with a group of not-hungry apes and a group of well fed apes. Naturally the well fed ones will beat the crap out of the other ones next time food is distributed and keep all of it, plus they will be higher in the hierarchy, plus they will get all the female-apes while the other ones just get the crap beaten out of them if they even try to approach the females
What can an ape choose???
punishment should bring people together
If you look at history this is exactly what has happened. Sixtus IV established the Spanish inquisition in 1478 the root out Judaizing, the Christian community was able to solidify behind this movement and by 1492 there were no Jews left in Spain. The establishment of the Portugese inquisition in 1534 had a similar outcome. When Paul III established the Roman inquisition in 1542 to stop the problem of Protestantism they were similarly successful.
The inquisitions of Europe were as successful as they were because they focused on penance, not punishment by isolation, which seems to be exactly what you advocate.
However, today the inquisition is hardly thought of as a good model, despite the fact that it meets all the criteria you seem to suggest: it wildly popular with the majority, the auto-da-fes were crowd pleasing events that focused on penance, the entire community felt they had a stake in rooting out heresy which threatened the continued well-being and existence of their world, and the punishment acted to bring the community together.
Surprisingly enough when the United States was founded, people like Madison and Mason considered these historical precedents and gave arguments for why unrestricted democracy was a bad thing. The tyrrany of the masses, as evidenced in the behavior of the masses.
I would be interested to hear how your community oriented anarchy would not allow something like the Spanish inquisition to be repeated.
(including the words "Five words")
./configure --with-vxworks; make ) were not compelled to release their changes by the XFree license. Result - a less than stellar server, that locks me into a buggy and feature-lacking OS (Don't say it - as soon as I have the manpower my project will be converted to Linux.)
I didn't see anybody at +3 making the analogy to the GPL vs. the BSD-like licenses.
In a sense, the GPL "punishes" freeloaders by denying them resources - "If you don't share with us, then we won't let you have a share of the pot." If you won't contribute to the shared codebase, you cannot take from the shared codebase.
Compare and contrast that to the BSD-like licenses that don't have the "Release the source" requirement - a freeloader (certainly Microsoft, possibly Transgaming, possibly Lindows) can take from the public pool, not give back, and incur no "punishment".
I used to think that RMS was a crazy, extremist bastard. Then something happened to cause me to revisit that thinking. I work professionally with a product called RtX, which is an X Windowing System server for the embedded operating system VxWorks. RtX is derived from XFree86. I've had several problems with RtX - it won't recognize certain graphics chips, it doesn't support font server use, it won't do anything but 256 pseudocolor, I cannot easily add key bindings or LEDs to the keyboard routines, and (most importantly) it won't work under the newer versions of VxWorks. None of these would be insurmountable problems if I had the source, but the folks that did the conversion of XFree into RtX (and it isn't a trivial conversion, not just
I know I just enraged the "GPL is tyranny, BSD is freedom" crowd. But please, think about this for a moment. If you wish to continue to use the BSD license for your code, wonderful. However, any code I do off-hours will be released under the GPL, for the reasons stated above.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Given: Freeloading is defined as the lack of cooperation.
Given: Punishment is defined as the act of making a given behavior fail to work.
Given: Something is considered to work if the majority does not fail when executing that behavior.
Conclude: The subject of this story is tautological; the subject "Cooperation" grammatically must "work" when its opposite "freeloading" is defined to not work by means of majority punishment.
Caveat: The results of this research most likely aren't useless or obvious; tautologies are, after all, incontrovertable truths, and lets not forget what science seeks.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
surely the comment moderation system used by Slashdot already provides a perfect example of this? Incidentally, wouldn't it be more sensible to allow ALL registered users mod priveleges after Xmonths or Xposts and only allow POSITIVE moderation? Surely we'd end up with a much more democratic system that didn't run the risk of "disappearing" potentially insightful posts? Just a thought.
That was classic intercourse!
don't want to raise old flames, but...
doesn't this sound as a good argument in favour of the GPL?
13-4=54/6
but I read an interesting article on a related subject the other day. (I thought it was in Scientific American, but couldn't find it on their site.)
The gist of the study was that people have a natural tendency (apparently) to look for fairness in interactions. They took pairs of people and gave one of them $10. This person was asked to offer as much of the money to the other person as they wanted. The second person could choose to accept or reject the offer. If accepted, both people would keep the money they had but if rejected neither could keep anything. Obviously, whatever the second person received would be free money, so logically (one would think) it's in their interest to accept whatever is offered, even if it's just a penny. But what the researchers found is that this is not what happens - instead, the second person would reject offers deemed insufficient. They ran this experiment in a number of places so that they could control for cultural differences, etc. There were cultural differences (in some places the offerer would actually offer more than half the money to the second person) but they consistently found that there was a limit below which people would reject the offer - apparently viewing it as unfair.
If I remember where I found it I'll add a link, if possible, in a later post.
Sigh. My id isn't prime. 2 2 2 2 2 3 5 313
If you have to punish someone, that's not cooperation.
I'd have to say it's majoritarianism, or more commonly, mob rule.
"There's no justice like angry-mob-justice!"
For example...
I offered my boss my bonus (~$3000) to fire a freeloader at work. I think the biggest thing about freeloaders is the proof. This woman I wanted gone was late 30min - 1hr every day. Played on the internet only when she wasn't on the phone or doing her homework. She hasn't produced any definable work since she was hired. And in general is the biggest bitch on the planet. The problem is that we have proof of her Freeloading and the punishment is negligible. She's protected by spinless corporate HR reps.(Sorry for the rant.)
Now, I have noticed that people who get labled as freeloaders, tend to think that the word FREE actualy means something.
Other exaples:
Gas, grass or ass. Nobody rides for free.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. (Can't remember how to spell Tanstalf. Free Luna!)
Free registration.
Free discount card.
Get rich quick.
Alright, bring on the flames.
Someone hates these cans.
I don't think we should program in punishments in p2p sharing systems or for users of free software who don't contribute. Why ? Because the world is bigger than that. What if someone volunteers a lot of thier time and effort for some charitable cause outside of computing, in the Red Cross say. Or in some drug/alchohol/victim whatever suport groups. They are contributing to social well being, for whatever reason already. May be we can aford to give back to them a few mp3s or free programs. Digital information is not the only currency in this global game of life.
Interestingly, the same argument gan be made about information as a public good.
Everyone gains if it is produced and placed in the public domain. It isn't "consumed" like a physical good so my use of information does not mean that there is less for everyone else. But because of this no single individual/corporation has the incentive to produce information based goods.
To create an incentive to produce, the current approach is to create an artificial concept of "intellectual property" to prevent the free use of information so that the producer can reap monopoly profits. This works in a fashion (information gets produced), but is highly inefficient because the full benefits are not realised, future innovation is restricted and there is an extremely costly legal infrastructure required to enfore it.
I personally believe that there are much better ways to structure incentive to produce information products that do not require copyright, patent and trade secret law. The idea of making information free, but requiring contributions and punishing freeloaders certainly seems to have potential. There would clearly be practical difficulties in arranging a universal system, but hey, nobody said that the revolution would be easy......
The really funny thing to me is that this is "news" to some people. Seems like common sense to me. It's a shame that there are actually people on /. who look at a study like this and feel that it's a revelation. Ah, the bitter fruits of socialism.
/. will let us know about some scientific research that indicates that those students who study tend to make better grades... outrageous!
Next,
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Direct Connect for Windows does something along these lines. I've only used it once, but I know that many of the servers you can log into require you to be sharing a minimum amount of data (say, 4 gigs) before you can join. As a result there is a hell of a lot of files available on the network. At least, there was when I signed on that one time several months ago.
Not only is this obvious, there are analytical models that have shown exactly under what conditions punishment works (also taking into account punishment of those who don't punish freeloading, and punishment of those who don't punish those who don't punish the freeloaders, etc)
This is the kind of stuff that game theory is made of. But for some strange reason, nobody cares about the proofs that have been around for ages, but only seem to pay attention to the far less informative simulations. Forgive me for plugging my own paper on the question of this kind of hype
To quote a founder of evolutionary game theory, John Maynard Smith, the idea that there is a bold new science of emergence and complexity is "absolute f*ing crap, but crap with good PR." (Reference in the paper linked to in previous paragraph.)
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
Seems like thats what we used to call these research results.
isn't that basically what john nash did? the guy that had the movie recently where they weren't very good at showing his life factually but instead hollywood-ized - A Beautiful Life
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
The article mentioned a rather cool game called "Settlers of Catan." Its made in Germany, and though an English version is available, its pretty hard to find.
/.'rs to adopt some territory the Nooshpere.
An Open Source software version can be found here. It seems to work okay but the latest build is ancient. Perhaps its time for some interested
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Even though that might we interesting for some sociological studies, i yet fail to see any advancement for P2P sharing.
Let me exlain this a bit further:
The first obstacle would be which kind of punishment fits best? Kick the freeloader off the Server? Most of today's P2P tools already provide that kind of punishment, even though only to admins or moderators ( DirectConnect for example... by the way, this works kinda great. I have to say that DirectConnect offers some servers which are really "clean" in terms of freeloaders and fake files )
Giving the privilege of kicking to all users would only result in 1337 h4>0r5 kicking innocent people. So that is obviously not an option. The next possibility would be denying Freeloaders access to files. Again, this is already provided by most tools ( see most Gnutella clients ).
As you can see, any option of punishing freeloaders could be easily exploited ( one reason this has not yet found its way into most tools ).
Giving the ability only to a few thrusted users helps a lot, but as i mentioned earlier this is already featured.
So, anyone, please give me a hint.
Ayn Rand would be rolling over in her grave over this. It was precisely because the rational investor would see that by investing, they'd succeed, that every rational investor would succeed.
It is when punishment is applied that people don't invest or take part. In areas heavily tested, punishment causes slacking off.
What economic advancement there is is largely due to those risk takers who do invest and drag the rest of us neanderthals along with them, kicking and screaming, into higher productivity worlds where more and more goods are available at cheaper costs.
"All representatives are busy. The estimated hold time is one..hundred..sixty..four..minutes." Detroit Edison, 02/01/02
That there *ARE* no elites in what he proposed. Meaning, that having a broadband connection would get you no higher status than a modem user.
What he's saying is that there is a cost to obtaining the status of "cooperative player", namely cooperating, but that there's no gradient to the status. You are tagged as a contributer, or not, and the ability to be tagged as a contributer is not high.
It doesn't matter when the points are awarded, it's a long-term concept in that you have to earn the status versus being granted it instantly. And yes, modem users would take slightly longer than broadband users to build up the points, but that's why the threshold should be relatively *low*, so that it doesn't take modem users eons to achieve "contributer" status.
No, the system won't incentivize people to share unbelievably massive amounts of data. But it *would* make it so that people who have *no* interest whatsoever in giving anything back (tagged as selfish) would not reap the benefits of the sharing system.
And yes, information isn't a scarce resource in the sense of food, shelter, energy, etc. But some will absolutely not share anything at all, even at no cost to them. And I think the system proposed would be quite effective in not rewarding unreasonably selfish individuals.
(also - I'm not saying that the system has to center around sharing warez or copyrighted songs, there are things I've pulled from p2p that were quite useful to me but not warez or songs)
If only this sort of majority control could be applied to Military financial resources we might could actually achieve preventitive warfare (like in preventitive healthcare.)
Certainly it is a minority (in comparision to the 6 billion plus of world population) who control such resources in a non productive manner.
Just as I'll claim if you try to use traditional economic arguments to justify "ownership" of software, or whatever, analogies between physical property (money) and property that can be duplicated (software, information) just don't hold up. The fact that you can share software or information with a friend without losing it yourself makes a HUGE difference in any kind of economic game. (There is some cost, for instance bandwidth in a peer-to-peer system, but I think it is mostly negligible.)
However, I would expect that this result does in fact hold for IP-less software economies as well. I am just saying that making direct comparisons is always trouble.
> But more important than a chance to poke at Lefties
> is the extreme implications of this: Is perceived
> fairness really a more important survival trait
> than unfair 'growth' scenarios? Clearly not, if
> everyone gains, even unequally, the group as a
> whole does better and the individuals do better as
> well. A win/win.
In my experience it is often the *disparity* in wealth rather than the actual magnitude of wealth that matters. If your evaluation function is "number of dollars posessed", then you are correct, but I think that is a little bit too glib.
Would you start a game of monopoly in the $2000 or $3000/$4000 scenario?
I still haven't figured this one out myself, but I think it's still more complicated.
Female Prison Rape in NY
apropòs, you dipshit.
Isn't this a rather obvious statement? Anybody that's held a job where you work in teams should know that those who do the most work get allocated their fair share of the billings and the freeloaders (or better put, those who did less work) get less or nothing.
I think we're dealing with a concept that is far more reaching than P2P and has been around for much longer.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Why don't they just implement some sort of Karma program like slashdot. Almost a global d/l u/l ratio.
Of course someone would find a way to hack it.
You spend a little of your resources (open
r ub e.en.html
connections) to throw big roadblocks to
spammers. If the majority does it, then
the spammers are penalized:
http://www.iks-jena.de/mitarb/lutz/usenet/teerg
Long ago before the world wide web was born and the internet was just an infant, we called this mob rule. This brings up the old movies where a mob wants to go and lynch somebody they _THINK_ has done something wrong. They want to do this without knowing all the information, and without just process. I am not sure I like this idea at all. This same type of co-operation is why so many people believed the world was flat. This could used as a tool to discredit valid options and opinions.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
you could only download if you uploaded, usually the ratio was like for every 5 you download, you had to upload 1, and it would hold you to it. of course it didn't restrict you from uploading something useless, then again, there were never any guarantees that the 5 you got had any worth either.
The general principle presented here is essential to slashdot's success. The moderation system allows a fairly mild way to punish those who are abusing the use of the shared resource.
How aware were the participants that the other players were changing each round? It seems like they were acting as if they were in a repeated-player scenario even though they weren't. In fact, it take an enormous pool of players to ensure that no one ever played with the person twice with multiple rounds.
Hey democracy lovers, add Quorum as a c
The problem is very closely related to fair play in wireless ad hoc network routing. In wireless ad hoc networks, nodes forward packets for each other; a selfish node could save battery power and still get their packets routed. At least two papers in the published literature make attempts at this problem:
Enforcing Service Availability in Mobile Ad-Hoc WANs uses secure hardware to achieve this result. Obviously, this makes it open to law-enforcement attack, since the issuer of the hardware is a single point of failure. Also, it's a lot easier to get someone to download something than to buy a piece of secure hardware.
Mitigating Routing Misbehavior in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks doesn't try to stop misbehaving nodes; rather, they try to stop using misbehaving nodes for forwarding. (If you think this scheme is not directly applicable, think of the case of requesting a download of a file you just uploaded.)
Since this is an ongoing area of research, it'll be interesting to see what happens; any workable solution for ad hoc network routing fairness will also ensure p2p fairness. It doesn't work the other way around, since the routing mechanism itself is under attack.
It seems that in a p2p system, including digital signatures in shares, in combination with some kind of reputation system, might be a good way to both achieve fairness and eliminate spam. Maybe allowing leechers in times of excess bandwidth would jumpstart the system (a problem for warezers), and using "moderation point" like things to mod people up and down.
[Disclaimer: I only work in a somewhat related area; I haven't actually considered how one might solve either problem]
Dude that was like 6 months ago!
... are freeloaders by choice. But I have a bandwidth cap when I'm on campus. (5gb/week.) I wouldn't give two shits if someone leeched from me all night and all day, but for the small issue of me getting my access cut off. Sharing isn't free for me; it cuts into what I can do.
Hence, the university makes a bastard of me. *sigh*.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Do I actually have to freeload, or can we just pretend I did and skip straight to the spanking?
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Uh...guys. Check your MacroEco 101 textbooks. This is called the free rider problem, or the tragedy of the commons, for the love of Pete! These concepts were covered the year America signed the declaration of independence...
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
There is another method for ensuring cooperation and fair behavior in peer networks. And it works the same was as the method described.
It is called social discovery, and it works by having each and every peer create a view of the network that suits their interests and needs. In such an environment, the freeloading peers will not be viewed as valuable peers and will be dropped from your peer group(s); no longer used, and no longer using your resources.
On the flip side, there is a strong incentive to become a better, more reliable peer yourself, as the quality of peers you can associate with is directly related to how they perceive *your* quality to them.
If you want to be able to tap better, higher quality peers, then you should keep your node available longer, more often, and also share more resources (whatever they may be).
The project I am working on that implements this social discovery mechanism is called the ALPINE Network and there is also another social discovery based project called NeuroGrid.
I am biased towards this kind of approach, but I think it provides the best long term solution to resource discovery / searching in large peer networks.
This is why copyright is supposed to be limited to a short period. If if still were, the system would work as intended. Much the same with patents (which originally had a longer term, because of they're supposed to represent a physical device, with the additional associated costs). The flaw is not in the basic concept, but in it's perversion by our government.
There's a long article (which unfortunately is not available online) discussing experiments like these and coming to the conclusion that the vast majority of people value "fairness" over material success in this particular case. I was particularly fascinated by the experiment known as the Ultimatium Game; the article says that only 4% of people, IIRC, choose what the mathematically most beneficial solution. (In other words, in 96% of cases people would choose the "fair" outcome over one that was objectively better for BOTH participants.) Worth checking out if you are interested in this kind of thing.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
but not posted on their site. You have to pick up the hardcopy...
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
The researchers' conclusion was not simply that punishment is a good longterm strategy sometimes. Their conclusion was that anger evolved because of this - we don't just say "hmm, I'll do better eventually if I punish that guy." We go right on merrily thinking short-term, but we throw away short-term gains because of built-in emotional responses, and it all works out.
Art. 13 Right to Privacy
e ga ff/swilaw/fconst.html
1 All persons have the right to receive respect for their private and family life, home, and secrecy
of the mails and telecommunications.
2 All persons have the right to be protected against the abuse of personal data.
http://www.eda.admin.ch/washington_emb/e/home/l
-s
We found that taking strong action against manipulators, while at times appears harsh, actually protects the integrity of the game play and keeps our community of hundreds of thousands of players happy.
In our ongoing simulation of social/market dynamics, the "Prosperity through punishment" theory has been applied successfully.
Do you know **why** the views taken by the two political parties are so similar? It's terribly obvious: think of an issue as a variable, ranging from ``reactionary'' to ``revolutionary''. The level of public support for a given stance will most likely resemble a bell curve.
Now, each party picks a position. The ``conservative'' party will get all votes to the right of their stake, and the ``liberal'' party all votes to the left. The in-betweens are up for grabs. (This is why we have television!) This is why elections are won by one and two percent. If one party slips too far away from the center, they begin to lose support, and so move closer to the other party. Example: Americans have grown much more tolerant of the idea of gay rights (at least when people they don't know get one) over the last fifty years. Whereas both parties previously resided on the ``gays bad and unnatural! institutionalize!'' side of the debate, that point of view is now limited to white-power activists, Slashdot trolls and Pat Robertson. Both parties at the very least recognize that gays are not automatically evil. The issue was moved to the left.
Just because you're surrounded by people with wacky beliefs, it doesn't make those beliefs any more popular in the General Populace.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
So in other words, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. How much time did they waste proving that?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Nature used to be a prestigious publication for major scientific papers. But it's been dumbed down. Outside the biological sciences, Nature's paper reviews are of very low quality. Articles on economics and computer science in particular seem to be especially bad. Sometime during the 1990s, something went very wrong over at Nature.
Here we're reading about one simple experiment, not confirmed by others. The article doesn't mention any previous or related work. The article reads like something off PR Newswire. That's bad science.
Punkbuster for P2P!!!
> Would you start a game of monopoly in the $2000 or
> $3000/$4000 scenario?
> True, but Monopoly is a zero-sum game, while the
> economy is not.
Actually, that's not true. Again, it depends on what your evaluation function is, but unless it is "the winner gets 1 point, the loser gets -1 points", it is not zero-sum. That's because of the "chance" and "community chest" cards (and passing Go). In fact, a cooperative game of monopoly could easily go on forever, with both players accumulating massive wealth.
It's not available online, but the January 2002 issue of Scientific American has a very relevant article titled "The Economics of Fair Play". It discusses the nonrational dynamics of how groups of human expect and enforce fairness. Definitely worth a read for open-source economic theorists and fans of intriguing behavioral-psych experiments.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Free markets fail with public goods. Think of the environment, or airline safety. There is incentive to freeload (to increase production and pollution, or to pay less than the other airlines for security workers, for example).
Free markets and laissez-faire capitalism are best for goods that aren't shared this way, and which don't have a freeloaders problem.
But for public goods, central planning is necessary. For example, the government sets limits which help keep the environment clean, and airlines safe (theoretically). The government enforces this with fees or penalties, which change the cost structure. In other words it punishes participants who freeload.
Ideally, the government should be made up of market participants. This is what we have (theoretically for sure) in the USA and any other democracy.
So we need government for certain things, we can't have free markets for everything, nor central planning for everything, and the threshold depends on how bad the freeloader problem is. This study seems to re-affirm that.
It is interesting to debate whether art, literature, computer software, etc, is a public good or not.
The participants considered their having punished someone--and the resultant feeling of power--to be a "profit" more valuable than real profit, just as the majority of "participants" in "real life" do.
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
a PR penalty, which you are exacting as we speak. I don't know what more one can do except that.
sulli
RTFJ.
Richard Dawkins detailes various evolutionarily stable strategies, including strategies like "tit for tat" in his book, The Selfish Gene.
:-)
Among other things, he looks at game theory and how Prisoner's Dilemma can be such a great tool for describing nature.
Oh, and one thing that isn't mentioned by this study is the fact that the proportion of freeloaders grows to a "point of no return", cooperation breaks down completely. One might think that this wouldn't happen in a situation where the freeloaders could be punished, but that isn't alway the case.
Read The Selfish Gene to find out why.
Most collectives fail because they become oligarchies. This experiment neatly sidesteps the issue with clever experimental design. I would bet that if you re-ran the experiment but allowed:
(1) individuals to tranfer resources to each other and
(2) communication between the participants and
(3) ran repeated trials, say 10 trials with each test group,
you would wind up with something more akin to what we see in the real world with collectives.
Modern sociaty is a good example of a system that punishes free loaders by majority to achieve better co-opperation.
Sociaty punished people who work against sociaty through the police force and justice system.. Co-opperation abounds.
Let's see... freeloaders use up the service without contributing. And you think it's a bad thing to get rid of them because if you do, then "there goes your userbase." But if you kick these people off you GAIN: more bandwidth, more room for people that contribute to the service. On top of that, a certain portion of potential freeloaders will be more likely to contribute if they find out they are in danger of being kicked off the service, thereby increasing the value of your service even more.
As long as it is made very easy to contribute to a service, you should not lose any meaningful users.
"And like that
Is it an issue of fairness or an issue of trust?
Do I trust the other group to do the same for me? Would I trust them to pay me more if they had the chance?
If the answer is no, then I will concede the extra buck and take $2. If the answer is yes, then I will take the extra dollar and expect that the other group, when given the situation, will do the same for me.
If you don't buy the trust then maybe it's not so much fairness but unfairness. "Why should I take less than some other group?" More wealth equals higher status. We all know this - it's kind of like trying to "keep up with the Joneses" sort of situation.
Let's say the issue was between something else, say computers. The choice is between two very decent brand XYZ (insert your own, high-quality) systems (say a 1.5GHz chip, 512MB RAM, etc.) that are perfectly acceptable for everyday use and will last 4 years. Or, you can get a 2GHz chip, 1GB RAM, 60GB HD and the other group would get a dual 3GHz, 4GB RAM, multiple hard drive beast. The rational person in me wants the 2GHz box... but the geek in me really wants the dual proc box.. and the geek also knows that all the recipients of the dual machine will brag endlessly upon how much theirs 'roxx0r'. So I settle for the 1.5GHz box and we're all the same.
It reminds me of the old joke:
Bob is sitting in his house one day when he hears his doorbell ring. He answers the door and there's a man with a suit holding a large wooden box with a big red button on the top. The man explains that the moment Bob presses the button he will receive $1,000,000 - and someone he never met will die. The man leaves the box with Bob and repeats the conditions. Bob goes back in to his easy chair and stares at the box but decides that killing someone is just too much for him to bear, and puts it in the closet. A couple of months later Bob remembers the box. So, he goes back to the closet and retrieves the box. He then hesitantly presses the button. Immediately his doorbell rings. Bob goes to the door and surprise; it is the same man in the suit who brought Bob the box. This time, however, instead of holding a box he has an oversized cashiers check for $1,000,000 made out to Bob. Bob takes the check, but before he can close the door the man asks Bob for the box with the button on it. Bob fetches the box and hands it to the man and asks him what he is going to do with the box. The man replies "I'm going to give it to someone you've never met."
Thanks,
--
Matt
I read this article in Sci Am a couple of weeks ago, and it got me thinking of an alternate experiment (which I should probably email the people who did the experiment in the first place to see if they thought of it).
In the game in the experiment, users are allowed to punish freeloaders by paying a tax. This system obviously sucks for a variety of reasons if implemented on a network of a large scale.
What I was wondering is what happens when you play the same game, except instead of punishing, you allow people to pay a tax to *reward* the people who are fronting up money? The results would probably vary wildly depending on how high the reward was...
> Here's a related link [dieoff.org] that may say it better than I can.
So that's where the story came from: a monograph by an amateur mathematician in 1833. A convincing example of social dynamics . . . but without basis in actual historical fact.
One of my hobbies is studying English History on the social/peasant level. And reading several Enclosure Records, I was struck by the fact many times acerage was held by a number of farmers or tenant ``in common". And reading the secondary history on village history, I never found a mention of Village Commons -- unless you want to include the small bit of ground in front of the church, or the village square.
This is because resources -- like land -- were rare in medieval times, & rights to them jealously protected. Nobles are recorded in the Domesday Book (for example) as having owned churches, & received a cut of the tithes paid by the congregation. Just because some pasture was held ``in common" by some or all of a village did not mean everyone or anyone could use it.
Think of it this way: you have two siblings, one of whom shares with you ownership of a vacation house. The other sibling constantly wants to be able to use this vacation house at anytime -- although she/he does not pay for upkeep -- because ``we're family". Would you be inclined to say ``no" often?
The medieval peasant with shares in a field held ``in common" felt the same way. A better example whould be people who lease land from the US Federal government (e.g. cattlemen who have degraded BLM lands with overgrazing & constant complaints over increased fees to cover costs).
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
It should be applied to Open Source Projects... and Slashdot editors.
"When penalties were allowed, the common good prevailed, and the investment by each group member climbed. "But if there's no opportunity for punishment, cooperation unravels," says Fehr, with investment declining rapidly."
Actually there are some more subtleties to this.
Other simulations have found that it is necessary to have a way to punish people for tolerating freeloaders. Without this, it is very hard to achieve stable cooperation. In a way, it's a bit like meta-moderation - a second level of assessment of people.
So not only do we shun those who behave badly, we shun anyone who does not shun those who behave badly. Of course this can be very coercive and intolerant if it gets out of hand.
Even with this, a society can converge into one of two modes.
1. Where almost everyone cooperates and almost everyone punishes those who don't cooperate, and also punishes those who do not punish those who don't cooperate.
2. Where few people cooperate and few people punish those who don't cooperate.
Which of these outcomes occurs depends on chance and initial conditions to a large degree.
You can see this in human societies. If you have traveled, you would have been astonished how ethical standards differ from one country to another. These differences seem to be quite stable.
This is not all about calculated self interest. People seem to have some inbuilt notions of fairness that predispose them to reject freeloaders and leeches even if it is in their short term interest to go along with them.
So, who gets to keep track of that data? In the BBS days, you had a centralized system in place to do that. Who securely fulfills this function in the P2P world?
Yeah, it does suck.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Reasearchers found that people are willing to punish other people for bad behaviour.
No variation, no comparison.
The best strategy is the one that causes the other player to cooperate.
Good headlines are sensational, not true.
This theory would seem to work, except that the common good is arbitrarily defined. The article even alludes to the fact that this type of system is supposedly used by the mafia to achieve what is a common good to the contributors but a common problem to the rest of society.
This is just a special case of capitalism: paying wages for work is not necessary because all workers automatically benefit from the common good--they essentially pay themselves. Meanwhile, non-workers also benefit but *do* have to pay for the benefit--whether this payment is a price, a fine, or non-monetary punishment is immatterial.
If I have music, and you want it, then I have value. After I give it to you, I no longer have value. The holder of information that is desired has value, the potential consumer is left out.
In IP terms, why would I share my exceptional Office Suite, if there was nothing in it for me. You, and RMS, say that the office suite, as I have implimented it, wants to be free. I say it doesn't, it wants to reside in my head. If you pay me for the emotional, mental, and time input for me to write it out, then you can share it. In this case the information has certain costs associated with it (time) that are not renewable.
If my ability to make more money by making my office suite better is there, then I have a real incentive to make it better. If no one will do anything except keep my name on the copyright notice, then I have no real incentive to do anything except kick out some half ass product that suites my needs alone.
There is a cost to writing software, writing songs, writing books, and yes, even sharing stolen music (if you have the CD rip it, the vast majority of downloads of copyrighted music were stolen: MP3's!=stealing, but Napster=Stealing).
Bandwidth, and time losses associated with bandwidth losses are real losses that can not be made up, or back. And if the information wasn't scarce, you wouldn't want to download it.
Scenario A: People are given $10, they are allowed a chance to give any part of that to another participant in the experiment, who they don't know (who will otherwise not be given anything).
Result: Very few people give any. The average is under a dollar.
Scenario B: People are given $10, they are allowed a chance to give any part of that to another participant in the experiment, who they don't know (who will otherwise not be given anything), but for every dollar they give, the researchers will kick in another dollar for the other person.
Result: Considerably more people give. The average (given, not received) approaches $5.
Conclusion: these psychological experiments are impossible to interpret and contradictory. One can be found to support almost any conclusion. They should not be considered to offer meaningful insight into human behavior.
In such cases, the people know they are in a psychological experiment (or at least a very unnatural situation), and that knowledge is likely the primary influence on their behavior (especially when the risks and rewards are insignificantly small), making it impossible to extrapolate the results to behavior outside of experiments.
Yeah, I was using gnut. Problem was, I never got anything from 137.99.*.* (on-campus addresses).
I did find a ratio FTP site on oth.net that was local. Getting a half-megabyte per second while fetching music videos is *nice*. I even sent him some movies I had---after all, what hassle is it to me? If only it'd happen more often... or if I could get oth.net to show me all sites in 137.99.*.*...
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
This isn't exactly news. Do a quick search on "experimental economics" and you'll discover that not only have these types of experiments been going on for over 40 years, the Swiss aren't exactly at the forefront of the effort either. There are research depts. and labs devoted to solving these types of problems and developing institutions and rules which generate the best outcomes (I'm partial to the ESL lab at George Mason myself). If you're looking for solutions for p2p problems and other issues of property/sharing issues, this is a good place to start.
Wow... so what those *smart* people
have actually found out, is that
social control helps to reduce crime.
Wonder how long it took them to figure
that out.
This paper came out last year. I found the analysis to be 10 times better than the conclusions that the Nature reporter jumped to (not to mention all the previous posts here, good lord!!).
To me, the key conclusion here is that the observed behavior IS rational self-interest. The previous ideas of self-interest I've encountered in economics always seemed to be distillations of raw stupid greed, without any allowance for intelligence on the part of the actor, and lacking any model whatsoever for social forces, e.g., shame, embarrassment, fame or notoriety.
This is the fundamental flaw in the idea of "the tragedy of the commons" - it assumes that the actors who overuse the commons have no social relationship to each other, and that their overuse will not be penalized in other arenas, which is of course totally ridiculous. This kind of theorizing has no use in the real world.
Several thoughts spring to mind.
First of all... what is a freeloader? Is someone who signs onto napster and downloads, but doens't share anything a freeloader? I think no.. the service does not require them to share anything. And those sharing do not require that others be sharing.
Secondly.. just because the majority wants something does not make it right. This is the reason for, say, the US Constitution.
"Congress shall make no law... etc..." means "No matter how much people bitch whine and scream, you CANNOT make certain laws"
I for one fear the majority. Who says the majority is qualified?
Economics is not a real science, it is a joke to call it such. I'm not saying economics is not a study, not something real.. but it's not science.
and the Nobel prize in Economics is not really a Nobel prize.
The Nobel prizes are handed out by the Nobel foundation, for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace.
As Economists felt left out, in 1968, the Bank of Sweden instituted a "Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel, founder of the Nobel Prize". Why? So they could hand out a "Nobel prize" in economics. It's still not a REAL Nobel.
Feh.
Actually, you see this behaviour in road bicycle racing. When a number of riders form a breakaway from the peleton, even if those riders are from different teams, they will all work together to maintain their lead, each doing more-or-less equal work. They do this because they know it is the only way they can maintain their lead and have a chance to win the race. Riders who do not work with the others by hanging back or only doing short turns will be punished by the other riders - either verbally, or the other riders will work to try to drop the offending rider from the breakaway group.
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
Doesn't the system break down if the majority ARE freeloaders?
With *BSD, there's no penalty. With Linux/GPL, you must contribute back.
Deleted
I'll use a Napster-like system as an example, but when I refer to "songs", you can easily substitute "movies," or "naked pictures of Natalie Portman," or just "files."
1. It costs one Point to download a song from another user.
2. Users have unlimited Points for a certain trial period (some people will try to re-register every day to get around this, but that problem may or may not significant enough to affect the service).
3. Users get a certain (small) number of Points each day.
4. Each time a song is downloaded from a user, that user gets two Points. This will be the primary means of gaining Points.
5. Note that the person the song was downloaded from received two Points for the transfer, but the person who downloaded it only paid one Point. This means that the total number of Points in the universe will increase by one for each song that's transferred. This if fine -- it keeps the system from being too strict. You can take up to twice what you give, which should be generous enough for most people's tastes.
6. People who have a lot of songs to share will have many more Points than they could possibly spend. This is fine. If you're even moderately generous, you shouldn't have to worry too much about what you take.
7. Most people who generously offer the songs they have will wind up with more than enough Points. Those who DON'T offer what they have will find themselves frequently running short, and will be encouraged to start offering what they have.
8. To further motivate people to accumulate a lot of unused Points, have a "Hall of Fame" listing top Point-holders, top new Point-holders, fastest-rising Point-holders, etc. People love stats; witness the people who'll install the D.net or SETI client on 5000 computers primarily to increase their rank in the stats.
9. For further motivation, offer additional prizes for accumulating Points. Maybe a person who reaches 100,000 Points gets a T-shirt, or a person can exchange 10,000 Points for a coffee mug.
10. Who pays for the T-shirts, and the service? Users with low bandwidth who otherwise would have a hard time earning Points can earn them by an alternative method of contributing to the service: financially. Whether you make songs available to users of the service, or help the service meet its financial needs, you have to contribute to the servicein SOME way to get a significant share of songs from the service.
11. Another way to encourage people to earn large numbers of Points would be to give preferential download treatment to higher-ranked users. For example, if the person hosting a song has configured his client to only allow other users to only download 200kbit/sec from his machine, and five users try to download from him at once, the 100,000-Point user might get to download 100kbit/sec from him, the three 10,000-Point users might get 33kbit/sec each, and the 2-Point user might be forced to download from a slower host.
12. This'll not only encourage users to offer more of their songs more generously so that they can download from faster hosts than those who don't, it'll also ensure that people with slow connections will get some people downloading from them (and thus the people with the slow connections will get to earn some points too), rather than every single user swamping the fastest hosts, bogging them down until they're slower than the slowest hosts.
Ideas? Suggestions? Flaws? Discuss.
eDonkey uses a "punishment" method in it's peer to peer networking scheme. Basically, until you're sharing at least 10k/s, you're limited to 4 times your upload speed for downloads... Yes, that means if you're sharing at 0k/s, you can receive at 0k/s. Also, it shares partial files, so, for what it's worth, you are almost always sharing at least a part of a file...
It works really well in small groups (reference DAPCentral ), and from what I can tell, it really makes interpersonal cooperation a lot easier than, say, Morpheus...
Of course, it'll never be as popular because it's not a single central server... That and it's got a linux interface, and we all know that anything that gets on linux dies the next week (as a hax0r tool)...
Hasta luego,
/Ex
It's interesting that it's taken scientists so long to realize this simple concept.
A society based on shame and individual responsibility is one that lasts. Thoughout human civilization, people who have not participated properly were either harshly shamed or severly penalized. This forced people to take more responsibility for their actions, and work harder for the common good.
Unfortunately, this feeling was often abused by the rulers or religious leaders of the day who manipulated people into giving more money or their rights.
The personal-responsibility-based society has gotten humanity through some of its toughest times. And now, technology has allowed us to descend into a society of no personal-responsibility where people can make poor descisions and still get away from it (abortion for accidental pregnancies, welfare for fiscal irresponsibility, etc) whereas earlier, people would've had to deal with their problems and encurred hardship. Others saw this hardship and it helped to keep them in line.
We are in a me-me-me entitelist society which, IMHO is tearing at the fabric of our civilization. Eventually, there will be more dependents than producers and there will be an uprising or revolt towards a personal-responsibility-based society and civilization will once again flourish.
This can be avoided if we can change our minds and our views on ourselves and our role in society. As scientists and sociologists start rediscovering already-discovered truths of civilization, perhaps the mindset of the populous will also change.
Granted he bought a pardon from Clinton, but for a long time he was living in Switzerland, wanted by the US, and the Swiss would not turn him over. The fact is the Swiss have a shameful record of war profiteering and money laundering. You can hide behind noble ideas like privacy but that does not fool anyone. Swiss hands are covered in blood.
Aside from the more scalable architecture offered by napster and fasttrack in comparison to gnutella they also had a major advantage in user/freeloader ratios.
I'd guess that 90% of napster users went with the default installations that allowed the client programs to scan their hard drives and automatically share all mp3s. Furthermore, I'd guess that a similar ration never had any siginificant cognition about the FT or napster clients continuing to run as background processes when they 'exited' the program.
Gnutella has a real reputation as a freeloaders network and it's not surprising. Many of the clients do not stay running when you close them (and even if something like LimeWire did, I'm loathe to have a huge chunk of memory taken up by a bloated JRE). Furthermore, a lot of the clients don't do a good job of making it extra work to *not* share your files. In the original gnutella client for windows as well as current incarnations of gtk-gnutella, you have to explicitly enter the config screen and tell the program which directories you want to share. For a lot of people with weak ethics or concepts of fair exchange that extra step is just enough to give them an excuse to be a leetch on the network.
It is intriguing to see what happens as more and more clients are punishing freeloaders in even the most rudimentary fashion. For instance, Limewire now has an option that will allow you to set preferences against those sharing less than a specific number of files. This in theory should encorage people to share their directories especially as the controls become more fine-grained and reward those sharing large collections/bandwidth with preferred access in exchange for offering their services to the network.
It's a little less cumbersome, if also a little less elegant and perfect, than the mojo nation system of a credit based economy. However, as in the curren tstate of most p2p, it is potentially missing the bigger picture by concentrating only on the health of the community qua community and ignoring the potential problems of freeloading within the scope of society. Namely, rewarding artists for their work.
P2P gains some respect if you accept the arguments that it encourages more CDs or concert tickets to be purchased, and thus greater rewards to the artists. This is no doubt true for many, however there are also plenty of people who haven't bought an album since they got broadband,a nd these people are gaining unfairly on the goodwill of thsoe who do have a sense of ethics on fair exchange with artists.
What I'd like to see is a similar system to the idea of giving preferential bandwidth to those who share that is integrated with sites like fairtunes. It seems possible that a p2p protocol could be developed or extended to check a user who is requesting a download for tokens representing 'tips' that they have made at fairtunes in exchange for the pleasure they have received for downloaded music. It would definitely add some overhead to the protocol to authenticate the tokens against a fairtunes server and/or public key, however offering perferential performance on the network would serve as a gentle pressure to encourage a more ethical, and arguably a more sustainable, system which artists would have less trepidation of participating in and may very well be able to earn reasonable incomes from if their music is enjoyed by enough people.
Metamuscle.com - News in the Iro
yea ... that's essentially why we have governments, both local government and the national. funny thing is, here on slashdot, ti seems like the government is the enemy ... buy truth be told, we created the govenment. they are arround because of this lighthouse problem: what's everyone's is noones, and what's noone's is everyones. i mean, everyone would like roads, parks, libraries, schools and the like, but very few are willing to pay for these things. So, we all pay taxes and this money buys the necessities like lighthouses.
Yet of course, that wasn't the point.
The point here, as I see it, was to investigate something about human nature.
Is a human a "rational Investor" or is "Altruism" part of our very makeup? Do we value "justice" above personal gain?
This was tested by putting people in an artifical situation with certain rules and seeing how they chose....do they choose to do what maximizes personal gain, or will they take actions that reduce personal gain in the interest of an overall sense of fairness.
Within the context of the system of rules in question, the rational choice was obvious, not invest. (if this offends you and your sense of how the world works, call it "flume" instead of "invest), as that maximizes personal gain.
The reason Rand would be rolling over in her grave is not that the system didn't reward investing (afterall, if the current situation is one that doesn't favor investing then the "rational" person doesn't invest right?) but rather because it showed that peoples motives are not completely selfish.... that maximizing personal gain came second to more egalitarian motives.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I think people are hardwired to value (fairness) over (short term advantage in an unfair system) if unfairness doesn't benefit them.
Choosing $2/$2 is obviously an emotional decision (since reason = math dictates $3/$4)
The adaptive advantage is that you are more likely to be treated well in a fair/predictable society than in an unfair/unpredictable society (society = experiment + rulemakers). Provide you don't make the rules.
It seems to me, evolutionary solutions don't converge to the best, most specific answer (take the most money) but to pretty good, global, fuzzy solutions (all things being equal, support fairness most of the time)
That fuzzy rule explains the otherwise unintuitive $2/$2 decision
I find most polls of limited use, and trying to govern by InterWeb Poll is ludicrous. The power of polls lies in their design. The only use you get from this kind of data is getting an answer to your questions: the questions themselves have to be useful ones. If they are basically rhetorical "do you believe in free speech/quality & affordable medicare/etc.", then all they do is support the bias of the pollster and their client.
Real democracy must resort to the Greek mode of public forums, debate, and the free flow of information. The InterWeb can help with this, but it is only the SPACE we work in, not the work itself, not the people needed to perform the work. Anarchy/Democracy doesn't require that everyone speak at the same time, just that the full range of opinions be expressed. When I see something I agree with on Slashdot, I tend to say to myself "well, there's not much I can add here, except maybe a few minor points" and feel satisfied that my opinions are well represented, even though it wasn't me presenting them.
I think the functional aspects of Anarchy require a kind of redundant opinion-generating and -filtering system (sound familiar?). Make sure all points of view are represented (even the crackpot ones) and available to the decision-makers.
In my little "atopia", these decision-makers would be ones interested in, committed to, and qualified for creating policy within one domain or another (scale isn't important). They wouldn't be "more equal than others", because the entire world could look over their shoulder, if necessary. Kind of a new class of Advocate/Mediator/Notary that would replace politicians. They would be able to represent "special interests", as long as everything was transparent. This way everyone, including poverty groups, environmentalists, industry groups, and communities could be represented.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
The difference now is that there is the potential for groups to make better decisions faster, due to increased access to information, lower transmission latency, and higher bandwidth. If we work to incorporate this improved information technology into the culture of decision-making, we can revolutionize all aspect of the human condition.
Why? Because intelligent/appropriate choices require two things: situational awareness and clear goals. Both of these things CAN be improved if we break away from the old procedures and laws. That is to say, we can make a better game by adapting or ignoring the rules of the old game.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.