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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.
I guess we'll start seeing bigger upload/download ratios on Warez servers now... :(
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
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.
;)
Maybe this is why they call Economics "the dismal science".
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Also, say you were (for example) designing a P2P music sharing service. You might say, "We could put in a way for people who share lots of music to punish freeloaders." But someone else might say "if you let people punish others, the whole network will be overrun by people who punish for no good reason and everyone will hate it." This study would provide evidence to support adding the punishment feature. This study might even give you the idea to implement such a feature if you hadn't thought of it before.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
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 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.
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
That's not such a bad idea. On Gnutella for example, freeloaders are more and more becoming the bane of Gnutella. They are getting their music, but not contributing anything back, bogging down the network, and making the entire thing less enjoyable for everyone.
While punishing freeloaders seems intuitive, this study does, as you say, give creedence to the idea that people with lots of music should have the ability to punish those that do not share music on the Gnutella network.
Could this possibly also be the grounds for figuring out why certain open source projects fail and others succeed? Or is there another reason for that?
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Actually, this article is very realevent to a weblog. You can give the paying members extra power and resistance from punnishment impossed by others. K5's Scoop is currently the best weblog software that I know about (slash sucks majorly), so lets use it as an example. Under scoop you could give paying members the following bonuses without messing up the works too much:
1) Ability to read invisible posts (posts rated below 1).
2) Your own posts do not become invisible until (a) they have been rated below 0.5 (instead of 1) and (b) they have at least 3 zero ratings.
3) You get trusted user access easier (ability to rate posts as zero).
4) Your story submissions have an easier time getting posted.
5) Your votes on story submissions count as two or three votes.
You might even give them a little more editorial power, like the abiltiy to delete their own comments.
Anyway, none of these things are two extream, but they might be enough to get some subscribers.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
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
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 $2 per person or we'll give each of you three bucks and each of them four bucks. What would you prefer?
85% of the participants go for the two bucks.
How do we punish the freeloaders of open source?
Do we even want to? I don't contribute much, but any programming I do on my own time is automatically gpl'ed. I don't even think to make it proprietary... just because I might want to sell it someday. I won't hoarde it. Its an attitude I've developed due to the good nature of others. SOMEDAY I might contribute something more substantial than the code snippets I do now, but without the right mentality, that day may never come to be.
This is also a slightly different analogy. In a shared investment game, freeloaders reduce the total profit for everyone. However, if I write a program and gpl it, if there's 1 user or 1 million users using it without returning anything, it makes no difference to me. I should have such a problem.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Think of M$ - making billions just because they once written a not-so-good program! Isn't it freeloading.
Disclaimer: sorry for m$ reference, just couldn't resist :-)
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
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.
$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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
...richie - It is a good day to code.
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
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???
(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
I agree that's a Duh, but it presents a common assumption. When people question a common assumption, and it's proven wrong it has far reaching effects. when it's proven correct, it leads to further research that is usualy more useful.
example how much freeloading should a group tollerate? Do we ding someone every time he has a bad day, or do we carry him/her a little bit?
Perhaps more importantly how much should it cost to punish someone?
Personally I can hack together some simple Perl and PHP stuff, should I be punished by other open-source programmer's because the software I enjoy using is beyond my skills to contribute to?
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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!
That punishes people for having poor connections, not for their desire to share or not share. Or, put another way, is the point awarded on download start, or download completion?
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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
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.
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
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?
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
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]
... 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
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."
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
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.
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.
Industrialization increases productivity through automation. Eventually, that automation will become so effective that human labor is no longer useful.
Think of the factory of the future as a very large Star Trek replicator.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
no, his followers did that decades later.
the problem with christianity is and always will be the damn mortals.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!