Game Theory Analysis Shows How Evolution Favors Cooperation's Collapse

First time accepted submitter Ugmug (1495847) writes Last year, University of Pennsylvania researchers Alexander J. Stewart and Joshua B. Plotkin published a mathematical explanation for why cooperation and generosity have evolved in nature. Using the classical game theory match-up known as the Prisoner's Dilemma, they found that generous strategies were the only ones that could persist and succeed in a multi-player, iterated version of the game over the long term. But now they've come out with a somewhat less rosy view of evolution. With a new analysis of the Prisoner's Dilemma played in a large, evolving population, they found that adding more flexibility to the game can allow selfish strategies to be more successful. The work paints a dimmer but likely more realistic view of how cooperation and selfishness balance one another in nature."

Comments

Obvious

[BarbaraHudson]

Strategies that are too selfish "kill the host". Or invite retaliatory action. This is the same whether it's a virus like ebola or bad actors in society.

Re:Obvious

[manu0601]

The problem with austerity measures is that government spending creates activity. Cutting public expenses cuts GDP, which means less tax revenue for the government. Situations where the tax loss is smaller than the cost saving are rares. Most of the time, austerity just kills the economy without any benefit.

Matters of Scale

[pubwvj]

This reinforces that scale matters. On the local family / pack basis communism (ultra cooperation) is the best solution. As you move outward in social groups the best evolutionary strategy shifts to socialism and at the most extreme end of the social structure capitalism becomes the best strategy. Neither liberals or conservatives will find this politically correct to their liking but it is real.

Re:Matters of Scale

[denzacar]

and at the most extreme end of the social structure capitalism

Capitalism is not a social system - it's an economic system. I.e. It is about making and trading THINGS.
You "win" by making and having more things faster.

Socialism and communism are social AND economic systems. Being SOCIAL they are primarily about benefits of PEOPLE AND/OR SOCIETIES.
You "win" by achieving a satisfied and happy society.

That's why it intuitively works for families and tribes - goals are common and simple.
And why it is a bitch to work in a larger society in which many smaller groups may have conflicting and complex goals.

Re:Matters of Scale

[Orgasmatron]

Who modded up this middle school crap?

Capitalism isn't about making or trading. It is about satisfying needs and wants. It is merely the distributed solution to that problem, while collectivism is the centralized "solution".

You may have noticed that solution was in quotes back there. That is because a centralized solution is not possible. First, there is no mechanism to accurately report wants and needs to a central authority. Second, there is no general solution for ranking or ordering those wants and needs. Third, the only way to enforce the central power's decisions is through violence, which around half of us reject.

The distributed solution, on the other hand, works pretty well, to whatever extent people want to implement it. The market is a tool for both finding and reporting on the relative worth and scarcity of things, which is to say, "the price". Also, the decisions are done at the local (individual) level, which is also the only place where a ranking of needs and wants is possible. Further, there is feedback. Those that do well at satisfying the needs and wants of others accumulate control over more resources. Those that do poorly lose their ability to mismanage things.

The reason that collectivism works in families and other tiny groups is because people can identify a small group as "us", and detect and punish cheaters through other social means. Somewhere around 50 to 75 people though, and the trust breaks down, hard.

Re:Justifying

[Anonymous Coward]

Rand

Rand's "philosophy" is so full of holes that only a sociopath
or someone with the mind of a child embraces Rand's ideas
wholesale. The sort of people who truly believe in the "fuck you,
I've got mine" position and who are also incapable of understanding that
society has a duty to help those who truly cannot fend for themselves
are the sort who embrace Rand.

Taxpayer's Dilemma

[retroworks]

If no one pays taxes, I live in a lousy infrastructure.

If everyone pays taxes, I live in a nice infrastructure, but had to pay taxes.

If I admit not paying taxes, no one else wants to pay taxes either.

If I make everyone believe in paying taxes, while I secretly do not pay taxes, I benefit from the infrastructure for free.

Dang. Didn't realize this was a Ph.D thesis material!

Re:Taxpayer's Dilemma

[grcumb]

You are assuming a perfect world where taxes are used efficiently, whereas most western government have rather low bang-for-the-buck. At the end of the day, what really happen is more of the realm of "Everyone pays taxes, but infrastructures still sucks".

No, actually. Unless by 'sucks' you mean, works imperfectly, but still better than those parts of the world that did not benefit from my tax dollars.

I say this with the benefit of experience. I've traveled to dozens of countries, rich and poor, and those with solid tax bases have dependably better public infrastructure than those without.

The cause of your crumbling infrastructure in the US is largely people not paying taxes.

Re:Taxpayer's Dilemma

[x0ra]

Read my comment above.

If you can afford to maintain two active war for a decade, you can certainly afford better education for your children... or better infrastructures. Depends where your priorities are. I still maintain that the whole money sank in "defense" (which should really be called "offense") industries would probably have been of much better use locally, might it just be not to put the next few generations in debt.

Re:Taxpayer's Dilemma

[mabu]

How much in taxes do you think you paid last year? $1k? $5k? $50k?

How much of the Interstate that you use daily will that pay for?

Maybe 1/2 an inch of the interstate.

Whine to us all about how government is raping you...

while you enjoy electricity, navigable waterways, the internet, safe food, police protection, fire protection, libraries, schools, parks, national forests, etc.

Re:Taxpayer's Dilemma

[roman_mir]

Wrong completely, but understandably. You look at the effect and believe it ti be the cause. A wealthy society grows cancer that is government, which steals the wealth, calls it 'taxes', creates a number of monopolies that are government propped and protected, which makes it look like infrastructure only can happen because of taxes.

The reality is that it was the wealthy economy that built the infrastructure, except the government destroyed competition and private initiative, making the infrastructure inefficient.

Poor economies cannot afford as much wasteful building as wealthy economies build due to theft called 'taxes'.

The result is that you are looking at inefficient glitter of a wealthy economy, that is overburdened with theft that is taxes and think that the economy is wealthy from the theft that is taxes. The reality is the opposite from what you believe.

I think it works until it doesn't

[EmperorOfCanada]

Basically cooperation is the best strategy as long as there is also a built in punishment system for the selfish. For instance if a disease wipes out too many hosts then it will fail to spread very quickly. If it wipes them all out then it won't spread anymore.

But evolution often will sacrifice to deal with the selfish. So our immune systems are sitting here primed and ready to have a go against all kinds of invaders; our immune systems are fantastically costly. But in a pristine system evolution might eliminate our immune system and then we would be wiped out by the first disease to come along.

The same with having the police. Police are expensive but we keep them around to deal with those who won't cooperate in ways that we find so egregious that we make laws.

But just as we have seen with our bankers there are those diseases that will subvert our punishment systems to not only ignore them but to actively abuse the us. AIDS would be an example of this (and yes I am saying bankers are as bad as AIDS).

So I would think that if you look carefully I think that what you will find is that what evolution will do is to evolve systems that punish the non-cooperative(bad diseases), reward the cooperative (things like digestive bacteria) and then continue living just fine.

Even within animals that group together there are often many systems for punishing animals that don't play by the rules.

But there is one huge problem with evolution from the standpoint of the individual. It might take a 95% die off for evolution to develop a way to fight off a disease, or the disease might end up being just deadly enough to continuously hurt individuals while not killing enough to drive evolution.

But this is where we might have just jumped some kind of hurdle. We demolished smallpox, we have polio on the ropes, malaria might have a bullet heading its way, and other diseases are lined up in the crosshairs. But taking out diseases to the point of extinction takes global cooperation. In Pakistan they recently killed 4 polio workers which will now probably dissuade polio workers from going back into that area and I suspect that if they were there then polio was there as well.

The key is that when gaming any relationship like evolution there are a huge number of rows and columns to work with. But quite simply we have way too many animals that cooperate in pretty magical ways for it not to be a key evolution friendly solution.

Re: The Selfish Gene

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. Dawkins book does not preclude other phenomena such as group selection. It's just that things like group selection have not yet been proven or the mechanism persuasively detailed.

However, the genetics surveyed in The Selfish Gene cannot explain things like human civilization, where the level of cooperation goes far beyond anything classical genetics would allow.

We still have much to learn.

Re:Academic Beclowining

[Anonymous Coward]

This is mainly because people forget that the person who 'invented' game theory ended up being committed to an institution due to actually being a psychopath.

Neither John von Neumann nor Oskar Morgenstern was ever institutionalized. They are the two people credited with "inventing" game theory. You may be thinking of the subject of the movie A Beautiful Mind, John Nash. Nash was a prominent early theorist in non-cooperative games. The Nash equilibrium is named after him. Nash was a paranoid schizophrenic, not a psychopath.

Testing game theory through experimentation is much newer. Most of the early work was done purely on a theoretical basis and founded in pure logic. I.e. it didn't try to explain why people did things; it tried to determine how a perfectly logical person should react.

Misleading Title

[PJ6]

They set up the experiment to cause cooperation to fail. They tried for that particular result, and got it.

It’s a somewhat depressing evolutionary outcome, but it makes intuitive sense

"Intuitive sense" sounds awfully wishy-washy considering they just pulled the models out of their asses.

Title should read "Game Theory Analysis Shows How Evolution Can Favor Cooperation's Collapse".

Where's that "-1 Obtuse" moderation?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I pay for electricity" -- if you live in a rural part of the US, you are able to buy electricity because the government coerced money from consumers and Forced At The Point Of A Gun electric companies to run universal service.

"The police don't protect me, they merely sort out the mess after it happened" -- and the notion that police can identify and apprehend the perpetrator has no deterrent effect whatsoever, eh?

"firemen mostly clean-up the mess" -- you have got to be trolling here.

"I don't have kids, so I shouldn't pay for schools" -- I suppose that's true, if you want to live in a society that's mostly illiterate and ignorant.

"I don't go to libraries" -- I see nothing in your post to make me disbelieve you.

I feel like the old rejoinder "if you don't like government, move to Somalia" is just trite, but holy fuck, you sound like you think Somalia is an ideological paradise. Or Afghanistan. At least there, they've got Top People working to make sure that half the population doesn't get schooling...

Re:TIt-for-tat fallacy

[dryeo]

what is it that makes H. sapiens such a successful species?

Why assume that H. sapiens is a successful species? We haven't been around very long and it seems as likely we'll screw up our environment through overgrowth as not, especially with how good we've become at developing weapons and our tendency to use them.
Another million years and we can start to talk about us being a successful species, while right now we're just another species that appears to be outstripping the capability of its habitat to support it.

Re:Justifying

[dunkelfalke]

Simply because true absolutely rational self interest automatically leads to cooperation and socialism which Rand herself vehemently hated. Simply because it is way cheaper and safer live in a society where nobody is left behind and has to resort to violence or spreads diseases around because doctors are too expensive to visit. It also leads to a lot of taxes to pay for the infrastructure that benefits everyone - also a concept that Rand abhorred.
And finally it also leads to non-smokers because smoking is irrational, while Rand... well, you get the idea.

Ultimately, all her "philosophy" is a collection of fairy tales for money nobility wannabes.