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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."
This is explained in Dawkins' book. It's an evolutionary stable strategy.
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.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The notion that "tit for tat" is relevant to evolution in the iterated prisoner's assumes that defection is detected -- an unrealistic assumption. The only reliable evolutionary system in which cooperation is sustainable is one in which the replicators (genetic and memetic) share a common fate aka vertical transmission. This is why the meiotic lottery works in multicellular sexual species and it is how symbiosis between species can evolve in ecologies where migration is restricted -- migration being the origin of the evolution of virulence via horizontal transmission. However, since restricting migration is not practical in much of nature, there is an "optimal virulence" in which a replicator tests the limits of its ability to, in essence, "take the money and run", and exploits to that limit.
Seastead this.
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.
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.
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!
Gently reply
The riot Index. Everything is in balance.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
Just so you know, most of the people doing the work applying Game Theory to Sociology are just jacking off.
Seriously. These are the people who found Psychology too rigorous and got thrown out of the Economics departments for making shit up.
Here, check this shit out. Look especially at the last sentences:
In other words, "Cooperation works in social systems until I change the rules to get the outcome I want. Vote Rand Paul 2016."
Seriously, Dr Plotkin, do U even Science, bro?
You are welcome on my lawn.
This is pure petty resentment. Make the life of the other guy miserable because his values did not prevent him to easily do what it took me a huge effort to do. At the end of the day, the only thing which really matter is the result. There is nothing wrong in a bimbo marrying a rich dying guy to inherit [at least, part of] his money.
"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."
Only if there is an unlimited number of new prisoners to dupe, and there is no communication between the two groups. Besides which, all Prisoner's Dilemma demonstrates is that in a distorted environment such as a prision, it pays to assume the other prisoners are potentially hostile. In Prisoner's Dilemma the prisoner isn't playing the other prisoner, he's playing the prison guards. If there 'researchers' actually had any experience of a real life working environment, they might have realized this.
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".
We choose to have a duty. Government protects "unalienable rights." Because we want to.
Society has strictly no duty to help those who truly cannot fend for themselves, just like cops have strictly no duty to put their lives on the line to save others. And before you contradict me on this point, have a look there: http://disinfo.com/2010/03/the...
You're going to cite a blog post that contains almost no citations of it's own, and those it does provide do not exactly support the assertions made by the blogger.
Really? That's your source?
Interesting idea, but logic dictates that if you try and make the game more favourable for cooperative styles of play, Game theory is utterly destroyed.
To propose a paper where you only test 1 change is cause for concern, in the long run. Game theory is flawed at the onset - only Psychopaths and Accountants answer the question the way the original author intended.
Thus I propose this: studies which are front page on /. which promote selfishism and neglect to tweak the experiment in the opposite direction should be prefixed with "Claim: ".
Thoughts?
Hartzler v. City of San Jose and DeShaney v. Winnebago are not enough for you ?
There is also Warren v. District of Columbia and Castle Rock v. Gonzales, though, not directly quoted in the post.
The entire article could be summed up as "How our confirmation bias made us change the rules until the results confirmed our bias."
In a second analysis, they allowed the payoffs to vary outside the order set by the Prisoner's Dilemma. Instead of unilateral defection winning the greatest reward, for example, it could be that mutual cooperation reaped the greatest payoff, the situation described by a game known as Stag Hunt. Or, mutual defection could generate the lowest possible reward, as described by the game theory model known as the Snowdrift or Hawk-Dove game.
What they found was that, again, there was an initial collapse in cooperative strategies. But, as the population continued to play and evolve, players also altered the payoffs so that they were playing a different game, either Snowdrift or Stag Hunt.
"So we see complicated dynamics when we allow the full range of payoffs to evolve," Plotkin said. "One of the interesting results is that the Prisoner's Dilemma game itself is unstable and is replaced by other games. It is as if evolution would like to avoid the dilemma altogether."
"See? When I change the rules of poker to be like blackjack, the game evolves into a game of blackjack on its own! Fascinating! It is as if evolution would like to avoid the poker altogether."
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"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...
Given that people cannot travel freely wherever they want, no, law is not an expression of the will of the people choosing to live under it. You can try to escape, but your options are limited. The voluntary "social contract" theory is a fallacy. Law is imposed on people.
Given the recent (post WWII) stance taken by Governments to ERODE "unalienable rights", I doubt you statement has much weight...
I don't need police if I can carry a weapon to defend myself. And yeah, the firemen argument was dishonest from my part. Where can I sign up to carry a gun, not pay the police, not pay for schools, not pay for libraries (I actually buy my books, don't rent them), but pay for firemen ?
Try Iraq, where we destroyed the dictator, his army and police.
You can set up your own gated home behind big walls.
But then the local tribal leader is going to come over with a dozen or a hundred of his followers who can outgun you, and do whatever they want with you.
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.
Oddly, for a philosophy allegedly so full of holes, your statement is typical of the arguments against it. I have too many disagreements with her philosophy to consider myself an Objectivist (e.g., I'm not pro coercive IP, not so pre-emptive with war, and not as "Republican" minded) but she laid some solid foundations once you take the time to understand her definitions.
Without understanding those definitions (e.g., "selfishness" is rational self-interest so if leads to self-destruction, you might want to check your analysis), there is no context for understanding anything she wrote. Thankfully, her definitions are easily accessible. Without a lexicon of what one means when writing, any philosophy or legal text (like the Constitution), can be taken out of context and perverted.
In sum, I love reading good arguments against Objectivism - real objections. What I read instead is drivel like yours.
Non-cooperation works in the short term, but it ends up laying waste to the entire system.
We're seeing right now what happens when psychopathology gains the upper hand in a social system. They live high and mighty for a time until their inability to cooperate for the greater good tanks everything and the empire falls apart. There's a long and colorful history of empires which have succumbed to this kind of 'game theory'.
Sounds to me like this study isn't taking the long view.
The consequence Douglas Adams points out is that an incomplete society based solely on the egoisms of its members will die out from the next triviality -- in his case the infected telephone.
(*) For Class A values of "miserable"
Only if you view having an aristocracy as an absolutely positive thing.
Otherwise, inheritance should be abolished.
That is because the duty of cops is not to protect people but to protect the system, the system just happens to have rules that enforces some protection of people. Very few people today understand that key difference.
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.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
The denser the population the more laws, rules and regulations get passed and the worse they get enforced. There is a certain reality that we are all hurdling through space on a rock and we are all doomed as well as the entire human race. As population swells and personal morality drops people become frightened and unable to cope with life. Politicians tossing out reams of laws as pablum to the people in order to get or keep a voting base is simply a form of corruption in itself. People do need to have a spine. To be able to stand and take the arrows and slings of fate while being aware that you are in a losing battle is just part of life. These days we have so many cowards who hide with alcohol or drugs and make all kinds of false justifications for their cowardice that I do not know how we expect to survive as a nation.
Ultimately all law is an expression of the will of the people choosing to live under it.
if you drop "ultimately" yes, that's the general aception that's sold to you. ultimately, however, law is the violence of the powerful.
The alternative ends in violence and misery, until a new agreement is reached.
and that's why it is sold to you, so you don't dispute it and don't demand a new agreement as often.
I see what you are saying; and on a simplistic level sure it makes sense to consider but, that is a pretty radical proposition, especially when you would essentially be asking the aristocrats to implement it and enforce it.
It means you are asking everyone to put their complete trust in the system as it will exist. Frankly, I don't see a system I would ever have that level of trust in. It sounds like you just want to be slave to the most powerful and generous master.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Society has strictly no duty to help those who truly cannot fend for themselves, just like cops have strictly no duty to put their lives on the line to save others. And before you contradict me on this point, have a look there: http://disinfo.com/2010/03/the...
Yup.
The grandparent poster is stating the socialism spin on an accurate statement.
There is no "duty" to protect the weak as it were. There just isn't. Philosophically you can't get there. That's pure political progressive ideas based on emotion and not actual thinking.
You CAN however, expand the argument a bit and come up with a compelling reason why helping the weak is actually helping yourself. First, everybody, at some point, is "weak" or "strong." For example. I am a nerd. I am generally, less physically capable than other adult men. (This is my own doing, shut up, I know.)
On the other hand, I carry a gun.
Someone, a large young man, could walk into a store and toss around a clerk or two while stealing swisher sweets and be the "strong" one. While he has no philosophical duty to protect the weak, it is SMART for him to do so, because there just may well be a nerd behind him with a loaded gun. Or, a skinny cop may tell him to get back on the sidewalk, where playing "tough" only gets the moron deaded.
The short version is, the "philosophy of using strength" gets you into conflicts in a society, where "philosophy of cooperating" tends to keep you out of conflicts. No matter how tough you are, you might end up standing in front of a nerd with a gun. This is true whether or not you are a socialist or some other political bent.
real-world pirates tend to have RPGs and machine guns
to download copyrighted material?? sick bastards!
“It’s a somewhat depressing evolutionary outcome, but it makes intuitive sense.”
No, it doesn't. Explain how unicellular animals became multicellular without cooperation. Explain how humanity went from hunter-gatherer to landing a probe on a comet without cooperation. No doubt there are exploiters (we have all kinds of infections and parasites), but evolution has given us detectors (immune systems) to combat them.
If someone claims that selfishness is a virtue, demand that they provide actual evolutionary evidence from Mother Nature who has had billions of years of experimental history to investigate their claim. It's time that we collectively responded to Ayn Rand libertarians who would rather live in their imagined apocalyptic hellscape than reality. Demand that they face explain why Mother Nature permits only limited exploitation. Life is relentlessly harsh, sure, but nowhere do I see systems that have evolved in a zero-sum universe. It all seems ever-so-slightly positive-sum, which permits a variety of cooperative strategies to flourish.
inheritance should be abolished
Registered Libertarian and I agree completely. Much of the philosophy assumes a level playing field to start, inheritance breaks many of the principles espoused.
It's both really. The problem is that there is a high switching cost so the contract has to get pretty messed up before we're willing to scrap it and start over. In the mean time you have a situation where the contract is only partially voluntary and partially imposed. It's shades of grey not black and white.
There is no "duty" to protect the weak as it were. There just isn't. Philosophically you can't get there.
You obviously haven't taken enough philosophy, given the right framework you can justify nearly any position. It all depends on the initial assumptions and chosen theory.
Where resource are plenty cooperations is advantageous. If resource are scarce, sharper, bigger tees win.
To be complete, Adams' story was far from complimentary of the B-ark people, too. In fact it's mostly just ragging on how useless and incompetent the B-ark people are (and how they completely ruined the world they eventually settled on), and only mentions in passing how their homeworld also collapsed in their absence.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Population statistics show that a culture where there is a somewhat inflexible elite class with a great deal more resources than the commoner class does not survive when the fitness landscape gets rugged and the carrying capacity of the environment gets tight. This type of culture has a population implosion and a pretty good possibility of extinction. (ref, the "HANDY" model).
I seems to me that a selfish model leads to just such a state and it will eventually collapse. The article does not deal with such issues as the environment or the establishment of elites.
Of course it was not complimentary to them -- they are exactly the boring, stubborn, bothering people we all like to complain about. But at least they managed to get the human society running, though with all the hickups, misconceptions, errors and catastrophes that are typical for humans.
It seems to me that Rand also forgot that none of us are strong all the time, particularly as children. A strict Randian society would die horribly.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Why do you think it got worse after WWII? What has the government done against free speech that's worse than the old Alien and Sedition Acts, or the laws against protesting the draft in WWI? Why do so many people think that iniquity is something developed by the Boomer generation?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Rand did actually try to do philosophy. I've got a book "The Virtue of Selfishness". It opens with a presentation to philosophy students at some University or other (Wisconsin?). Personally, I don't see why she wasn't simply laughed off the stage. I've never managed to get up the nerve to read the rest of the book.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Another preconceived concept is the pattern. We tend to see patterns everywhere. If we spot several dots in a row, we tend to see a line. How strong this pattern spotting is, can be easily demonstrated by the well known optical illusions. Patterns allow for a compression of available information, we ignore slight derivations from the regular pattern, and still can mentally reproduce the situation almost completely. Those patterns don't need to have a counterpart in reality, they are mainly a mechanism of our minds. But they are a very powerful one.
Both narrative and pattern allow for inductive reasoning. From a information theory point of view, inductive reasoning never gives a warranty of being right (other than deductive reasoning), nevertheless it's a necessity to us, thus we have the concepts for it ingrained in our minds.
Ayn Rand's epistemology requires thought processes to be rational, but pattern and narrative are non-rational shortcuts, and they are much faster and in general "good enough" for us, and in many cases, they allow for survival, where a rational thought process would be much to slow or can't even yield a result because of incomplete information. Ayn Rand somehow conjures up the idea that an individual can have complete information and enough time for a rational decision. But this is wishful thinking, and she herself admits: wishing won't make it so. Ayn Rand never asks where the time required to gather information and to make decisions comes from.
But we as a group (society, culture...) have means to create a vast library of concepts, patterns and narratives that have proven to work most of the time. We call it education, science, laws, regulations, morality, ethics and knowledge. The library is there to support the individual in decision making, but enough individuals have to support the library for it to not deteriorate. Only because the group has this vast body of knowledge and tradition, the individual is empowered to make informed decisions. The group creates the freedom of the individual. An individual alone is not able to stay free. It needs the group and their preconceived ideas to stay alive, to have enough time to gather necessary information and to rationally decide. If the group doesn't provide this freedom, the individual can't exercise it.