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Originally posted by Kyo
I actually don't have much argument with TIT FOR TAT - I have a suspicion that I put in my own 2 cents for the sake of being argumentative (it's too enjoyable to me, somehow). It has been shown that given a random population, TIT FOR TAT will eventually take over - even against an exploitive strategy such as 'always defect', by putting 'evolutionary pressure' on the other strategy to cooperate. I'm sure you've read about it and agree, so no, I don't know why I'm bothering.
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hehehe...yeah, thought as much! But don't worry...I do it too!
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The reason I bring up the dollar auction is the evidence of discord - obviously these people are incapable of cooperating. If TIT FOR TAT is such a dominant strategy - which has been proven again and again - why don't people follow it? I other words - TIT FOR TAT is evolutionarily stable, and would explain where our tendency for cooperation came from - except that the tendency to cooperate doesn't seem to exist in modern-day society!
In other words - in the actual prisoner's dilema (with real prisoners), how many prisoners would actually choose to cooperate, even if they had reasoned it out? Can you count on the other person to reason it out? Can you count on them not to take advantage of you even if you know they can reason it out?
In other words - taking a single-iteration prisoner's dilemma is a more accurate representation of our various decisions and conflicts than a repeated prisoner's dilemma. If you don't have a chance to retaliate - what do you do? It has been shown, through (and seems intuitive enough, anyway), that people will overwhelmingly tend towards defection.
Greed is all: Note that in a prisoner's dilemma with a finite number of iterations, you can defect at the last iteration to 'beat' the other person - since they will still be cooperating if they are playing a TIT FOR TAT strategy. However, if they wise up to that, they will also know to defect on the last iteration - so you will have to defect on the second-to-last iteration. But they will reason similarly, so you end up defecting at the third-to-last. Fourth-to-last. Fifth-to-last. Etc. Until the entire game is one massive defection.
That's the way real life tends to play out. TIT FOR TAT doesn't really help us in real-world situations. Even Axelrod admits that.
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The big difference is that in "Real Life" you tend to think about things in an apprently "intelligent" manner. As such you logically think the prisoner's dillema through, and come to the conclusion that it undoubtedly better for you to defect.
However, our emotions/instincts are "unintelligent" creations of evolution.
We don't "logically" decide what our emotions are going to be, they simply "are" (to a large extent...social distortion aside).
The creation of a society, and the social norms that go with it would not have been a conscious decison by like minded individuals who intelligently came to the conclusion that they should form these social "rules". Rather societies evolved from uncooperating egoists, into TIT FOR TAT-like cooperating egoists.
Now TIT FOR TAT,a dn the prisoners dillema in genreal is only a rough mathematic abstraction of reality. Reality is much more complex (illustrated nicely by our inability to implement a 75%TIT FOR TAT strategy). However the simple fact remains:
Mutual cooperation is better than mutual defection.
And on this basis it has been shown that it is possible for egoists to "evolve" their cooperation, and so build a society.
Evolution cannot effect what conclusions we come to with our intellect.
Logically speaking, there is no reason for anyone to raise children.
So it would seem that it is in our DNA's best interest not to give us consciouness/intelligence, due to the fact that as automata we are forced to do our DNA's bidding.
But the problem is that there is so huge benefit's to intelligence...someone who is intelligent will be infinitetly more flexible when it comes to competing with an unintelligent automata.
So intelligence will appear to win out....but may not replicate!
This dead end is soved by our DNA giving us intelligence, but also keeping tabs on what we use this intelligence for, by giving us emotions/instincts/desires etc.
So we can use our intelligence to do what we like, but in the vast majority of cases, what we intelligently decide to do, will be benificial rather than detremental to our DNA's chances of replicating itself.