I am thinking about the implications for everyday human life.
Freedom of association makes cooperation a superpower. If you are a cooperator, associate with other cooperators and win! If you are a defector, you… won’t have much of a choice. At the end, all players will sort themselves out and end up in Heaven (the circle of cooperators) or Hell (the circle of defectors).
Sounds intuitive. So why isn’t actual life like this?
First, I guess because we don’t have much of freedom of association. It is difficult to escape the bully at school, the criminal in your neighborhood, or the dictator in your country. I mean, technically, you can, but it’s expensive. And when you move to another school / neighborhood / country, chances are that some trouble will find you there, too.
(How to model this in the game? Do you lose some points every time you reject playing against someone? And if you find someone you like to play with, will the game sometimes randomly assign you a new player anyway?)
Then there is a problem with coordination. If you switch schools, you get rid of the bully, but you also lose contact with your friends at school. You can’t convince them to move together with you. If you emigrate, will you take your family and friends with you? But they would also want to take their family and friends… so somewhere the chain gets broken; most likely somewhere very close to you. And even this is under the optimistic assumption that you are allowed to move (which wasn’t true for most humans in history) and can afford the costs of moving.
Second, the line between “cooperators” and “defectors” is not clean. What about those who want to cooperate with some kinds of people, and want to defect against other kinds of people? If they happen to want to cooperate with you, is that enough to classify them as “cooperators” from your perspective? What if they don’t want to cooperate with your friends? What if their cooperation with you is conditional on you paying some cost? What if their cooperation with you is conditional on you cooperating with those they tell you to cooperate with, and defecting against those they tell you to defect against? Now you can no longer choose freely; you need to be strategic and notice the incentives, and maybe they are pushing you into a situation that you don’t like but can’t easily avoid. If everyone is free to choose their 1:1 interactions, you can escape the school bully, but you can’t escape a cult leader who demands that everyone who stops obeying him must be shunned by the rest of the church… and then everyone needs to calculate whether, if they leave, they lose their family and friends.
Finally, there is even no agreement on what does it mean to “cooperate” or to “defect”. Even on the meta level; for example, someone people will insist that if you don’t cooperate with those who defect against you, then you are the true defector; and things like this.
So in theory there is a way out… and even in practice, it happens… to a certain degree, unreliably… for example some people grow up and learn to detect and avoid abusers in their personal lives (even if they can do nothing about the dictators), some bad people end up in prisons, people sort themselves out by subcultures, etc.
But I would like to see this effect much stronger. Like, my idea of heaven, or a post-scarcity society under a benevolent AI overlord, is that personal interaction only happens with mutual consent. Then, people either learn to be nice… or they stay alone, or create groups of mutual abuse; I don’t care.
I am thinking about the implications for everyday human life.
Freedom of association makes cooperation a superpower. If you are a cooperator, associate with other cooperators and win! If you are a defector, you… won’t have much of a choice. At the end, all players will sort themselves out and end up in Heaven (the circle of cooperators) or Hell (the circle of defectors).
Sounds intuitive. So why isn’t actual life like this?
First, I guess because we don’t have much of freedom of association. It is difficult to escape the bully at school, the criminal in your neighborhood, or the dictator in your country. I mean, technically, you can, but it’s expensive. And when you move to another school / neighborhood / country, chances are that some trouble will find you there, too.
(How to model this in the game? Do you lose some points every time you reject playing against someone? And if you find someone you like to play with, will the game sometimes randomly assign you a new player anyway?)
Then there is a problem with coordination. If you switch schools, you get rid of the bully, but you also lose contact with your friends at school. You can’t convince them to move together with you. If you emigrate, will you take your family and friends with you? But they would also want to take their family and friends… so somewhere the chain gets broken; most likely somewhere very close to you. And even this is under the optimistic assumption that you are allowed to move (which wasn’t true for most humans in history) and can afford the costs of moving.
Second, the line between “cooperators” and “defectors” is not clean. What about those who want to cooperate with some kinds of people, and want to defect against other kinds of people? If they happen to want to cooperate with you, is that enough to classify them as “cooperators” from your perspective? What if they don’t want to cooperate with your friends? What if their cooperation with you is conditional on you paying some cost? What if their cooperation with you is conditional on you cooperating with those they tell you to cooperate with, and defecting against those they tell you to defect against? Now you can no longer choose freely; you need to be strategic and notice the incentives, and maybe they are pushing you into a situation that you don’t like but can’t easily avoid. If everyone is free to choose their 1:1 interactions, you can escape the school bully, but you can’t escape a cult leader who demands that everyone who stops obeying him must be shunned by the rest of the church… and then everyone needs to calculate whether, if they leave, they lose their family and friends.
Finally, there is even no agreement on what does it mean to “cooperate” or to “defect”. Even on the meta level; for example, someone people will insist that if you don’t cooperate with those who defect against you, then you are the true defector; and things like this.
So in theory there is a way out… and even in practice, it happens… to a certain degree, unreliably… for example some people grow up and learn to detect and avoid abusers in their personal lives (even if they can do nothing about the dictators), some bad people end up in prisons, people sort themselves out by subcultures, etc.
But I would like to see this effect much stronger. Like, my idea of heaven, or a post-scarcity society under a benevolent AI overlord, is that personal interaction only happens with mutual consent. Then, people either learn to be nice… or they stay alone, or create groups of mutual abuse; I don’t care.