In real life, you can do something even better than to defect every time.
You can cooperate, thus signaling to others, you are not a defector. Cooperating with them, you can do more than alone. More than a lone wolf, always defecting to everybody.
This is the reasoning behind tit-for-tat, and which allows it to succeed—when it does succeed.
However, in a crowd of always-defectors (such as a set created by reasoning from a known length-of-game), tit-for-tat’s initial cooperation means it will have a slightly lower score than the crowd which always defects; tit-for-tat needs the cooperation of one or more other not-always-defectors to build up enough of an advantage amongst themselves to overcome that.
But even there, you soon find two or more defectors from this always defect code. They start to cooperate between each other and outmaneuver the initial crowd.
Sidetrack: Villains by Necessity, a D&D-influenced novel in which the world has become so good that it’s about to disappear in a burst of white light. A group of Evil characters gather to prevent the end of the world.
Unfortunately, the book isn’t sophisticated about such questions as whether the Evil characters’ increasing ability to cooperate with each other threatens to make them too Good to do their job.
In real life, you can do something even better than to defect every time.
You can cooperate, thus signaling to others, you are not a defector. Cooperating with them, you can do more than alone. More than a lone wolf, always defecting to everybody.
This is the reasoning behind tit-for-tat, and which allows it to succeed—when it does succeed.
However, in a crowd of always-defectors (such as a set created by reasoning from a known length-of-game), tit-for-tat’s initial cooperation means it will have a slightly lower score than the crowd which always defects; tit-for-tat needs the cooperation of one or more other not-always-defectors to build up enough of an advantage amongst themselves to overcome that.
For such an ideal set of defectors, that’s true.
But even there, you soon find two or more defectors from this always defect code. They start to cooperate between each other and outmaneuver the initial crowd.
Sidetrack: Villains by Necessity, a D&D-influenced novel in which the world has become so good that it’s about to disappear in a burst of white light. A group of Evil characters gather to prevent the end of the world.
Unfortunately, the book isn’t sophisticated about such questions as whether the Evil characters’ increasing ability to cooperate with each other threatens to make them too Good to do their job.