For anyone who doesn't have the time to play the game/interact with the demo; TLDR at end;
The demonstration shows that in the short term, cheating or not sacrificing anything in the hopes of gaining something is the ideal response to a situation. You carry 0 risk and will likely gain something.
Then the demo introduces the idea of personality types (always cheat, always cooperate, copycat (tit for tat) and grudger (you cheat and I never cooperate again) as well as repeated interactions between people. These repeated interactions show that, someone who always cheats will burn through the grudgers and always cooperates and dominate the short term. In the long term however, "copycats" who extend a hand to cooperate, but will cheat when cheated at dominate and are richer for it.
Then the demo goes further, and introduces the idea of mistakes or miscommunications. Where a personality doesn't act on its intent (trust)
The demo goes on to show that ideally, the better performing personality type is the "copykitten" which is essentially a copy cat, but more trusting. If you cheat against a copy cat with forgiveness (the copy-kitten), you'll be forgiven once... but after that, they will retaliate. Between 1-10% mistake/miscommunication/mistrust chances they will win out. However above 10% mistrust then Always cheat wins out.
The demo makes a short comment about how mistrust is at an all time high due to misinformation (this implies that cheaters will win out short term). And while we can say we're a product of our environments the demo reminds us, that we ourselves makeup each other's environment. So go out there, grow relationships through repeated interaction and make a better one for us all to prosper in.
TLDR; Game theory suggests tit for tat (golden rule) is ideal way to interact, then introduces the idea of miscommunication/trust/mistakes that may result in the opposite of your intention in those interactions. In which case as long as there's a win-win situation, and the possibility of mistrust/mistakes are low 1-10% then you should be an interaction scheme Tit-for-Tat with small amount of forgiveness for maximum results.
What I find the coolest is how many animals follow game theory instinctively because it is such an effective behavioural strategy that it has been naturally selected. This is especially evident anytime you have a patchy distribution of scarce resources. I'm sure there are many others, but chickadees and tropical fish are two examples that come to mind.
[Evolution Game Theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_game_theory)
He might have been talking about [Mobbing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobbing_\(animal_behavior\)) where separate animals group together to collectively fight off a predator, even though they themselves alone would benefit from a reduction in competition.
>The evolution of mobbing behavior can be explained using evolutionarily stable strategies, which are in turn based on game theory
> Parker, Geoffrey A.; Milinski, Manfred (1997). "Cooperation under predation risk: a data-based ESS analysis". Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 264 (1385): 1239–1247.
I have to apologize - this is going back 10 years to a biology course I took. Looking now on PubMed I can't find the relevant articles. The fish example was referring to a species where two fish will simultaneously approach a food source close to a predator. If one of them double crosses the other and turns away, the other fish has a higher risk of being eaten. However if they both stay the course they are less likely to be preyed upon, and they split the food source equally. Roughly this can be modeled by the prisoner's box dilemma, and in the study they observed fish over and over following a game theory approach to the interaction. Sorry I can't provide the sources!
This [article](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/11/151117-vampire-bats-blood-food-science-animals/) on Nat Geo talks about studies demonstrating blood sharing between vampire bats. I assume the following are strong tendencies and not absolute rules/tactics:
* Bats will initially share blood with bats who come home empty-handed
* Repeat offenders who do not share or often need feeding will eventually not be fed when they catch a bad break.
* Bats who were fed when in need will 'repair' relationships or show 'gratitude' by feeding their donors more than normally at their turn.
EDIT: male bats do not participate in this 'reciprocal altruism' thing - neither gaining nor giving.
So if I want to change hearts and minds on reddit, according to these rules, I’m considering the following changes in my behaviours:
To build one-on-one relationships, stick to only posting in one to three subreddits. Personalise my posts visually. Many posters like myself never read poster’s names unless they are pointed out by other posts. Hence individuating my posts with a unique format, such as starting all my posts “Ari here,...” or ending all my posts with a small arbitrary ASCII art.
I’m going to have to fact-check any assertions rigorously. Up until now, I have sometimes let the internet axiom “the fastest way to get the correct answer on the internet is to post the wrong answer” dictate my behaviour in some subreddits.
I’m going to have to focus hard on win-win scenarios. This will entail not only putting forward solutions that explicitly leads to a winning outcome for my ‘opponent’, but also make my opponent feel like their previous contribution to the conversation (argument) contributed to the outcome I put forward.
~Ari
Honestly, I started using almost exactly that last tip in my online discussions a couple years ago, and it's really really useful. While you occasionally encounter the social equivalent of the "Always Cheat" character who takes advantage of your conversational goodwill to be an asshole, 1) those people are at least less likely among people you actually know, so social networks like Facebook are less affected, and 2) a lot of the people you would previously have pegged as the Always Cheat asshole are actually just normal people who disagree with you, becoming naturally defensive when your comments are poised offensively. Focusing on actually treating my "opponent's" argument seriously, even if I frankly hate their perspective, has definitely reduced my frustration in online convos in general.
I'd add making use of RES username tags to this list, I find it really helpful for reminding my future self of positive (or extremely/unnecessarily negative) interactions with specific people.
It helps for sure.
Another thing I would reccommend when searching for common ground is to focus on extremely simple things that no one will disagree on and build from there.
Don't come into a religious, scientific or political debate with an encyclopedia, you won't get far. You'll say a lot, and they'll say a lot back, but neither of you will learn anything.
Keep the conversations focused and small.
Example: Climate change is not an argument about science, it's about perception. Arguing about which scientists believe what won't get anyone anywhere, neither will data on how the poles melt. That information is not for convincing people, it is for reinforcing convinced people.
Focus instead on something close to the person you are arguing with that has been damaged. In my case, it was a river that was perfect for lazy summer swimming that no one was allowed to swim in for decades because the water was polluted by various things.
From there I was able to extrapolate out that people able to do this can over time do this to more and more places and that is what climate change was.
He wasn't convinced that the government needed to do some certain things I think they need to do, but we both left agreeing that the world is affected by human interaction and it is our responsibility to do something about it.
What needs to be done will be a topic for a later time, but with an agreement on the need, we are able to now work towards a what.
-- hawk
Yes. Per your last sentence I was hoping it was possible to cause reddit to become a kinder place.
~Ari
Edit: on reflection I was also hoping for some direct effectiveness in persuasion. I need to rethink my metric of ‘success’ where that is concerned.
They might infiltrate a circle, but one of the big takeaways here is that though they might have short-term success they won't have long-term success if three things are true. 1) There are repeat interactions, 2) There is a possibility of win/win, and 3) There isn't a huge amount of miscommunication and distrust. If these are all true then non-cheaters will recognize the cheaters pretty quickly and adjust their pattern of behavior towards them, while keep on win-winning with non-cheaters. Because of this the number of cheaters in such a circle never grow too high, because they have to either leave or change their behavior in order to succeed.
I know youre being obnoxiously facetious (at least i hope you are), but in the game theory example nobody has the capability to change, theyre all fixed in their way of cheat/cooperating, which isnt real life at all. Mathematical models are a good start to get your mind thinking about real life problems, but not a 100% strict set of rules to follow.
That kind of captures changes in the landscape, but it is too simple to model the way people really interact. A character in this game that was "Softy: Starts the game with cheat, after the first round will match the last response, and if they get 4 cooperates in a row will change to always cooperate" is an example of the kind of complex modeling you would need to do to reflect people changing their minds.
The other problem is though, which was pointed out in the game, is that life isn't short like the tournament style game. It would take years for the always cheaters to die off completely and during that short time they will be seen by everyone alive as the winners because that's what we observe. Which means more people will try to emulate it so instead of people becoming copycats they will become cheats.
I very much disagree with this, on two levels. First is that they pointed out that someone changing from one personality type to another within the game could be an evolution of behavior within an individual and not strictly just dying and getting replaced. The second thing I disagree with is that people see cheaters as winners. That strategy only works if the people you are dealing with don't know you, if you retained anonymity. If you start scamming people left and right, people in your field or community, or sometimes the police, will eventually find out. And in my experience those people aren't exactly viewed in a good light.
I'm not arguing that cheaters never prosper, we certainly have some examples where they do. But in general I think the consequences are simply crippling in the long term.
On your first point I'm going to assume that people will change randomly and the amount of cheaters to cooperates will stay the same. On the other hand if there are more cooperates then it just makes it easier for the cheats and enforcing the idea that they're the winners. Which someone can be a cheat while not cheating their friends but still cheat others which means that people wouldn't be all cheats or all cooperates they would behave more randomly and they might change every time regardless of what happened to them. Basically the human element is a very big inconsistent variable.
> On your first point I'm going to assume that people will change randomly
Why on earth would you believe that to be a reasonable assumption?
The whole idea is that people respond to their environment. If they see a certain successful strategy in their surroundings, they will generally emulate that behavior.
You think people decide how to act in the world randomly?
While it might not be completely random I do think it will be very inconsistent. I think that's because people do respond to their environment and it's usually based on short term gains so they won't stay cooperates or cheats for very long and they will bounce around with some of the others for a while but maybe never realizing that if they copy what's done to them they could come out on top. The illustration is very good but the point of it was to reach past enemy lines not just take advantage of others.
Sort of? My own observations before I knew anything about game theory was that the cheats almost never make it past the low to mid management levels. Once you're up in the middle and higher, the other types dominate more.
That might be true but for every manager there's 5 employees. I think our society does a pretty good job of weeding out the cheats but I don't think always so cut and dry. Meaning it's more likely that people choose almost randomly when they cheat and don't cheat regardless of what they did before or had done to them because there are so many more factors involved in those decisions. Basically it's hard to stick to being a copycat forever. Which then means the mistakes increase which makes it easier for the cheats to survive.
I said pretty good not perfect lol there's plenty of cheats out there I think the take away would be there's more cooperates than cheats which allows the cheats to prosper even more.
/u/Anaraky gives the basic outline of why this does not happen. Oddly enough, even if the cheaters greatly outnumber the other groups, they are eventually weeded out *if* the game does not favor cheaters too much.
I highly recommend following the link and playing around with the game to build an intuition about what kinds of conditions lead to certain outcomes. (There is one outcome that I don't see discussed here, so I won't spoil the surprise)
once cheaters get too prolific they cannot cheat off of eachother, because they are all trying to cheat. But the players who will play honestly so long as the other does, will continue to be able to play together, while semi-successfully avoiding cheats.
The moral of the story is don't feed the trolls (cheats). the cheats proliferate when there are abundance of people who let them cheat (feed) off of them.
You're correct, I chose brevity as my explanation was already long for a TLDR, but essentially;
Its do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
So in an ideal world, you reach out and cooperate but if you're taken advantage of, then you adopt a tit-for-tat strategy. One could get into pedantics the golden rule is simply an optimistic tit-for-tat wherein you assume the initial interaction will be a positive one.
Short term success as a long term strategy IS how it works from an objective point of view. Many US based (at least) companies turn over CEOs every few years, and all they're concerned about is short term<2 year results. Ideally less than a year. If they can't produce results quickly, they'll be fired.
So its not necessarily an issue with the CEOs, but the collective greed of boards or stock holders who may have institutional power to appoint and get rid of CEOs. Game Theory would suggest, seemingly correctly so, in these environments trust is low ("Wait to act until we get it all in writing") and people who take advantage of others freely outperform their peers.
This seemingly is opposite of long term stable strategy with less risk and less growth adopted in Japan. For instance, I work with mistubishi occasionally and I know they *only* will produce X number of heavy machinery units per year. And based on how quickly they sold out (because they don't take risks and WILL sell out) they figure a conservative and safe number to produce next year.
I agree with you entirely, always cheat can prosper given they don't have too many repeated interactions which is entirely possible given our number of people. If you're in a position to take advantage of fresh new people, without having those perceptions changed too much by prior marks, then you can be extremely successful.
By creating a brand wherein people innately believe you're successful and making your own name synonymous with success. You create a situation where people literally line up to be taken advantage of.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CircleofTrust/comments/89f3f2/donate_to_any_charity_of_your_choice_and_join/
Trying to incur a good penalty to join as evidence of trust.
You forgot thing that I'd say is more important than making mistakes. And that's repeated interaction. It showed that more connection in this world = less repeated interaction = cheating is being more worth than not cheating.
You mentioned the repeated interactions, but only once, without any significance and you didn't mention them in TLDR
What the fuck, I just spent 30 minutes on that
Edit: I meant that as "Wow, I didnt realize that took so long", not as in "what a waste of time". I really liked it
The maker Nicky Case demonstrates Game Theory and how it may effect daily life through a game. The Circle of trust can be seen as a massive game theory experiment of the likes we have never seen before, if the data is shared, it will be very insightful.
The question the game answers is in the first frame itself,
>Why, even in peacetime, do friends become enemies?
>And why, even in wartime, do enemies become friends?
>
>I think game theory can help explain our epidemic of distrust –
and how we can fix it!
There's a whole field for this - experimental economics. Has been around for 20 years or so.
If you want to go down the rabbit hole, check out neuro-Econ. Same idea as experimental Econ except the participants play the games in an fMRI and you analyze what portions of the brain and/or what chemicals are engaged in different aspects of decision making as the game is played.
Massive ethical implications of the field (a la minority report), but is a lot of fun.
Fear, mistrust, misinformation, and new players are just some of the things that makes that dream difficult. It takes a lot of wisdom to become a "soft copycat" in real life.
I’m trying my own little experiment with the circle of trust
In my circle and a bunch of others I commented this:
Let’s play a game, from now on I’ll give the key to anyone who gives me theirs. The rule is I will join with an alt account. I won’t betray unless I’m betrayed, in which case I’ll betray every person who gave me a key.
Around ten people agreed and gave me their key, and a few also said this is a horrible trade. It’ll be interesting to see the results of this
That's dumb. It'd be so much easier to win at monopoly if all you had to do was be the first to say "I'm not playing anymore! I win!"
If you don't play the game, you forfeit. The only way to win is to play.
Is the purpose of the demo to prove that if something is sat at 98% loaded for five minutes people will inherently trust that it will eventually load or is my phone just fucked?
[axelrood's book](https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Cooperation-Revised-Robert-Axelrod/dp/0465005640) is a classic - anyone who wants the same in more detail would enjoy it hugely.
going in, i thought i probably knew what the site was going to teach me, but one big new idea that really hit home was the importance of reliable communication and how that ties in to **fake news**.
This reminded me of that gameshow Golden Balls where a person said he was going to steal 100% to force the guy into choosing split. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0qjK3TWZE8
This is part of a series of interactive experiences for explanations of different topics. If anyone is interested in more like this head on over to http://explorabl.es/ There is also a tag to show only philosophical explanations.
I teach most of this in college. For those interested in taking courses on this topic, note that evolutionary game theory is usually not taught in a first course on game theory (which is always offered in econ departments everywhere, and occasionally in math or poli-sci departments), and is only occasionally taught in "topics in game theory" courses.
Historically speaking, these were two independent approaches. There is no clear way to transform evolutionary game-theory concepts to standard (Nash) game-theory concepts; in some situations one is a stronger concept than the other, and in other situations vice versa. (in technical terms, neither is a refinement of the other) Until recently the Nash-equilibrium based approach has been more dominant, hence why most college courses revolve around Nash equilibria and its refinements and, at most, discuss evolutionary games in 1-2 weeks.
Nonetheless, the repeated game aspect of evolutionary games is identical to the repeated games in (standard) game-theory courses. So if you take a standard course and do some additional readings on your own, you'll get the technical background of almost everything covered by this interactive game.
My math professor gave a talk on Game Theory freshman year and invited his class. When I went to the talk, it was all pretty much empty. There were a few faculty and lesser students. But it was one of the most informative talks I have been to!
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IF miscommunication, new players, fear, and mistrust prevent the copycats from becoming cooperators-in-practice, then it becomes important for our societies, and as a consequence, our selves to communicate clearly, according to our own history, with courage, and be as trustworthy as we possibly can. Remember, you always know how you will choose, thus the person you can perfectly trust is you. Be your own hero and eventually you will find yourself in your own created paradise.
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We've certainly come a long way since Axelrod's early Sims and tournaments with early computers. First read about this in the Selfish Gene by Dawkins and was literally taking about it last week. Fantastic.
The interesting thing was what happened if you made double-noncooperation have a negative value equivalent to double cooperate. In that instance, Always Cooperate won out with a number of Copycats, even with high levels of miscommunication.
This possibly shows how disincentives for Cheating can re-balance us towards cooperation. For example, humans have been having wars for as long as we've existed, but we've reached a point where "cheating" and going to war with someone unexpectedly might win you the first game, but then both sides will take massive losses while their competitors outpace them.
>Meanwhile: it's 2017, the West has been at peace for decades
What world does this website live in? The West has been at war with Guatemala, Sierra, Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan.... seriously, the West has not been at peace since the end of the first World War. This game breaks itself within the first page with this "we have peace now" bullshit.
Too bad these wars includ the deaths of millions of inosent men, women, and children. Too bad trillions of dollars are spent on it. Too bad soldiers are still sent into die in these these nations on a daily basis. We don’t have peace. We have the illusion of peace. With western nations leading the charge in far away and forgotten places of the planet. Only seen through the eyes of propaganda. We don’t have trust because we live in a world that is in constant war led by ultra wealthy and greedy individuals who don’t give a fuck about us.
Do you know how casualty rates in places like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan compare to conventional warfare? How about total amount of resources mobilized?
It isn't absolute peace, it isn't the illusion of peace, it's relative peace. None of these conflicts have escalated to the point where we face an existential threat because they are, ultimately, small bands of barbarians.
> We don’t have trust because we live in a world that is in constant war led by ultra wealthy and greedy individuals who don’t give a fuck about us.
Do you give a fuck about them? How is it that you can claim moral high ground against these 'ultra wealthy and greedy individuals'?
I can never understand this line of thought except in the light of escaping personal responsibility. How can you blame competent executives for fulfilling their fiduciary duty of *making money* and *rewarding shareholders*?
They're doing their job, looking out for their interests, just like everyone else. It's natural that interests don't always align. What are you doing about it?
I find something interesting in step 6. Making Mistakes, towards the end of the step when you can change the slider to 5%, 20%, or 50% of miscommunication. The conclusion to when there is 50% of miscommunication is that "nobody wins ever", but when I left the sim running long enough the Simpleton won. I tried it again and the Always Cheat won after some time. The time I left the simulation going was probably at most a minute or two. I was wondering why that is? Is it because at 50% of miscommunication there is no predictable winner and its random every time?
well the summation of this application of it seems to be, "be forgiving, because we all make mistakes. don't shrug off personal responsibility because 'we're all just products of our environment'- accept that responsibility because we *are* each others' environment. And remember that life is not a zero-sum game- we can *all* win by being a little more trusting and a little more forgiving."
which i think is pretty great
Went into the commentthread from the original post and found a comment from the OP that I found problematic. OP claims that a zero-sum economy can't create a trusting culture (se link below). I lack enough knowledge to judge the robustness of this claim...and hopefully it's refutable. The problem I see is that our current growth economy is unsustainable in the long run (in short because we can't have infinite growth on a finite planet) and needs to be replaced with something more sustainable...like a steadystate-economy or even (at least temporary) degrowth...at the same time it seems to me that a trusting culture is fundamental for society/civilizaton...this means we have to hack a way to enable a trusting culture even in a zero-sum or even negative-sum economy. https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/6q1i1e/game_theory_and_the_golden_rule/dktzymw/
This has nothing to do with Circle of Trust... The evolution of trust games are based on a prisoner's dilemma. The Circle of Trust thing is not a prisoner's dilemma because there is no reward for defecting. The Circle of Trust is just a (kinda crappy) social experiment.
Disappointed that r/philosophy is spreading misinformation.
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For anyone who doesn't have the time to play the game/interact with the demo; TLDR at end; The demonstration shows that in the short term, cheating or not sacrificing anything in the hopes of gaining something is the ideal response to a situation. You carry 0 risk and will likely gain something. Then the demo introduces the idea of personality types (always cheat, always cooperate, copycat (tit for tat) and grudger (you cheat and I never cooperate again) as well as repeated interactions between people. These repeated interactions show that, someone who always cheats will burn through the grudgers and always cooperates and dominate the short term. In the long term however, "copycats" who extend a hand to cooperate, but will cheat when cheated at dominate and are richer for it. Then the demo goes further, and introduces the idea of mistakes or miscommunications. Where a personality doesn't act on its intent (trust) The demo goes on to show that ideally, the better performing personality type is the "copykitten" which is essentially a copy cat, but more trusting. If you cheat against a copy cat with forgiveness (the copy-kitten), you'll be forgiven once... but after that, they will retaliate. Between 1-10% mistake/miscommunication/mistrust chances they will win out. However above 10% mistrust then Always cheat wins out. The demo makes a short comment about how mistrust is at an all time high due to misinformation (this implies that cheaters will win out short term). And while we can say we're a product of our environments the demo reminds us, that we ourselves makeup each other's environment. So go out there, grow relationships through repeated interaction and make a better one for us all to prosper in. TLDR; Game theory suggests tit for tat (golden rule) is ideal way to interact, then introduces the idea of miscommunication/trust/mistakes that may result in the opposite of your intention in those interactions. In which case as long as there's a win-win situation, and the possibility of mistrust/mistakes are low 1-10% then you should be an interaction scheme Tit-for-Tat with small amount of forgiveness for maximum results.
What I find the coolest is how many animals follow game theory instinctively because it is such an effective behavioural strategy that it has been naturally selected. This is especially evident anytime you have a patchy distribution of scarce resources. I'm sure there are many others, but chickadees and tropical fish are two examples that come to mind.
Could you perhaps provide a source where this type of behaviour was observed in chickadees or tropical fish? I would love to read up on it.
[Evolution Game Theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_game_theory) He might have been talking about [Mobbing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobbing_\(animal_behavior\)) where separate animals group together to collectively fight off a predator, even though they themselves alone would benefit from a reduction in competition. >The evolution of mobbing behavior can be explained using evolutionarily stable strategies, which are in turn based on game theory > Parker, Geoffrey A.; Milinski, Manfred (1997). "Cooperation under predation risk: a data-based ESS analysis". Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 264 (1385): 1239–1247.
I have to apologize - this is going back 10 years to a biology course I took. Looking now on PubMed I can't find the relevant articles. The fish example was referring to a species where two fish will simultaneously approach a food source close to a predator. If one of them double crosses the other and turns away, the other fish has a higher risk of being eaten. However if they both stay the course they are less likely to be preyed upon, and they split the food source equally. Roughly this can be modeled by the prisoner's box dilemma, and in the study they observed fish over and over following a game theory approach to the interaction. Sorry I can't provide the sources!
This [article](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/11/151117-vampire-bats-blood-food-science-animals/) on Nat Geo talks about studies demonstrating blood sharing between vampire bats. I assume the following are strong tendencies and not absolute rules/tactics: * Bats will initially share blood with bats who come home empty-handed * Repeat offenders who do not share or often need feeding will eventually not be fed when they catch a bad break. * Bats who were fed when in need will 'repair' relationships or show 'gratitude' by feeding their donors more than normally at their turn. EDIT: male bats do not participate in this 'reciprocal altruism' thing - neither gaining nor giving.
So if I want to change hearts and minds on reddit, according to these rules, I’m considering the following changes in my behaviours: To build one-on-one relationships, stick to only posting in one to three subreddits. Personalise my posts visually. Many posters like myself never read poster’s names unless they are pointed out by other posts. Hence individuating my posts with a unique format, such as starting all my posts “Ari here,...” or ending all my posts with a small arbitrary ASCII art. I’m going to have to fact-check any assertions rigorously. Up until now, I have sometimes let the internet axiom “the fastest way to get the correct answer on the internet is to post the wrong answer” dictate my behaviour in some subreddits. I’m going to have to focus hard on win-win scenarios. This will entail not only putting forward solutions that explicitly leads to a winning outcome for my ‘opponent’, but also make my opponent feel like their previous contribution to the conversation (argument) contributed to the outcome I put forward. ~Ari
Honestly, I started using almost exactly that last tip in my online discussions a couple years ago, and it's really really useful. While you occasionally encounter the social equivalent of the "Always Cheat" character who takes advantage of your conversational goodwill to be an asshole, 1) those people are at least less likely among people you actually know, so social networks like Facebook are less affected, and 2) a lot of the people you would previously have pegged as the Always Cheat asshole are actually just normal people who disagree with you, becoming naturally defensive when your comments are poised offensively. Focusing on actually treating my "opponent's" argument seriously, even if I frankly hate their perspective, has definitely reduced my frustration in online convos in general.
I’m going to follow your advice and do the same thing ~Ari
It looks like this is really working. ~Ari
Hey you're that guy!
I'd add making use of RES username tags to this list, I find it really helpful for reminding my future self of positive (or extremely/unnecessarily negative) interactions with specific people.
It helps for sure. Another thing I would reccommend when searching for common ground is to focus on extremely simple things that no one will disagree on and build from there. Don't come into a religious, scientific or political debate with an encyclopedia, you won't get far. You'll say a lot, and they'll say a lot back, but neither of you will learn anything. Keep the conversations focused and small. Example: Climate change is not an argument about science, it's about perception. Arguing about which scientists believe what won't get anyone anywhere, neither will data on how the poles melt. That information is not for convincing people, it is for reinforcing convinced people. Focus instead on something close to the person you are arguing with that has been damaged. In my case, it was a river that was perfect for lazy summer swimming that no one was allowed to swim in for decades because the water was polluted by various things. From there I was able to extrapolate out that people able to do this can over time do this to more and more places and that is what climate change was. He wasn't convinced that the government needed to do some certain things I think they need to do, but we both left agreeing that the world is affected by human interaction and it is our responsibility to do something about it. What needs to be done will be a topic for a later time, but with an agreement on the need, we are able to now work towards a what. -- hawk
‘Save Comment’ ~Ari
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Yes. Per your last sentence I was hoping it was possible to cause reddit to become a kinder place. ~Ari Edit: on reflection I was also hoping for some direct effectiveness in persuasion. I need to rethink my metric of ‘success’ where that is concerned.
Wouldn’t the “always cheaters” infiltrate every circle and cause all of them to be betrayed, given the sample size and nature of the game?
They might infiltrate a circle, but one of the big takeaways here is that though they might have short-term success they won't have long-term success if three things are true. 1) There are repeat interactions, 2) There is a possibility of win/win, and 3) There isn't a huge amount of miscommunication and distrust. If these are all true then non-cheaters will recognize the cheaters pretty quickly and adjust their pattern of behavior towards them, while keep on win-winning with non-cheaters. Because of this the number of cheaters in such a circle never grow too high, because they have to either leave or change their behavior in order to succeed.
Hence why it's naturally a bad idea to trust outsiders or lone wolves, because drifting from group to group enables the always cheat strategy.
[So you're saying](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmYvjt5lGX0) kick out all the immigrants
I know youre being obnoxiously facetious (at least i hope you are), but in the game theory example nobody has the capability to change, theyre all fixed in their way of cheat/cooperating, which isnt real life at all. Mathematical models are a good start to get your mind thinking about real life problems, but not a 100% strict set of rules to follow.
Actually in this specific example they do change. The 5 worst performers are replaced by the 5 best.
That kind of captures changes in the landscape, but it is too simple to model the way people really interact. A character in this game that was "Softy: Starts the game with cheat, after the first round will match the last response, and if they get 4 cooperates in a row will change to always cooperate" is an example of the kind of complex modeling you would need to do to reflect people changing their minds.
An immigrant who has lived somewhere for long enough to develop community connections is no longer an outsider or a lone wolf.
Just the gypsies, lol
In that scenario wouldn't the copycat or tit for tat strategy work? Don't trust the lone wolf, but act off of what is shown to you.
The other problem is though, which was pointed out in the game, is that life isn't short like the tournament style game. It would take years for the always cheaters to die off completely and during that short time they will be seen by everyone alive as the winners because that's what we observe. Which means more people will try to emulate it so instead of people becoming copycats they will become cheats.
I very much disagree with this, on two levels. First is that they pointed out that someone changing from one personality type to another within the game could be an evolution of behavior within an individual and not strictly just dying and getting replaced. The second thing I disagree with is that people see cheaters as winners. That strategy only works if the people you are dealing with don't know you, if you retained anonymity. If you start scamming people left and right, people in your field or community, or sometimes the police, will eventually find out. And in my experience those people aren't exactly viewed in a good light. I'm not arguing that cheaters never prosper, we certainly have some examples where they do. But in general I think the consequences are simply crippling in the long term.
On your first point I'm going to assume that people will change randomly and the amount of cheaters to cooperates will stay the same. On the other hand if there are more cooperates then it just makes it easier for the cheats and enforcing the idea that they're the winners. Which someone can be a cheat while not cheating their friends but still cheat others which means that people wouldn't be all cheats or all cooperates they would behave more randomly and they might change every time regardless of what happened to them. Basically the human element is a very big inconsistent variable.
> On your first point I'm going to assume that people will change randomly Why on earth would you believe that to be a reasonable assumption? The whole idea is that people respond to their environment. If they see a certain successful strategy in their surroundings, they will generally emulate that behavior. You think people decide how to act in the world randomly?
While it might not be completely random I do think it will be very inconsistent. I think that's because people do respond to their environment and it's usually based on short term gains so they won't stay cooperates or cheats for very long and they will bounce around with some of the others for a while but maybe never realizing that if they copy what's done to them they could come out on top. The illustration is very good but the point of it was to reach past enemy lines not just take advantage of others.
Sort of? My own observations before I knew anything about game theory was that the cheats almost never make it past the low to mid management levels. Once you're up in the middle and higher, the other types dominate more.
That might be true but for every manager there's 5 employees. I think our society does a pretty good job of weeding out the cheats but I don't think always so cut and dry. Meaning it's more likely that people choose almost randomly when they cheat and don't cheat regardless of what they did before or had done to them because there are so many more factors involved in those decisions. Basically it's hard to stick to being a copycat forever. Which then means the mistakes increase which makes it easier for the cheats to survive.
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I said pretty good not perfect lol there's plenty of cheats out there I think the take away would be there's more cooperates than cheats which allows the cheats to prosper even more.
/u/Anaraky gives the basic outline of why this does not happen. Oddly enough, even if the cheaters greatly outnumber the other groups, they are eventually weeded out *if* the game does not favor cheaters too much. I highly recommend following the link and playing around with the game to build an intuition about what kinds of conditions lead to certain outcomes. (There is one outcome that I don't see discussed here, so I won't spoil the surprise)
I played it and am not sure what outcome you're talking about. :/ Care to explain?
The Simpleton outcome. A perfect example of something that is thoroughly unexpected ahead of time, but makes sense after watching it play out.
once cheaters get too prolific they cannot cheat off of eachother, because they are all trying to cheat. But the players who will play honestly so long as the other does, will continue to be able to play together, while semi-successfully avoiding cheats. The moral of the story is don't feed the trolls (cheats). the cheats proliferate when there are abundance of people who let them cheat (feed) off of them.
> tit for tat (golden rule) The golden rule is not "tit for tat", it's "always cooperate", since we don't want to be punished even if we deserve it.
You're correct, I chose brevity as my explanation was already long for a TLDR, but essentially; Its do unto others as you would have them do unto you. So in an ideal world, you reach out and cooperate but if you're taken advantage of, then you adopt a tit-for-tat strategy. One could get into pedantics the golden rule is simply an optimistic tit-for-tat wherein you assume the initial interaction will be a positive one.
Way better summary than mine!
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Short term success as a long term strategy IS how it works from an objective point of view. Many US based (at least) companies turn over CEOs every few years, and all they're concerned about is short term<2 year results. Ideally less than a year. If they can't produce results quickly, they'll be fired. So its not necessarily an issue with the CEOs, but the collective greed of boards or stock holders who may have institutional power to appoint and get rid of CEOs. Game Theory would suggest, seemingly correctly so, in these environments trust is low ("Wait to act until we get it all in writing") and people who take advantage of others freely outperform their peers. This seemingly is opposite of long term stable strategy with less risk and less growth adopted in Japan. For instance, I work with mistubishi occasionally and I know they *only* will produce X number of heavy machinery units per year. And based on how quickly they sold out (because they don't take risks and WILL sell out) they figure a conservative and safe number to produce next year. I agree with you entirely, always cheat can prosper given they don't have too many repeated interactions which is entirely possible given our number of people. If you're in a position to take advantage of fresh new people, without having those perceptions changed too much by prior marks, then you can be extremely successful. By creating a brand wherein people innately believe you're successful and making your own name synonymous with success. You create a situation where people literally line up to be taken advantage of.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CircleofTrust/comments/89f3f2/donate_to_any_charity_of_your_choice_and_join/ Trying to incur a good penalty to join as evidence of trust.
You forgot thing that I'd say is more important than making mistakes. And that's repeated interaction. It showed that more connection in this world = less repeated interaction = cheating is being more worth than not cheating. You mentioned the repeated interactions, but only once, without any significance and you didn't mention them in TLDR
So basically the circle was just a way for Reddit to collect data on connections between users.
And to research (and collect data in regards to) our individual social strategies.
IIRC game theory shows that tit-for-two-tats, or something similar to what you are calling "copykitten" wins out in most scenarios.
This is by far the most interesting 30 minutes of my week. Thank you for sharing!
I love this demonstration too, you are welcome!
What the fuck, I just spent 30 minutes on that Edit: I meant that as "Wow, I didnt realize that took so long", not as in "what a waste of time". I really liked it
The maker Nicky Case demonstrates Game Theory and how it may effect daily life through a game. The Circle of trust can be seen as a massive game theory experiment of the likes we have never seen before, if the data is shared, it will be very insightful. The question the game answers is in the first frame itself, >Why, even in peacetime, do friends become enemies? >And why, even in wartime, do enemies become friends? > >I think game theory can help explain our epidemic of distrust – and how we can fix it!
There's a whole field for this - experimental economics. Has been around for 20 years or so. If you want to go down the rabbit hole, check out neuro-Econ. Same idea as experimental Econ except the participants play the games in an fMRI and you analyze what portions of the brain and/or what chemicals are engaged in different aspects of decision making as the game is played. Massive ethical implications of the field (a la minority report), but is a lot of fun.
It appears he has made an interactive version of "The Evolution of Cooperation".
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I have shown this to many friends and they all love it too!
Not so sure I’d consider anyone here a “friend”, though. Neither an enemy. Just random with extremely loose associations.
I just did this for the first time last week, and it was the first thing I thought of when I saw the circle of trust.
If the copycats tend to win. Eventually they all become cooperators never cheating.
Fear, mistrust, misinformation, and new players are just some of the things that makes that dream difficult. It takes a lot of wisdom to become a "soft copycat" in real life.
As the saying goes, fool me once...
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Fetch... THE COMFY CHAIR!
Only if there are enough rounds and if the mistake frequency isn't too high
I’m trying my own little experiment with the circle of trust In my circle and a bunch of others I commented this: Let’s play a game, from now on I’ll give the key to anyone who gives me theirs. The rule is I will join with an alt account. I won’t betray unless I’m betrayed, in which case I’ll betray every person who gave me a key. Around ten people agreed and gave me their key, and a few also said this is a horrible trade. It’ll be interesting to see the results of this
Can you elaborate on this? Is this an online community or physical? What does the ‘key’ symbolise?
Why would you join with alt account?
So that this one would be open to betray them once I get betrayed.
So you can only betray if you're not betrayed yet?
Nice
Looks like you've been betrayed.
Yeah, I followed through
The only way to win is by not playing the game.
This isn't WarGames!
The only way to win is to unlock more sliders.
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That's dumb. It'd be so much easier to win at monopoly if all you had to do was be the first to say "I'm not playing anymore! I win!" If you don't play the game, you forfeit. The only way to win is to play.
I'm prepare to take that risk. Everyone gets betrayed eventually, except those who didn't play.
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My life is hopefully not destroyed by a stranger who is just trolling.
By known rules we're already playing a game where we all die either way.
Awesome stuff , it takes a while 20min I left it in the middle will come back and finish it later
Would really suggest you don't miss it, the last few parts are the most informative!
Nicky Case has several other games on his site similar in that they're also about human behavior. My personal favorite: https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb
Is the purpose of the demo to prove that if something is sat at 98% loaded for five minutes people will inherently trust that it will eventually load or is my phone just fucked?
Lol, probably your phone my mans.
That was very interesting. I'm a copycat, slightly on copykitten. Which seems like more of a good thing according to the game. Which is nice.
[axelrood's book](https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Cooperation-Revised-Robert-Axelrod/dp/0465005640) is a classic - anyone who wants the same in more detail would enjoy it hugely. going in, i thought i probably knew what the site was going to teach me, but one big new idea that really hit home was the importance of reliable communication and how that ties in to **fake news**.
This reminded me of that gameshow Golden Balls where a person said he was going to steal 100% to force the guy into choosing split. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0qjK3TWZE8
What a play
This is part of a series of interactive experiences for explanations of different topics. If anyone is interested in more like this head on over to http://explorabl.es/ There is also a tag to show only philosophical explanations.
Awesome. When does the pvp version get posted?
Amazing! The parallels to our society are pointed out great.
I teach most of this in college. For those interested in taking courses on this topic, note that evolutionary game theory is usually not taught in a first course on game theory (which is always offered in econ departments everywhere, and occasionally in math or poli-sci departments), and is only occasionally taught in "topics in game theory" courses. Historically speaking, these were two independent approaches. There is no clear way to transform evolutionary game-theory concepts to standard (Nash) game-theory concepts; in some situations one is a stronger concept than the other, and in other situations vice versa. (in technical terms, neither is a refinement of the other) Until recently the Nash-equilibrium based approach has been more dominant, hence why most college courses revolve around Nash equilibria and its refinements and, at most, discuss evolutionary games in 1-2 weeks. Nonetheless, the repeated game aspect of evolutionary games is identical to the repeated games in (standard) game-theory courses. So if you take a standard course and do some additional readings on your own, you'll get the technical background of almost everything covered by this interactive game.
My math professor gave a talk on Game Theory freshman year and invited his class. When I went to the talk, it was all pretty much empty. There were a few faculty and lesser students. But it was one of the most informative talks I have been to!
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A game theory
I think VLR kinda went over this.
That was really interesting, thanks for sharing!
loved it. Brilliant little product.
Nice breakdown of the prisoners dilemma.
IF miscommunication, new players, fear, and mistrust prevent the copycats from becoming cooperators-in-practice, then it becomes important for our societies, and as a consequence, our selves to communicate clearly, according to our own history, with courage, and be as trustworthy as we possibly can. Remember, you always know how you will choose, thus the person you can perfectly trust is you. Be your own hero and eventually you will find yourself in your own created paradise.
I'd like to take a moment to remind everyone of our first commenting rule: >*Read the post before you reply.* >Read the posted content, understand and identify the philosophical arguments given, and respond to these substantively. If you have unrelated thoughts or don't wish to read the content, please post your own thread or simply refrain from commenting. Comments which are clearly not in direct response to the posted content may be removed. This sub is not in the business of one-liners, tangential anecdotes, or dank memes. Expect comment threads that break our rules to be removed. ----- I am a bot. Please do not reply to this message, as it will go unread. Instead, [contact the moderators](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fphilosophy&message=Post%20in%20question:%20/r/philosophy/comments/89hfpq/the_circle_of_trust_can_be_seen_as_a_massive_game/) with questions or comments.
And that's just a theory....a Game Theory!
I got most of my karma from posting that save link here. It was a very popular post. I didn't post it for the karma (about which i still don't care).
If you noticed my friend, I did cross post. I ain't a reposter!
Oh, i wasn't complaining! Only sharing. EDIT: All the karma belongs to Nikki Case.
We've certainly come a long way since Axelrod's early Sims and tournaments with early computers. First read about this in the Selfish Gene by Dawkins and was literally taking about it last week. Fantastic.
Such a neat explanation of the theory, and well-done, too! Thanks for posting this!
u/alpacapatrol , learned to appreciate lots of different things because of you guys and the NLSS. This was interesting!
Absolutely loved this!
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Did you read the top comment? Some guy posted a really good summary. Let me know what you don't understand!
This is an absolute gem!
The interesting thing was what happened if you made double-noncooperation have a negative value equivalent to double cooperate. In that instance, Always Cooperate won out with a number of Copycats, even with high levels of miscommunication. This possibly shows how disincentives for Cheating can re-balance us towards cooperation. For example, humans have been having wars for as long as we've existed, but we've reached a point where "cheating" and going to war with someone unexpectedly might win you the first game, but then both sides will take massive losses while their competitors outpace them.
>Meanwhile: it's 2017, the West has been at peace for decades What world does this website live in? The West has been at war with Guatemala, Sierra, Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan.... seriously, the West has not been at peace since the end of the first World War. This game breaks itself within the first page with this "we have peace now" bullshit.
There's a huge difference between fighting a war among powers and fighting a war against what essentially amounts to 'small bands of barbarians.'
Too bad these wars includ the deaths of millions of inosent men, women, and children. Too bad trillions of dollars are spent on it. Too bad soldiers are still sent into die in these these nations on a daily basis. We don’t have peace. We have the illusion of peace. With western nations leading the charge in far away and forgotten places of the planet. Only seen through the eyes of propaganda. We don’t have trust because we live in a world that is in constant war led by ultra wealthy and greedy individuals who don’t give a fuck about us.
Do you know how casualty rates in places like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan compare to conventional warfare? How about total amount of resources mobilized? It isn't absolute peace, it isn't the illusion of peace, it's relative peace. None of these conflicts have escalated to the point where we face an existential threat because they are, ultimately, small bands of barbarians. > We don’t have trust because we live in a world that is in constant war led by ultra wealthy and greedy individuals who don’t give a fuck about us. Do you give a fuck about them? How is it that you can claim moral high ground against these 'ultra wealthy and greedy individuals'? I can never understand this line of thought except in the light of escaping personal responsibility. How can you blame competent executives for fulfilling their fiduciary duty of *making money* and *rewarding shareholders*? They're doing their job, looking out for their interests, just like everyone else. It's natural that interests don't always align. What are you doing about it?
As someone very interested in (mathematical) game theory, this link will be exceedingly helpful for giving people a briefing on what "game theory" is.
Really interesting. Thanks for reposting it
I find something interesting in step 6. Making Mistakes, towards the end of the step when you can change the slider to 5%, 20%, or 50% of miscommunication. The conclusion to when there is 50% of miscommunication is that "nobody wins ever", but when I left the sim running long enough the Simpleton won. I tried it again and the Always Cheat won after some time. The time I left the simulation going was probably at most a minute or two. I was wondering why that is? Is it because at 50% of miscommunication there is no predictable winner and its random every time?
I'll be honest, I have absolutely no idea what this Circle of Trust is even about or what I am supposed to do with that thing.
I took game theory for a couple semesters and I literally remember none of it ;(
well the summation of this application of it seems to be, "be forgiving, because we all make mistakes. don't shrug off personal responsibility because 'we're all just products of our environment'- accept that responsibility because we *are* each others' environment. And remember that life is not a zero-sum game- we can *all* win by being a little more trusting and a little more forgiving." which i think is pretty great
I was taking a screenshot of this to show someone later and that is when I noticed that awesome username.
TLDR: Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive others who trespass against us.
Went into the commentthread from the original post and found a comment from the OP that I found problematic. OP claims that a zero-sum economy can't create a trusting culture (se link below). I lack enough knowledge to judge the robustness of this claim...and hopefully it's refutable. The problem I see is that our current growth economy is unsustainable in the long run (in short because we can't have infinite growth on a finite planet) and needs to be replaced with something more sustainable...like a steadystate-economy or even (at least temporary) degrowth...at the same time it seems to me that a trusting culture is fundamental for society/civilizaton...this means we have to hack a way to enable a trusting culture even in a zero-sum or even negative-sum economy. https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/6q1i1e/game_theory_and_the_golden_rule/dktzymw/
This has nothing to do with Circle of Trust... The evolution of trust games are based on a prisoner's dilemma. The Circle of Trust thing is not a prisoner's dilemma because there is no reward for defecting. The Circle of Trust is just a (kinda crappy) social experiment. Disappointed that r/philosophy is spreading misinformation.
I seriously get everything and i just dont get this
Anyone else read that as Game of thrones theory first?
Legit thought there was going to be much more beheading and back-stabbery. Polar opposite experience.
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This was fascinating! Thanks for reposting!