Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Evolution of Trust

ncase.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 81 posts

Re: The Evolution of Trust

#61

Post by Symmetry »

hyperpallium wrote: post #39
Symmetry wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a tremendous amount of social technology that had to be developed to allow people to regularly interact with strangers without trying to kill each other. EDIT: Which is to say, a global community of 7 billion is absurd but not all that much more absurd than a city-state of 50 thousand.

There's an intriguing but hard to prove theory that some popular religions (Christianity, Buddhism) arose as cities became more populous, and in response to that. Part of your "social technology". Perhaps we'll soon see a new religion?

Maybe, I have Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict on my reading list but that seems to be more a part of later developments than city states. Before that came written laws, and before that came having states. I guess I'd recommend reading The World Until Yesterday followed by The Origins of Political Order.

Re: The Evolution of Trust

#62

Post by nabla9 »

cryptica wrote: post #12

Wow that is extremely insightful. Now I understand why globalisation is dangerous; if people start to favor short term relationships (both personal and business) with many different partners (smaller number of rounds per match ), then society will evolve to become full of cheaters.

Interpersonal trust can be replaced with trust in legal frameworks, rules and contracts. Well functioning rule-based society is important for globalization.

Countries where personal relations are important for business suffer from smaller number of opportunities because forming personal trust takes time.

Re: The Evolution of Trust

#63

Post by freeflight »

This is great and really fun.

10 rounds with changed payoffs has some really interesting results. Punishing cheating from both sides, regardless of how high, still leads to the cheaters taking over. But if you increase the payoffs for both sides cooperating, even if it's just by +1, you already eliminate all the cheaters very quickly and even the copycats are gone pretty quick, leaving a population of only cooperate.

Sure that's for the 10 round game without any of the other players, it's still very interesting how even in that setting it seems more beneficial to reward good behavior vs punishing bad behavior.

Re: The Evolution of Trust

#65

Post by swsieber »

rossdavidh wrote: post #47
cJ0th wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust, however, is not a miracle drug. For one thing, people can build trust with the intend to abuse it after a longer period of time. An abuser, for example, could plan to offer 20 "good rides" on Uber until s/he strikes. For another thing, many people have learnt to skillfully simulate trust which may pose a problem for you. For instance, you may believe to be in a loving relationship but all of a sudden you find…

The book "Phishing for Phools" has a good chapter on "reputation mining", which is essentially that, with the added wrinkle that you can buy a company that has a good reputation and cut corners until the customers wise up. I'm looking at you, InBev.

Chrome extensions have been abused this way many times.

Re: The Evolution of Trust

#68

Post by hftf »

The execution of this visualization was rather disappointing.

I didn’t like the overly cute text (the description of the Simpleton algorithm was almost incomprehensible), the low-contrast captions and colorblind-unfriendly color scheme, and the limited navigation (there was no way to go to the previous slide within a chapter, for example).

But more importantly: If you are going to design an entire interactive exercise like this, graphs are a much better way to explore the effects of varying different parameters. Trying to experiment (as instructed) with different parameters by watching animations in the various chapters and the "sandbox mode" included in this simulation was not only tedious, but prevented effective comparisons. If you just run each iterated tournament (from chapter 4 and onwards) by pressing the "Start" button, there is too much going on simultaneously at a high speed to follow along – I would recommend a sorted table or bar chart rather than many multi-digit numbers arranged in a circle – while stepping through is too slow to keep everything in your head.

I noticed that some of the other "explorable explanations" by the same creator include graphs; I think omitting them from this visualization was a mistake. http://explorableexplanations.com/

Re: The Evolution of Trust

#69

Post by barrkel »

dwaltrip wrote: post #43
DanAndersen wrote: post #37

One extension I'd like to see to this simulation is the exploration of group/tribe dynamics, as a way of exploring questions regarding in-group loyalty (anthropomorphized in as "ethnocentrism" or something analogous) vs egalitarianism. It seems like much of the success of these agents can depend on whether Agent A can determine what sort of actor Agent B is -- communication that can be conveyed beyond just the framew…

Another important missing factor here is the modeling of empathy and altruism. It can often simply feel good to help someone else, even if you get nothing tangible in return. This is a biological fact, as far as I'm aware. Incredibly crude approximation: some situations that appear as [empathetic helper +0, receiver +3] on the surface, might in reality be [empathetic helper +1, receiver +3]. There is a ton of complex…

Have you thought that perhaps things like emotions, both empathy and revenge have evolved to emulate Copycat / Copykitten play styles?

That is, I don't think they're missing from the simulation. Rather, the simulation shows why those things exist.

Re: The Evolution of Trust

#70

Post by brudgers »

carapace wrote: post #45
brudgers wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The premise of the replacement is that poorest adopt the strategy of the richest and is premised on this being the right thing to do even if the change is from always cooperating to always cheating. In some ways the description of replacement rather death is a more explicit example of the premise underlying the simulation that cheating is morally/ethically/rationally justifiable. The underlying moral/ethical theory b…

The "reward" is an unspecified scalar value. You are casting the terms of the model into "poor" and "rich". It's a mathematical model, not an ethical one.

'Cooperation' and 'cheating' and 'mistake' are not mathematical terms. They are part of moral/ethical/rational frameworks. The realm in which the simulation is supposed to provide insight is moral/ethical/rational. Moral/ethical/rational conclusions are the point of the website.

If the point is just mathematical, then limiting interactions to one and cheating is the best strategy. The simulations assume autonomous decision making on the part of the agents, that's what provides insight into human behavior why considering the moral/ethical/rational premises of the simulation are relevant when evaluating what the simulation shows.

Post reply on HN