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'Snowdrift' game tops 'Prisoner's Dilemma' in explaining cooperation (2007)

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Re: 'Snowdrift' game tops 'Prisoner's Dilemma' in explaining cooperation (2007)

#31

Post by jerf »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #4

These experiments are nonsense. Firstly, from the article: “In principle, natural selection predicts individuals to behave selfishly” is a faulty premise. Obviously humans who cooperate to raise children to sexual maturity will have more descendants. Secondly, in these simulated games it seems likely to me the participants would be, at least to some extent, randomly selecting cooperate / defect because a potential mo…

"while our worldview is "everything is a competition" that is how we will interpret what we see."

If you think that the idea that competition is rife is merely a product of our world view, stop competing for a while and see what happens. You may have to think carefully about what all constitutes "competition"; you come from a very long line of survivors and there's a lot of competitive behaviors that come naturally to you. Squeezing them all out may take some work.

Competition is a second-order effect; the primary cause is the limited nature of desirable resources, and the ability of resources consumers to step up their rate of consumption exponentially in the face of an increase of resources. Unless you can prove that resources are not limited here and now, you're going to get competition.

Re: 'Snowdrift' game tops 'Prisoner's Dilemma' in explaining cooperation (2007)

#32

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

rizzom5000 wrote: post #14
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #4

These experiments are nonsense. Firstly, from the article: “In principle, natural selection predicts individuals to behave selfishly” is a faulty premise. Obviously humans who cooperate to raise children to sexual maturity will have more descendants. Secondly, in these simulated games it seems likely to me the participants would be, at least to some extent, randomly selecting cooperate / defect because a potential mo…

>> “In principle, natural selection predicts individuals to behave selfishly” is a faulty premise. I'm fairly certain that cooperating to raise your own offspring is still considered selfish behavior. Something like taking resources from your offspring to give to someone else would be more in line with the definition of selfless (e.g. taking food from your own malnourished child to give to another child).

> I'm fairly certain that cooperating to raise your own offspring is still considered selfish behavior.

Cooperation is selfish.

I think this strengthens my point about how the dominant worldview colours our thoughts.

It could be argued that even a sports game, the epitome of competition, requires magnitudes of order more cooperation in order for it come about that the game can be played.

But then it could be argued that it is the selfish desire of the individual to want to play that drives the cooperation to compete.

This reminds me how all(?) Wikipedia articles can lead to philosophy.

Re: 'Snowdrift' game tops 'Prisoner's Dilemma' in explaining cooperation (2007)

#33

Post by jerf »

rhizome wrote: post #30
scj wrote: post #27

I just invented a different snowdrift game, modeled on something that happened to me a couple of years ago. You live in a townhouse next to another family that shares a driveway which turns onto a medium traffic density one-way street (there are traffic lights a few hundred feet away which control flow). Gaps in traffic tend to exist around when the lights change. The frequency of snowstorms this year is higher than…

Is there an option to install a fisheye mirror so people in the driveway can see perpendicularly down the street? https://www.reflectionproducts.com/images/View-car-200-feet-...

First, the point of these discussions is explicitly to stay within the lines. We all know there's a billion elaborations that you could make, but those are different problems. Worthy and interesting problems, even, but different problems.

Second, there isn't always a great option for that, no.

Re: 'Snowdrift' game tops 'Prisoner's Dilemma' in explaining cooperation (2007)

#34

Post by scj »

rhizome wrote: post #30
scj wrote: post #27

I just invented a different snowdrift game, modeled on something that happened to me a couple of years ago. You live in a townhouse next to another family that shares a driveway which turns onto a medium traffic density one-way street (there are traffic lights a few hundred feet away which control flow). Gaps in traffic tend to exist around when the lights change. The frequency of snowstorms this year is higher than…

Is there an option to install a fisheye mirror so people in the driveway can see perpendicularly down the street? https://www.reflectionproducts.com/images/View-car-200-feet-...

Frozen ground, with an equal snowbank on the other side (it is a one way street, so you only care about one of the banks).

If you had installed it in prior years, it'd probably be buried (the real life snow bank this is based on was approximately 6-7 feet tall).

Re: 'Snowdrift' game tops 'Prisoner's Dilemma' in explaining cooperation (2007)

#35

Post by nostrademons »

ChrisSD wrote: post #24
nostrademons wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "individual" in evolutionary game theory is generally considered the gene, not the human. A lot of facts of life - like raising offspring at all, or death - make zero sense if you consider the actor to be a person, but make a lot of sense if you consider the actor to be a gene.

I would agree with that but it doesn't appear to be what Kümmerli is saying: > “In principle, natural selection predicts individuals to behave selfishly,” Rolf Kümmerli, co-author of the study, told PhysOrg.com. “However, we observe cooperation in humans and other organisms, where cooperation is costly for the actor but benefits another individual. That is clearly referring to the human, no?

I think that's the "faulty premise" that TheSpiceOfLife is referring to. He's saying that building a study to explain cooperation between humans is modeling a phenomena that's a social construct anyway, when the real question is "what genes lead to behavior that ensures the survival and propagation of those genes?" Natural selection operates on the genetic level, not on the human level, so Kümmerli made an error by trying to inject natural selection arguments into a model where the primary actors are humans.

Re: 'Snowdrift' game tops 'Prisoner's Dilemma' in explaining cooperation (2007)

#36

Post by nostrademons »

fizwhiz wrote: post #26
nostrademons wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "individual" in evolutionary game theory is generally considered the gene, not the human. A lot of facts of life - like raising offspring at all, or death - make zero sense if you consider the actor to be a person, but make a lot of sense if you consider the actor to be a gene.

> A lot of facts of life - like raising offspring at all, or death - make zero sense if you consider the actor to be a person, but make a lot of sense if you consider the actor to be a gene. Care to elaborate?

Raising offspring presents a huge cost to the parents, but every living organism does it because it's the only way to ensure that your genes will propagate on to the next generation after your death. Those that don't are washed out of the gene pool, and irrelevant after one lifespan.

Similarly, death is obviously bad for an individual - it's the termination of your existence. However, it frees up resources for new individuals who may be better adapted to conditions of the time. Species where individuals rarely die may see the whole species die off at once as they get outcompeted by other species whose individuals are better adapted to the environment.

(There's a societal analogue as well here: historically, societies that hold tight to tradition and preserve the internal firms & institutions within them end up being conquered, en masse, by more competitive societies where the individual firms within them either adapt or die.)

Re: 'Snowdrift' game tops 'Prisoner's Dilemma' in explaining cooperation (2007)

#37

Post by glenstein »

jmull wrote: post #12
glenstein wrote: post #5

I don't want to be gratuitously negative here. So let's start with the fact that it's great to have a model of cooperation as something out there to be improved upon, or refuted, or defaulted to in the absence of obviously better models. However, if the idea is that a model is good at "explaining" cooperation by setting up a hypothetical where people choose it a lot, then I guess the "best" model would make people ch…

> However, if the idea is that a model is good at "explaining" cooperation by setting up a hypothetical where people choose it a lot... I don't think that's the point. I think the point is that SD is closer to the average case for cooperation than the PD, so it might be a better tool, in general, for talking about and reasoning about cooperation. (Both PD and SD have the nice property that they are simple and straigh…

The article suggests that a higher percentage of people choosing the "cooperate" option means that the model in question does a better job explaining. Explaining is the article author's chosen word. But maybe you are right that the author is missing the point, I'm not sure.

But even that's a tough sell for me, since the ideas you suggest as substitutes for the term "explain" are things I would put under the umbrella of what is meant by explaining.

Re: 'Snowdrift' game tops 'Prisoner's Dilemma' in explaining cooperation (2007)

#38

Post by majewsky »

nostromo wrote: post #25
rizzom5000 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> “In principle, natural selection predicts individuals to behave selfishly” is a faulty premise. I'm fairly certain that cooperating to raise your own offspring is still considered selfish behavior. Something like taking resources from your offspring to give to someone else would be more in line with the definition of selfless (e.g. taking food from your own malnourished child to give to another child).

Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene is the most fitting way of framing this conundrum. Spending time and energy raising one's children isn't selfish of the parent as an individual. But it's selfish from the view of their genes.

Yeah, but if the definition of "selfish" is so broad that it includes basically all of human behavior, it's not useful anymore.

Re: 'Snowdrift' game tops 'Prisoner's Dilemma' in explaining cooperation (2007)

#40

Post by majewsky »

Danihan wrote: post #23
AznHisoka wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I wish life was just like that Black Mirror episode with reputation scores for everybody. Nobody wants to cooperate because there is hardly any long term reputation to worry about when interacting with most people (ie cutting off that car in the highway, being rude to that stranger next to you)

There are reputation scores for everyone: net worth and credit score. ;p

A good reputation score would start out at +/- 0 and not punish you for being the lone righteous guy in an otherwise immoral neighborhood.
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