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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)

#21

Post by chryton »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #7
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…

I despise these contrived experiments and think they should be ridiculed. Cooperation evolved in humans because: a. Our young are helpless, and take over a decade to reach sexual maturity. Those who cooperate to raise the young have more descendants. b. Cooperation is a sexual fitness signal because of point a The end. Edit: fix a word, thanks.

You explain why but not how. Is it a spandrel from some other evolutionary trait that eventually became something important? Is it a process of higher-order brain functions that we have? Is there an alternative method that brought this about (stuck in a proverbial room with only a fruit basket and no way out)?

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

#22

Post by nostrademons »

baddox wrote: post #17
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).

> I'm fairly certain that cooperating to raise your own offspring is still considered selfish behavior. Why? Because it leads to more descendants? In that case, the premise is a tautology.

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.

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

#23

Post by Danihan »

AznHisoka wrote: post #16
Danihan wrote: post #3

The benefits of cooperation can't be modeled so simplistically, since the concepts of both long-term reputation and long-term retribution need to be taken into account.

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

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

#24

Post by ChrisSD »

nostrademons wrote: post #22
baddox wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm fairly certain that cooperating to raise your own offspring is still considered selfish behavior. Why? Because it leads to more descendants? In that case, the premise is a tautology.

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?

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

#25

Post by nostromo »

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).

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.

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

#26

Post by fizwhiz »

nostrademons wrote: post #22
baddox wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm fairly certain that cooperating to raise your own offspring is still considered selfish behavior. Why? Because it leads to more descendants? In that case, the premise is a tautology.

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?

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

#27

Post by scj »

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 normal, and the overworked snowplows have made a snow bank too tall and wide to see around in your car. The only way onto the street is to turn blindly and hope that either no one is coming, or that they see you in time to stop.

Your salary is $x/hour, and it would take two hours to manually trim the snowbank to the point where you can see above it. Thus, it would cost $2x to remove the snowbank (assuming you could work overtime and earn the money).

Each party makes a choice if they would shovel the bank alone, with help, or not at all. If they both do it, they both lose $1x in OT wages. If one does it alone, $2x. But if neither do it, the hazard remains and each party rolls a 6-sided die. Anybody rolling a 1 loses $kx (where k is larger than x), and no longer have a car to participate with.

That covers one day. It will take 7 days for the city to remove the snow bank if no one else does. Any parties with a car will repeat this 6 additional times until the snow bank is removed.

Then rank the dollars lost and award real world prizes for the top positions. If there are 10 people and the top 5 get the exact same prize, shoveling might become attractive (through co-operation, as it is extremely likely at least one of the two parties per trial will be eliminated).

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

#28

Post by lisper »

Note that the SD is not actually a dilemma. The PD is a dilemma because you ALWAYS do better for yourself in any given iteration by defecting no matter what your opponent does. In the SD, if your opponent defects, you still do better for yourself by cooperating. So of course people will cooperate more under those circumstances. The only thing left to argue about is what the payoff matrix for real-world situations looks like.

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

#29

Post by jerf »

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).

If you want to think clearly about these issues, you need to be very careful to define "altruistic" and "selfishness" for yourself properly. It seems to be a common temptation to assume as you implicitly do that an altruistic or selfishness-free act must net harm at all time scales the person so acting, but if you try to map that definition back to the real world, you find that it doesn't isn't as useful a model as you'd like for the behaviors you care about. I have phrased that very carefully; it is not as if it is an objectively wrong definition, because it's pretty hard for such a thing to exist. It's just that it's not exactly what we're trying to figure out here.

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

#30

Post by rhizome »

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-...

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