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To: tortoise
The Golden Rule is simple, "Do unto others as you would have done unto you"

Good. Progress.

Yet it took you three posts and hundreds of words to answer my simple question, when it would have to both our benefits to deal with it simply and directly in the first post. How does this square with the tenets unveiled in the Iterated Prisioner's Dilemma concerning the benefits of mutual cooperation?

160 posted on 11/18/2003 6:06:00 AM PST by Tribune7 (It's not like he let his secretary drown in his car or something.)
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To: Tribune7
How does this square with the tenets unveiled in the Iterated Prisioner's Dilemma concerning the benefits of mutual cooperation?

Given two or more agents of roughly equivalent intellectual capacity (a required mathematical qualification, but generally true for the human population at large), one can prove that an agent can optimize the benefit to themselves over the long run by trying the optimize the benefit they give to others through their interactions. In other words, the optimal behavior is to try to benefit others, as this will maximize the benefit you receive from the interactions as well. Cooperation in good faith is a utility maximizer for all involved parties.

Related to this, the optimal way for interacting with defectors is to employ retaliatory defection in like kind. Punishment or due consequences, in other words.

So to sum up the major mathematical consequences of IPD in more colloquial vernacular: Always cooperate and be fair to your fellow man by default. If those who you interact with abuse this for their own benefit, you must exact retaliatory consequences for their misbehavior.

(This is the problem with the gov't social welfare system at large. It is a clear violation of game theory for the purported results it is trying to achieve i.e. the system was designed in a fantasyland where mathematics doesn't apply. Our system does not deal with defectors appropriately at all, which generates a necessarily sub-optimal outcome.)

182 posted on 11/18/2003 11:04:29 AM PST by tortoise (All these moments lost in time, like tears in the rain.)
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