Civilization and the Iterrated Prisoner’s Dilemma
As a general rule, I try and avoid writing depression porn; for one thing it’s too easy, and for another it tends to turn into “excuse making” far too quickly. I didn’t become the man I am today by accepting my lot in life, or by blaming external forces for my problems. However: there is a fine line between blaming external forces and acknowledging them.
Heck; I wax poetical about Kurt Gödel all the time, and his claim to fame was a response to Bertrand Russell, who failed in his attempt to establish Formalism with Principia Mathematica – a problem which Gödel proved was unanswerable.
In other words, this post is going to be long on problems, and short on solutions. In my last post, I tried to tie a happy bow around things; I think that denies just how deep the problems go.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma
Source: Wikipedia.
I cannot overstate what a terrible, terrible thing the Prisoner’s Dilemma is. It is Objective Reality run amok. It is Cthulhu’s maw gaping for our souls. It is an eternal hall of mirrors squeezing in on you, until the glass shatters and tears through your eyes, and into your soul.
If you think you have a solution to the Prisoner’s Dilemma, then you don’t understand the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
The essence of the PD is this: Heaven is possible, but the sane men choose Hell. The sane man always and forever chooses Hell. Heaven – the “cooperator” – is nothing but a Unicorn Hunter, he is a total and utter fool. Perhaps his opponent is another Unicorn Hunter, and in that rare instance the two of them get to happily smear their feces on the wall, but nonetheless these are both Doves waiting for a Hawk to come along and eat them.
The above Matrix is a “gentle” version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, so perhaps you aren’t convinced just yet. In that case, I invite you to adjust the numbers until they’re sufficiently dire… or better yet, instead of comparing apples to apples, compare apples to oranges. Replace “1 to 3 years in prison” with “Sex Scandal versus Blackmail”, or anything else that strikes dear to your heart. The greatest tragedies ever written are fundamentally about the Prisoner’s Dilemma – Shakespeare’s Hamlet is nothing but the story of two decent and fallible men locked into such a struggle.
Peaceful Coexistence <-> Kingship
Revenge <-> Mutual Death
There are some plot twists, but those are the essential elements; and the tragedy is that you know how it’s going to end from the moment it begins.
“What – is there no honour among thieves?” you say – hearken! For you’re no longer talking about the Prisoner’s Dilemma; you’re talking about the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma.
The Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma
The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a one-off which presupposes absolute ignorance between the two parties. Prisoners A and B have insufficient data to make a Bayesian assessment of one another – this is why they’re Prisoners in the thought experiment, to emphasize that they have no civilized assumptions about one another. “Civilized Assumptions” are what happens when you iterate the experiment – rather than running it a single time, you run it multiple times. Over and over, Prisoners A and B have to decide what they’re going to do, whether they’re going to develop trust between one another, or whether they’re going to blade each other for an easy payday. This is where you start to see civilization occurring.
There’s a large body of research on the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, but what it boils down to is this: ‘normal’ people (meaning: white, university-educated males) will rapidly develop a system of proportional punishments during the IPD. “Each time you defect, I’m going to defect three times in a row.” While it’s unlikely that you’ll ever see a perfectly cooperative game of IPD (if you do, it’s probably because you didn’t explain the rules properly – or, because the real IPD game is happening outside of your gaming circle) what you’ll generally find is that the basic rules of proportionate punishment – which players discover all on their own – creates an environment which is primarily cooperative.
“A-ha!” you say, finger pointed at my face. “Civilization is an emergent behaviour!”
But I only shake my head, and hand you the moist towelette that I’ve been storing in my wallet for precisely such an occasion. “You’re missing two things.”
“What’s that?”
“Who imposed this 100-game iteration structure on these two players? And what happens on turn 98?”
The IPD and Marriage
I already argued that the IPD is the same thing as civilization, and I think it’s no stretch to argue the marriage is the basis of civilization. Without marriage, you don’t have paternal investment in children; without marriage, you don’t have surplus male labour; without marriage, you don’t have the driving force which convinces 10,000 men to coexist peacefully, rather than murdering one another to build their local harems.
Some other time we’ll explore the impacts of porn, sexbots, and political lesbianism, but for now let’s just admit that for every bachelor-entrepreneur you have 99 layabouts, and that for every Ayn Rand you have 999 prostitutes. The exceptions are not the rule; without married couples, there is no society.
There are numerous Prisoner Dilemma-style questions which make up our world, but without marriage the rest of them fall apart; it is the most foundational. Break it, and you break the lot of them… and remember: marriage is just another sort of Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Healthy Marriage <-> Alpha Fucks/Beta Bucks
Soft Harem <-> Single Mother/Herb
The above is a vast over-simplification – obviously! – but it puts the whole matter into perspective. How are you supposed to trust the other person? “I want to try a glass of milk before I buy the cow,” is just as reasonable as saying, “I want some commitment before I put out.” Neither are conducive to trust without some overweening commitment… some sort of Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma…
But what happens on the 98th turn?
Well, what do you think happens on the 98th turn?
The 98th Turn
When you set people up on an IPD experiment, and you replace “years in prison” with “dimes”, you start to see some raw humanity at play – some raw power dynamics, some raw Objective Reality. And somewhere around the 98th turn is where the defection begins.
The first 30 turns are spent establishing the rules – “If you defect, I’ll defect,” et cetera. The next third of the game is spent playing by those rules, and only occasionally testing them to see if they’re still in place. The next third of the game… that’s where it becomes Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: the choral music’s playing, nukes are all over the map, and the Space Race is going full force – what good is loyalty to past alliances when Armageddon threatens?
Up until about 1800 or so, we were playing a Perpetually-Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma: Cave, Cave, Deus Videt! None of us escaped His wrathful gaze. Even your final move on your deathbed was being witnessed. But at some point in the early 19th century we decided we didn’t need Him anymore. “God is dead!” Thus Spake Zarathustra: and we carried on as before, living with Pagan dignity in the ruins of a Christian world, acting as we had always acted, and only occasionally asking “Should we really feel bad about doing X? This new philosophy of Utilitarianism certainly seems scientific, and it says that we’ll be okay.”
For about two centuries things held together reasonably well; we amended the rules here, and relaxed the requirements there – but surely a bit of market inefficiency was worth a general liberating of human happiness, wasn’t it?
Markets, utilitarianism, quantifiable, heuristical living… *sigh*
Without a center, the orbits can’t hold.
ͼ-Ѻ-ͽ
We aren’t at the 98th turn yet… but we’re getting close. I can already hear the choral music starting. 95th, perhaps?
The closer we get to the end game, the greater the percentage of those who will defect; and as the number of defectors rise, the cost of trust rises as well. As both of these work in unison, a positive feedback loop ensues, driving the cycle faster and faster, until…
…we return to Hobbes’ state of nature, and the one-off Prisoner’s Dilemma becomes all that we are. Savage sociopaths – the lot of us.
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I know I promised no happy ending, and if I were a better man I would leave it here… but there are still some words to be said. Earlier I asked two questions, and I only answered one of them.
“Who imposed this 100-game iteration structure?”
Or – in our case – who will impose the structure of civilization once more? Jack Donovan‘s Barbarians, perhaps? Can we trust that some man – some vir – will impose slavery upon the slave-like masses, to teach them how to be civilized once more?
And what, then, of the Paladins? Shall we lose all faith? Accede to the wonts of the tide, and disappear like the Unicorns?
Or – even in a world without trust – can we still find a struggle that’s worth fighting?
I don’t know much about trust, but I know a noble death when I see one. 
You’ve missed one of the most troubling things about the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. If everyone knows that the game will end on the 100th turn, rational people don’t wait until the 98th turn to start defecting.
On the 100th turn, there is no reason to cooperate because defecting will give better results no matter what the other player chooses. Since it’s the last turn, there is no fear of retribution. On the 99th turn, a rational person knows that if the other person is rational he will defect on the 100th turn. Thus, the first person can’t really be punished for defecting on the 99th turn. The punishment will occur on the 100th turn regardless of what is done on the 99th turn (so it isn’t really a punishment). Thus, defecting becomes the logical course of action on the 99th turn. This logic can be applied backwards to each preceding turn such that defection is the logical course of action on turn one and every turn thereafter.
The only time the iterated prisoner’s dilemma yields cooperation is when the total number of turns is unknown. This is generally okay for civilization since we don’t really know when the last turn will be. We continue to cooperate. You can see this in action when someone has decided to ‘bug out.’ Whether it’s a job, a business relationship, a marriage, or general adherence to criminal law, once someone decides that the days of the agreement are numbered, they are likely to stop honoring it.
Great stuff, Aurini. I mean that. However, since I’ve been reading and listening to you, I think I see something disturbing at your core. This will be dark commentary, and of course you can analyse me from my work in return.
Do you embrace the Aurini brand noble man’s burden? That would make your a relativist, your greatness dependent on the continued existence of the dull masses as dull masses, like a Jew with neither Judaism nor goyem. Prisons require a tax base, sovereignty, an order. How do you get order? You have honor with your in group and you kill rivals until you have a society all yours, reaping rewards from cooperation the whole time in practical perpetuity. If you have a guilt complex (a la AssymetricalWarfare), and one made a doozy with your very high IQ, there is a solution. Change your mind. How did Alexander solve the Gordian knot? No dilemma. He choose his sovereign frame, not the knot tier’s frame. How did James T. Kirk win the Kobayashi Maru test? The universal rules are not what’s in your heart. The working rules are the laws of nature. If your nature requires you to be ‘honorable’ for the sake of evolutionary dead ends as your judges by being your measure–and what gold standards they are–that does not bode well for you, my friend.
“Can we trust that some man – some vir – will impose slavery upon the slave-like masses, to teach them how to be civilized once more?”
Imposition =/= Teaching, which is why the human garbage (relative to material technology requirements) are forever dangerous (unless technology goes back), and not meant to be around forever (per progressive evolution that gave you your excellent and noble mind in the first place). Maybe you can pull a Jurassic Park and cultivate noble Stone Age people to inherit the earth once again. The human shit will not support freedom, thank goodness it works that way, will not support a civilized order, except as manure for the Tree of Liberty. You want to be a patriot in the one fashion where a dime-a-dozen sheeple will perform just as well as you? “No poor dumb bastard ever won a war dying for his country.” The Tree of Liberty requires stewards to shovel the manure, and that is where you outclass the garbage. You ought to be able to identify what garbage is. Me thinks you might be an expert on the Madonna-Whore complex based on a masculine version adapted to a code of chivalry. If you wrestle pigs, you all get muddy, but the pigs already were. The Tree of Liberty at record heights will be a better legacy than Sacrificial Hero Brother’s Keeper. You may have comments on that comment. It might make a great post. Playing away from the crux of societal issues is a popular pastime for the mentally weak. This is where we excel.
MGTOW and PUAs are all about defecting, one reason being lack of trust. And look at the collapse of marriage and the dearth of children. For a noticeable number of women, it’s take, take, take and men are supposed to give, give, give. So we’re at the end stage of the Game.
So far, the best solution startegy to monte-carlo gaming of the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemna has proven to be forgive exactly once.
Funny how Christian concepts and objective reality often merge.
In Praxiologistic monte-carlo sims, the other winning group uses the “libertarian” strat: Do the right thing, but never forgive an aggressor.
In mixed groups, the survivors are generally 80% “forgive once”, and 20% “libertarian”.
Which has led me to personally adopt “forgive exactly once”, even though I’m a libertarian atheist.
At the end of the day, we’re all Frodo on the road to Mordor- the road ahead is fraught with peril, save for a few besieged sanctuaries that can’t shelter you forever, and both failure and success will probably cost you your life. So, then, how is one supposed to survive on the road to that Mordor which is Modern Civilization, carrying the One Ring of degeneracy and decadence?
The answer is simple: find your Sam. In a world where people don’t want to think about the problems facing them, when they have plenty of opportunities to turn around and go home, the prospects are discouraging. But that one person, that Sam, will never leave your side, even when they realize that following you is a death sentence. And I don’t think it’s presumptuous to suggest that most men’s Sam will be another man.
Yes, Sam marries Rosie Cotton after the War of the Ring, but it is his devotion to Frodo, not a desire to see Rosie again, that keeps him going. If he had been sustained by his desire for Rosie, he would have turned back at Rivendell. It was his undying loyalty to Frodo that saved the day, in the end.
The relationship between Frodo and Sam brings up another point: it is a hierarchical relationship. Frodo is Sam’s social and intellectual superior. Both of them are aware of this, but Frodo does not treat Sam as a slave. Rather, Sam is a friend. A lower-ranking friend in his service, yes, but a friend nonetheless. Frodo does not treat Sam with condescension or contempt, and Sam does not treat Frodo with resentment or abject servility. They are friends, one is simply higher up on the food chain than another. Neither questions it or tries to achieve some sort of false equality.
“Cthulu’s”
Cthulhu’s
“Priosners”
Prisoners
@Reality Doug
Just as the Berserker bottles up his precious rage for when it is most useful, I hold the Righteous Anger in check until such time as it’s needed. Don’t worry, it’s still there – I’m just waiting for a good target.
@Sean
That is an excellent metaphor – especially in light of this post by Laura: http://unmaskingfeminism.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/my-precious-feminism/
The only way to destroy the ring is to use the ring. Refuse its burden, and you’ll be cut down by the orcish hordes – just another ‘traditionalist’ with a porn-star daughter. Embrace its power, and you become a degenerate like the rest of them. But use it sparingly… and you might just make it all the way to Mount Doom.
@Bhruic – thanks, as always.
Correcting the typos messed up the 2×2 matrices.
Oh I dunno, Aurini. There are any number of people that form meaningful alliances in business and personal life and they do fine. I worked for one company with a management team you couldn’t trust further than you could throw them and they closed the doors two years after I got there. The company I work for today is very honest and open about alliances. We ask our suppliers and customers what the term ‘alliance’ means to them – and off we go.
That depressing scenario you describe is a closed system. Out here in the real world – If I can’t get along with you…I will get along with some one else and vice versa.
Certainly within a closed system, the ramifications of the Prisoner’s Dilemma are frightening – we would extrapolate back from the final turn and determine that defecting every round would be best for us, because the possibility of being betrayed and “defeated” is the worst outcome for us with our broken human minds.
But luckily neither is truly a closed system. Street justice heavily punishes defectors when they do get out, and God will punish the civilization defectors even worse. In my opinion, that’s the only thing that gives us any hope. If God did not exist, every human being on planet earth would be running around defecting at every decision point.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a limited mathematical tool. That has limited use in society.
But you mentioned the New Barbarians. *Sigh, a product of romantic 18th Anglo-Saxon Romanticism. Though the spirit of kinship and clan loyalty is a step in the right direction.
Consider La Cosa Nostra, one good read would be Bound by Honor: a Mafioso’s Story by Bill Bonanno. See the Italian Mafia was based on the old Mediterranean Patron-Client system.
Hey man, glad you are still writing. I don’t do it anymore, as I felt like I was repeating myself and said what needed to be said. I am glad you are keeping up the fight, esp. the whole gamers gate thing, attacking that dumb slut anita, etc etc. Just waiting out the end man, watching the world burn as the craziness only increases.