Reddit Reddit reviews The Evolution of Cooperation: Revised Edition

We found 13 Reddit comments about The Evolution of Cooperation: Revised Edition. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

Books
Self-Help
Success Self-Help
The Evolution of Cooperation: Revised Edition
Check price on Amazon

13 Reddit comments about The Evolution of Cooperation: Revised Edition:

u/zipzapbloop · 17 pointsr/politics

Here's a whole book about this kind of stuff. I wouldn't say it's more evolved, it's just a strategy that can emerge in populations, and it's a strategy less likely to prove successful and stable over time, so while it can be a great strategy for a run of short terms gains, if broadly adopted, the strategy destroys the environment from which agents who would employ it can extract gains for themselves at all.

You hit on something really important. Axelrod demonstrates that part of what sustains cooperation is repeat interactions in populations. When there's a low enough chance of repeat interaction, then a "cheating" behavior can seem rational. It's rational in a narrow sense (if all you want are short terms gains), but it's less rational in another sense -- that if enough people do it then the collective adoption of that behavior destroys the very environment from which cheaters extract gains. In other words, by behaving in that way, over time, you won't be able to behave that way anymore AND the environment you'll find yourself in will be less stable and predictable (two things you need if you want any hope for making plans for the future).

The cool news is that once cooperation takes hold and some threshold proportion of the population it has "a ratchet", as Axelrod puts it. Cooperation is robust once it gets going. Nevertheless, groups of agents (a society) can develop conditions under which the robustness of cooperation can be challenged (too many people cheating, low repeat encounters, too many people fear for the end of the world) such that it can fail.

u/andrewcooke · 6 pointsr/philosophy

axelrood's book is a classic - anyone who wants the same in more detail would enjoy it hugely.

going in, i thought i probably knew what the site was going to teach me, but one big new idea that really hit home was the importance of reliable communication and how that ties in to fake news.

u/hindu-bale · 6 pointsr/IndiaSpeaks

> I see what you are getting at -

I'm unconvinced of arguments involving game theory and utilitarianism. Although, it's easy to latch on to them. Going down a path of "articulated objectivism" in a world dominated by new atheists touting Science as above morality and philosophizing, there isn't much else to fall back on. So I understand why one might want to base their arguments such.

My own break from this approach involved (1) reading "The Evolution of Cooperation", which is as Game Theory and Dawkins as it gets, with its thesis based almost entirely on computer simulation, then simultaneously reading (2) Greg Mankiw's piece on "When the Scientist is Also a Philosopher", which to me was largely an admission from a top Economist, then finally (3) reading Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" that showed me the possibility of an entirely alternate perspective. Particularly impactful were his citing of Fehr & Gachter's Altruistic Punishment in Humans, his case about Kant and Bentham being autistic - implying they weren't socially capable of understanding how people actually functioned in social settings, and his takedown of the New Atheists including Dawkins.

> in part rhetorical :)

Yes, in part, the other part being sincerely open to being convinced otherwise :) .

> I think there is so much more that ails the legal system today

What do you believe ails the legal system?

To me, Dharma is at the least evolved for India, in comparison to Western canonical law. Dharma is still well embedded in our cultural consciousness, we grow up on stories involving Dharma. If you're thinking in terms of Schelling points, Dharma should be an obvious solution to many of India's societal woes. It is at the least far more intuitive for us Hindus. Western legalese on the other hand is mostly about being "technically correct" "as per the law". Maybe it works for the West, probably because it bakes in their Schelling points, but I don't see how it's good for India.

Of course I'm not suggesting overhauling legal vocabulary, but instead, dumping vocabulary altogether. Being technically correct is not the same as being correct. Subjective judgements should be acceptable. The Western legal system, for all its rhetoric about living "by the rule of law", never got around subjective judgement of judges.

u/samwaterbury · 4 pointsr/Economics

Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century by Frieden is a wonderful and not too long read. It doesn't require tons of economic theory that you won't know from a few intermediate economics classes.

It basically provides a riveting history of international economics and trade over the past century, which is a critical thing to understand for anyone interested in economics. I highly recommend it. Other recommendations:

The Logic of Collective Action by Mancur Olson

The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod

u/AlwaysUnite · 3 pointsr/vegan

Hmm I look at it this way. Indeed morality is simply a product of the human mind, and this is exactly what makes it objective. And I don't mean like "I think this is right, therefore it is". It is bigger than that. Morality is real, natural and objective the same way water is wet and planets are things. There isn't anything wet individual H2O molecules. Yet through their interaction a property we call 'wet' is presented. The same goes for planets. They are really just big balls of elementary particles. But it doesn’t help anyone to think of it this way. There are still laws like Newton’s law of gravitation that describe how planets work. This is the idea behind reductionism. While things are really made out of ever smaller parts (until you hit quantum mechanics), it is still useful to describe reality at higher levels of generalization.

For morality the same works in two steps (ending the line of reduction down at the human individual). Imagine two strangers meeting each other. They both need medical attention due to a civil war. Now the other could provide the medical attention but also pose a threat. When these people interact one of two things can happen. Either they cooperate or they oppose each other (cooperate/defect in the Prisoners Dilemma as it is called in game theory and economics). Now when people oppose each other nothing really changes compared to when they didn't interact with each other. All participants are still selfishly trying to achieve their own goals regardless of anything or anyone else. But when they cooperate something new is created. A unit of several individuals that works together towards a common goal. This unit of people is similar to water being wet. But this is not morality yet. This is more like selfish cooperation.

The difference lies in the fact that humans can do one thing that water molecules can't. And that is reproduce, both sexually and intellectually (by changing other people’s minds they in effect let you copy a part of you, namely your thoughts, into them). This gives rise to a second level of effects due to evolutionary theory. We find that there is another more general way to look at human behaviour that can be described using scientific laws just like planets can. Not only do people sometimes cooperate, but whenever they do they also generate profit. In fact they generate more profit compared to when they had worked alone. The only additional route to this is in a perfectly competitive market, but as anyone who has taken econ 101 may remember there are at least 12 separate conditions that need to be fulfilled in order for this to work. Making cooperation the dominant mechanism by which people become rich.* Because cooperation=profit there is a force acting towards individuals, small groups of people and societies to cooperate more with each other. There is ample evidence for this (see for example 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Morality is therefore (at least in my mind) the tendency for more cooperative societies* to grow and flourish while societies which exploit, oppress, oppose each other and their members are retarded, stagnant or collapse.

From this follows what I think of as objective morality. In societies where no cooperation at all takes place society is destroyed, civilization collapses, and humanity is reduced to a collection of wandering individuals constantly trying to survive and kill each other (basically an unending version of the Purge but more extreme). In society where everyone cooperates to rationally find the best solution to bring everyone happiness, individuals live longer and the amount of suffering, pain and death is minimized/eliminated. I would call the first Evil and the second Good but really I don't have to because humanity as a whole has already done this by. Words are defined by the majority of opinions after all (Luckily regardless of what name we give this phenomenon the effect remains real).

Incidentally these 12 conditions basically never occur so whenever someone says “the market will solve everything” I recommend to take a very very close look at what they are actually proposing.

**In the sense of the prisoners dilemma not the communistic/socialistic sense. The communists didn't in fact base their society on the community but on the communist party. And everyone else got kicked into the dirt.

u/CassandraCubed · 2 pointsr/raisedbynarcissists

Oh, I like you! What you did falls into the Robert Axelrod The Evolution of Cooperation territory.

u/Truth_Be_Told · 2 pointsr/science
u/rightfuture · 2 pointsr/futuristparty

Understanding their dynamics is very important. studying other collective systems should teach us lessons about how they work. (this is something I have spent a lot of time on).

I highly recommend starting with the [Evolution of Cooperation](http://www.amazon.com/The-Evolution-Cooperation-Revised-Edition
/dp/0465005640) by Robert Axelrod.

The Complexity of Cooperation goes into how these dynamics can be modeled to create a better society.

There are plenty of resources and examples in society that prove that we can engineer a better society. This is our chance to do so.

I encourage anyone who want to discuss the specifics and methods to keep up the discussion as they wish. I am glad to go into some of the details as anyone wants to.

u/PsychRabbit · 1 pointr/math

I can't recommend Axelrod's "The Evolution of Cooperation" enough. Hopefully it's close to what you're looking for. It touches on the biological, but much of the book builds on simulations of abstract games.

u/majorbigtime · 1 pointr/askscience

The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod might be something you would find interesting.

u/todu · 0 pointsr/Bitcoin

> Such power could be used against the interests of the system just as well

That's why I wrote that I believe that miners will choose mutual cooperation (and collectively punishing defectors) with only a 75 % probability. I'm not 100 % certain. I as a test subject am not a researcher. All I did was to share my anecdotal observations from memory. Someone who has studied game theory for many years should spend some time analyzing the miners' game and share their conclusions and opinions about probable current and future miner behavior regarding 0-conf tx's.

With that said, I'm not appealing to authority either. Nobel prize winning people (in economics[1]) such as Paul Krugman for example are fully capable to misunderstand how Bitcoin works. But a person who is not a Nobel prize winner (like I assume all of us Bitcoin enthusiasts) is also capable of misunderstanding how Bitcoin works. And as a very skilled programmer, so are you.

That's why universities spend a lot of time, money and effort funding such experiments even today. It's difficult to predict human behavior from theory alone.

My point was that many games tend to evolve a cooperative behavior where defectors are punished. And I think that Bitcoin mining is one such game and my guess is that I'm 75 % likely to be right about that. But again, I'm self-taught and by no means any kind of expert of game theory.[2] But neither are people who work on the Bitcoin Core project (such as yourself), and certainly not Peter Todd.

[1]:

Yes, I know that there is no actual Nobel prize of Economics, but you know what I mean.

[2]:

I've watched that Russel Crowe movie, read two books and participated as a test subject for 5 hours in total. And that's about it. Total amount of time spent and experience, probably just one month.
But enough to see when people who are claiming absolute "facts" are likely out of their element and probably wrong.