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comment by Said Achmiz (SaidAchmiz) · 2019-05-11T19:51:49.406Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Meta: please re-post the text of link posts whenever at all possible, especially when they’re quite short, and double especially when the original is on Facebook!

Edit: There are many obvious reasons for this, but here’s one out of a half-dozen I could name:

On the linked page, I cannot select any text to quote and respond to it!

Replies from: quanticle
comment by quanticle · 2019-05-11T20:21:47.712Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Here's the post text. I was able to copy/paste it from Facebook, through some combination of running Linux, running Firefox, having AdBlock and not being logged in to Facebook:

A lot of people like to use the prisoner's dilemma to justify being shitty to other humans they personally know. I think think is a dumb analogy, at least for First World, relatively affluent adult life, because the original PD doesn't let you say "Hey, wait a minute, my game partner is an asshole who keeps defecting, I'm out of here".

That's why creating avenues of escape for people who don't have that luxury is so important to me. Entrapment is one of the most insidious parts of abuse, because of course you're going to come up with a counter-asshole strategy if you have to keep playing with an asshole. But most of those strategies have a cost of emotional guardedness and alienation that can make it tough to get along with genuinely good and nice people.

A better lesson from the PD? The winning strategy is always, always, always dependent on the strategies of your other players. It's really hard to juggle many wildly different strategies at once. Keep it simple. Pick a strategy that synchronizes well with itself, go and find people running the same strategy, and make that your people.

comment by Said Achmiz (SaidAchmiz) · 2019-05-11T21:00:11.193Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thanks to quanticle [LW(p) · GW(p)], I can now quote the linked post…

A lot of people like to use the prisoner’s dilemma to justify being shitty to other humans they personally know.

I have never seen anything like this—could you say a bit about what this is like?

comment by quanticle · 2019-05-11T20:26:43.527Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

From the post:

A lot of people like to use the prisoner's dilemma to justify being shitty to other humans they personally know.

Can you post a specific example of someone using the prisoner's dilemma to justify being shitty to someone they personally know? One of the preconditions of the prisoners' dilemma is that the prisoners don't know one another very well (else, otherwise, they'd have come up with some kind of prearranged strategy). You see this with real prisoners and real gangs: they often flow along family and social lines, precisely because you can rely on your brother or a childhood friend when you've both been arrested, in a way that you can't with a relatively unknown stranger.