The Prisoner’s Dilemma: The Key To Successful Civilization

It’s amazing what education can do for a civilization. So much pain and suffering could be avoided if the majority of people in the world could act based on the collective wisdom gathered thus far, rather than being pulled to and fro by our primal instincts.

One example of this is the prisoner’s dilemma. The experiment was designed to illustrate how humans interact with each other with respect to cooperation or defection (screwing the other person over). Here’s the idea: you and another person you don’t know are going to share a sum of money based on whether or not you want to help each other or try and be selfish.

Cooperation Rules

If you try and screw the other guy, and he tries to screw you (it’s prison, you understand), then you each only get $2. If you choose to cooperate and the other chooses to screw you, you get $1 and the other guy gets $4. But if you both choose to cooperate you each get $3.

Think about that for a second, and keep in mind that if you screw each other one person gets 4 and the other person 1 — for a total of 5. While if you cooperate you both get 3 — a total of 6. Two educated people would know this, but two ignorant sods would not.

Reality

This model maps astoundingly well to the world in which we live. Unfortunately, that world is full of ignorant sods. People fcuk each other up on a regular basis because they’re only out for themselves, all the while not realizing that if they’d just start being nice to each other life would improve drastically.

That was the most interesting point of the video: they actually asked a bunch of computer scientists to write computer programs designed to win at this game of Prisoner’s Dilemma. Some programmers submitted bots that ganked you at ever turn. Others were like Mother Theresa. Guess which type won?

The nice ones.

In fact, the one that did the best was a brilliant, cooperation-based system where it started out cooperating and then would reciprocate whatever the other person did. So if you screwed me then I’d screw you back, but as soon as you went back to being nice I would forgive you and go back to being nice as well.

For America’s sake, I hope the rest of the world is running that code.: