re: #145 Hecuba’s daughter

I haven’t read Sapolsky but have read other articles about the Prisoners Dilemma. It’s a fun game but its relationship to situations outside of the original premise are limited:
1. It’s strictly mathematical — no reward for being honest or punishment for doing harm. Just 2 actions each party can take with the identical matrix of payoffs; i.e. if A does Y and B does Z the results for A are the same as would be true for B if A did Z and B did Y
2. The payoffs are structured in such a way to encourage certain behaviors if parties engage repeatedly with each other. Different structures would lead to different results.

The whole premise is divorced from honesty, ethics, kindness, or the law. It assumes that both participants are in the same situation and respond to the same incentives. That is clearly not true in our current political world.

I bow to your superior knowledge of the game theory, I don’t know much. Would you contend that failure to retaliate is a winning strategy in our current dilemma?