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 was linked before to an interesting thought game on the Prisoner’s Dilemma that re-frames it a bit differently and opens it up more for the different elements you talk of, both by repeating the process over several ‘rounds’, allowing for different approaches, and showing how certain behaviors will breed and encourage reciprocal behavior in some way.

The Evolution of Trust