Today's Keith

Revisiting The Prisoner's Dilemma

(keep Donald Trump's behavior in mind as you read thru this)

From +Plus magazine (this is the whole post):

Survival of the nicest?

One of the most puzzling aspects of human behaviour is cooperation, in situations where backstabbing and selfishness would seem to be more rewarding. From the point of view of evolutionary theory, the very existence of altruism and cooperation appear mysterious. The mechanics of evolution seem to imply that rugged competition is the order of the day; that, given an opportunity to benefit by cheating someone, or by defaulting on a deal, we will inevitably do so. Surely to do otherwise would mean relegation to the sidelines of the evolutionary game - and in that game, demotion means extinction.

In fact, as even the most cynical observer must admit, cooperation is rife in human society. Even if you sometimes despair of human nature, you must admit that the "dog-eat-dog" scenario conjured up by the phrase "survival of the fittest" doesn't bear much resemblance to life as we know it. So it must be that, from a purely selfinterested point of view, cooperation can actually be good for us.

Solitary confinement

To highlight this puzzle, consider the Prisoner's Dilemma, described in detail in Adam Smith and the invisible hand in Issue 14 of Plus. To summarise, this very famous paradox in Game Theory describes two people suspected of being accomplices in a crime. They are held prisoner in separate, non-communicating cells. The police visit each prisoner, and tell both that if neither confesses, each will be sentenced to two years in jail. However, if only one prisoner confesses, implicating the other, the one who confesses will get off scot-free as a reward, and the other, who didn't confess, will receive a punitive sentence of seven years. If each confesses and implicates the other, both will be sentenced to three years.

What should a prisoner do in this situation? Suppose the other prisoner doesn't confess. Then the best course of action is to confess, and go free. Even if the other prisoner does confess, it will be better to have done likewise - at least the sentence will be lower. Both prisoners will reason thus, so both will confess and end up serving sentences of five years - even though, if both had remained silent, both would have served sentences of only three years.

Second-guessing

If you think this dilemma is very far from your everyday life - after all, you are lawabiding and will never be thrown in jail! - think again. Every time you make a bargain, you are potentially facing the prisoner's dilemma. What is to stop you - or, more to the point, the person you are making the bargain with - from defaulting? Surely both of you will be tempted by the prospect of getting something for nothing, and afraid that if you are honest the other person won't be, and you'll get landed with the so-called "sucker's payoff" - getting nothing for something? It's all very well to say that "honesty is the best policy" but surely this is a luxury that only the civilised and comparatively rich can afford?

Well, the good news is that we are not dependent on the benevolence of others, as the prisoner's dilemma would seem to suggest. In fact, cooperation can spontaneously break out even among fundamentally selfish agents - provided you assume that people meet each other more than once, and can remember what the other person did last time they tried to strike a bargain.

To explore this sort of sitution, political scientist Robert Axelrod invented the game of "Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma" - Prisoner's Dilemma played repeatedly against the same opponent - and set up a tournament, inviting academics from all over the world to devise strategies. First Axelrod compared various strategies by pairing them and seeing who won; then he held a meta-tournament, in which there were many agents, each with its own strategy which it was allowed to modify in response to what was going on around it, for example if it saw that other agents had more successful strategies.

Over the long term, Axelrod discovered that selfish strategies tended to do very badly, as did foolishly generous strategies. Defecting encouraged others to defect; not punishing others for defecting only encouraged them to do so again. One of the most successful and stable (in other words, successful against many different strategies and in many different environments) was "Tit for Tat". This strategy involves cooperating the first time you meet another agent, and after that always repeating your opponent's last move. So if your opponent defaults on one turn, you punish them by defaulting on the next; if they cooperate on one turn, you reward them by cooperating on the next.

A slightly better strategy - because it avoids the possibility of getting trapped into long cycles of retaliation - is "Tit for Tat with forgiveness". This is Tit for Tat with a small randomised possibility of forgiving a defaulter by cooperating anyway. Forgiveness is particularly helpful if you introduce the possibility of misinformation into the game - that is, if moves are sometimes randomly misreported.

The submitted strategies varied in many ways - initial hostility, tendency to forgive or retaliate, complexity, how much past behaviour they took into account, and so on. No one strategy will always be best because how a strategy does depends on who the other players are - if you're playing against mugs, you may as well be a freeloader, and if you're playing against sharks, you may as well get your retaliation in first! And research into human behaviour is ongoing, with biologists, economists and mathematicians studying phenomena such as spiteful behaviour, altruism, and kin selection (generosity between close relatives, which is evolutionarily useful since their genes are similar). But Tit for Tat did well or best in Axelrod's tournament against very many different opponents - showing how cooperation could evolve using only the selfish mechanisms of natural selection.

That yellow-hilited paragraph sounds a little like Trump, especially in light of his recent "birtherism pivot", but other than the misinformation bit, has Trump ever shown the slightest inclination to forgive anybody but himself for anything?  The guy has said he's never even asked God to forgive him. 

Gotta remember one fairly important aspect of this mess. It's all well and good when we're talking about real estate deals and bargaining for some financial leverage with one of your business cronies, but it takes on a slightly different tinge when you throw in actual military options that include Nuclear Weapons.

Tit For Tat, motherfucker.  This Trump guy gets elected, and we're one randomly perceived insult on a bad hair day away from World War III.

Carlin 1971

Today's Podcast

Deplorables, Trump's Childcare Trickle Down Plan, The Worst Birther Day Ever for the media.

As always, be sure to throw 'em a little tip by going to Amazon thru their website link.

Today's Tweet

HuffPo:

The entire event promoting his hotel ― carried in it's entirety by all three cable news channels ― lasted more than 30 minutes. Trump proceeded to spend approximately 30 seconds blaming Hillary Clinton for inspiring his quest to find Obama’s birth certificate.

Ashleigh Banfield on CNN is completely fed up with Trump's "birther crap" 🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/4AvcEckaAb

— John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) September 16, 2016

So Trump did the usual politician thing - at least, the usual Trump thing, by inviting the inference that Hillary caused the problem, so he had to fix it.  It's classic - the arsonist taking credit for pulling the fire alarm.

It really was just a free ad for Trump's hotel in DC.  The thing went on for 30 minutes and there was nothing but a tour of the hotel and some pander-fawning of Medal Recipients, ending with Trump spending 30 seconds "renouncing" his birtherism bullshit. 

Finally - FINALLY - the Press Poodles are starting to get a little hip to the simple fact that they actually are the suckers Trump is playing them for, and that some of us have been trying to tell 'em about for years.

And yet, The Trump Scampaign® marches on.

Fun Facts: 
The cheapest room at the Trump DC hotel is almost $400 a night
The Penthouse is rumored to go for $100,000 per night, with a 5-night minimum
Of course, if you have to ask how much it costs, then you can't afford it anyway - so fuck off, loser.

Meet-N-Greet

America's youth should be encouraged to contact and engage with the people who want to run the joint. That way, they can get a sense of what those people are trying to do and help us all gain a deeper understanding of just how great the good ones are...

...and how terrifying the bad ones can be.

Always trust kids and dogs when it comes to dickhead detection - they are absolutely unerring.

Sustainability, Bitches

Gotta have a little balance.

Logical Fallacy Illustrated

False Equivalence

Today's Tweet

pic.twitter.com/Mzqp3ec5rY @cher

— Nicholas (@HMiglino) September 4, 2016

Today's Keith

.@KeithOlbermann explains what Hillary got wrong about her "basket of deplorables" comment pic.twitter.com/8VFv1KSrrO

— GQ Magazine (@GQMagazine) September 15, 2016

Today's Rant

Mr Paul Mooney

hat tip = Facebook pal DR

And whatever else you do, don't go watch Spike Lee's Bamboozled.

Today's Quote

"Calling a liar a liar isn't an opinion if you can prove it. That's what we call a fact. The idea that news network executives traded their balls for ratings, that's just my opinion." --Samantha Bee

Part 1

Part 2

Where To, Bub?

Hillary went out of her way to assure us that she's not dead.  Of course, we all know what a liar she is so I guess that means we'll have to stay home and let that orange Nazi guy win it.

 

Today's Olbermann

In the debut episode of his new series, “The Closer with Keith Olbermann," GQ's Keith Olbermann tallies the most outrageous of Donald Trump's offenses in what is now his 15-month assault on American democracy.

Watch this video on The Scene.

And here's the text version.

A Razor Blade In The Apple

Buzzfeed:

The secretive private legal system written into many international trade treaties is the epitome of a “rigged game,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren told BuzzFeed News. But it is not set in stone, she said. In an interview in her office on Capitol Hill, she outlined three steps that could get rid of it entirely.

This legal system, which empowers foreign businesses to sue entire countries for hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, was the subject of an 18-month investigation by BuzzFeed News published last week. Among the findings: Executives convicted of crimes have used the system to avoid punishment, and companies have used the mere threat of a lawsuit to gut a country’s laws.

Warren described a case, highlighted in the investigation, that she said “really jumped out in front and put the human face on what this obscure clause can actually do”: A court in El Salvador found that a factory had poisoned a village with lead, failing for years to take government-ordered steps to prevent the pollution. But by threatening to take the matter to this global super court, lawyers for the company helped it avoid a criminal conviction and the responsibility for cleaning up the community and providing needed medical care.

“The company that damaged so many people just gets to slip away,” Warren said of the case. “This is a reminder how the game is rigged.”

If there's something like "the other side" of this one, I haven't heard much of it yet. My main thing is that the ISDS thing wreaks of privatization and corporatocracy.  Too much power in too few hands.

Hillary has made some noise about swinging around in opposition to TPP, even tho' her buddy, Virginia Gov Terry McCauliffe says she'll swing right back once she's been sworn in - so we just don't know.

All the more reason to find out as much as possible about any given candidate's leanings on something like "Free" Trade.  Guess it's time to email Jane Dittmar on this one.

It might be nice if a Press Poodle or two got up on their hind legs and started asking real questions, specific to things like ISDS.

PS) Elizabeth Warren - please come to my house so I can hold you and pet you and call you George...

HRC's Episode

Some tweets:

hillary has pneumonia and is still campaigning 24/7 meanwhile my back kinda hurts so i ordered delivery 3 times today

— jomny sun (@jonnysun) September 11, 2016

Wait, so Hillary has PNEUMONIA and she's still campaigning as hard as she is? You realize how badass that is, right?

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) September 11, 2016

It shows her doing her best to grit her teeth and work hard even with pneumonia. And it's humanizing, relatable.

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) September 11, 2016

I'd rather they just come out and tell us what's going on. I think I understand that they don't wanna make her the center of attention in order to countervail the fact that Trump superimposes himself on everything in sight; and they believe they always have to protect her from the shit that everybody throws at her every minute of every day and blah blah blah - but she's gonna catch that shit either way, so I think she's better off if they stop trying so hard to be cute with it and just let her own it.

"Yeah - I tho't it was just the usual allergies that bother me this time of the year.  Turns out I have pneumonia.  And then I did a coupla campaign stump speeches and a fund-raiser or two, and a buncha other work-type stuff, and then I sucked it up on a Sunday and went to a 9/11 memorial and I started feeling really bad and I had to take a little break - because pneumonia, bitches.  Do ya think Presidents get to call in sick every time they feel a little funky?  I'm gonna do this job, and I'm gonna keep on doing this job, and they're gonna have to carry me out in a fucking box before I stop doing this job.  Hear what I'm sayin'?  Good - what else ya got?"

Today's Meme

Wow.Just.Wow

It just can't ever be about anything but Trump.

There's audio of Trump patting himself on the back for having the tallest building in Manhattan after the WTC fell! pic.twitter.com/vQFFcAibQz

— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) September 11, 2016

Listen For It

The next GOP rebranding is well underway.  Because they know they're gettin' their butts kicked and they have to salvage something.

"What The American People want..." Listen for it.




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 The Professional Left

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