Two grim-trigger strategies are playing the iterated prisoner’s dilemma over a noisy telephone line. One mishears the other as saying “defect”, and they switch from both always cooperating to both always defecting.
So you’re saying two people, in a closed system, were able to influence the other to cooperate but are no longer able to, and “status” is the ability to influence, and ability to influence has been lowered?
If so, I think in this case “ability to influence” was for environmental rather than social reasons. The words on the line describe how the environment will react to an individual’s cooperation/defection.
I see status as more ability to influence or resist influence for social, non-environmental reasons—if you have a super-laser-of-doom-and-evil on the moon pointed at the Earth, you may have influence, but not status.
Maybe I have something different in mind when I say “status”. To the extent that an agent’s treatment of an opponent is based on some sort of persistent state, rather than on the opponent’s local behavior, I would say that that state is a form of status information. (Thus, one can have a status with a grim trigger, but not with a tit-for-tat.)
In humans (and I conjecture in approximately-winful strategies generally?), status tends to be one-dimensional, with one end eliciting “do nice things for this person” behavior, and the other end eliciting “do mean things to this person” behavior.
Two grim-trigger strategies are playing the iterated prisoner’s dilemma over a noisy telephone line. One mishears the other as saying “defect”, and they switch from both always cooperating to both always defecting.
I’m missing the connection.
So you’re saying two people, in a closed system, were able to influence the other to cooperate but are no longer able to, and “status” is the ability to influence, and ability to influence has been lowered?
If so, I think in this case “ability to influence” was for environmental rather than social reasons. The words on the line describe how the environment will react to an individual’s cooperation/defection.
I see status as more ability to influence or resist influence for social, non-environmental reasons—if you have a super-laser-of-doom-and-evil on the moon pointed at the Earth, you may have influence, but not status.
Maybe I have something different in mind when I say “status”. To the extent that an agent’s treatment of an opponent is based on some sort of persistent state, rather than on the opponent’s local behavior, I would say that that state is a form of status information. (Thus, one can have a status with a grim trigger, but not with a tit-for-tat.)
In humans (and I conjecture in approximately-winful strategies generally?), status tends to be one-dimensional, with one end eliciting “do nice things for this person” behavior, and the other end eliciting “do mean things to this person” behavior.