But do you actually know that? I mean, in your evolutionary past, there were people alive who committed betrayals that they thought they had gotten away with. They didn’t, and those people are less likely to be your ancestors.
So people’s brains, presumably with circuitry tuned to follow TFT because their ancestors used it, warns them not to commit acts of betrayal that in reality they could get away with. So they commit less acts of perfect betrayal than they otherwise would.
Like most other instincts, it can be overcome with learned behavior, which is why people exist who do betray others every chance they get and get away with it.
The fact that people will sometimes get it wrong (predict they can get away with betrayal, but can’t) is not a problem. It’s really a balance of fitness question (in cases where there s high probability of getting away with a defection gain, vs small probability of getting caught. Consider that the waiter you don’t tip might just chase you out of the restaurant with a gun. Probably won’t though.) Evolution would still favour last-round defections in such cases.
I’m saying that in the past, if you committed a major betrayal against your tribe—they kill you. It wouldn’t even what you stole or who you raped, etc, it’s the fact that you were willing to do it against the tribe. So, even in last round cases where you might think you got away with it, the times that you fail to get away with it erase your gains.
Look what happens to powerful people in today’s society if they get caught with some relatively minor transgression. So what if a Congressman sends naked pictures of himself to potential mates, or coaxes a female intern to give him a BJ? But, in both cases, the politician was betraying implicit promises and social norms for behavior that the voters want to see in a person in elected office.
This might be true… If the punishment for defection is always very severe after getting caught, then even with a very low probability of getting caught, but a low gain from defecting, evolution would favour co-operating on the last round (or single round) rather than defection. But this means that others’ commitments to vengeance have transformed the prisoner’s dilemma to a non-PD, which is my explanation 2 in the original article. (Or explanation 3 if vengeance is exacted by the whole tribe, including members who weren’t directly injured by the original defection.)
However, this just shifts the burden of explanation to accounting for why we (or whole tribes) are vengeful to such an extreme extent. After all, vengeance is enormously costly, and risks injury (the condemned can fight back) or counter-vengeance (whoever kills the original defector risks being killed in turn by the defector’s surviving family, and then the whole tribe splits apart in a cyle of killing). And notice that at that point, the original defection has already happened, so can’t be deterred any more, and the injury-risking, potentially-tribe-splitting vengeance has negative fitness. The tribe’s already in trouble—because of the betrayal—and the vengeance cycle could now destroy it. So why does it happen? What selection pressure maintains such severe punishment when it is fitness destroying?
But do you actually know that? I mean, in your evolutionary past, there were people alive who committed betrayals that they thought they had gotten away with. They didn’t, and those people are less likely to be your ancestors.
So people’s brains, presumably with circuitry tuned to follow TFT because their ancestors used it, warns them not to commit acts of betrayal that in reality they could get away with. So they commit less acts of perfect betrayal than they otherwise would.
Like most other instincts, it can be overcome with learned behavior, which is why people exist who do betray others every chance they get and get away with it.
The fact that people will sometimes get it wrong (predict they can get away with betrayal, but can’t) is not a problem. It’s really a balance of fitness question (in cases where there s high probability of getting away with a defection gain, vs small probability of getting caught. Consider that the waiter you don’t tip might just chase you out of the restaurant with a gun. Probably won’t though.) Evolution would still favour last-round defections in such cases.
I’m saying that in the past, if you committed a major betrayal against your tribe—they kill you. It wouldn’t even what you stole or who you raped, etc, it’s the fact that you were willing to do it against the tribe. So, even in last round cases where you might think you got away with it, the times that you fail to get away with it erase your gains.
Look what happens to powerful people in today’s society if they get caught with some relatively minor transgression. So what if a Congressman sends naked pictures of himself to potential mates, or coaxes a female intern to give him a BJ? But, in both cases, the politician was betraying implicit promises and social norms for behavior that the voters want to see in a person in elected office.
This might be true… If the punishment for defection is always very severe after getting caught, then even with a very low probability of getting caught, but a low gain from defecting, evolution would favour co-operating on the last round (or single round) rather than defection. But this means that others’ commitments to vengeance have transformed the prisoner’s dilemma to a non-PD, which is my explanation 2 in the original article. (Or explanation 3 if vengeance is exacted by the whole tribe, including members who weren’t directly injured by the original defection.)
However, this just shifts the burden of explanation to accounting for why we (or whole tribes) are vengeful to such an extreme extent. After all, vengeance is enormously costly, and risks injury (the condemned can fight back) or counter-vengeance (whoever kills the original defector risks being killed in turn by the defector’s surviving family, and then the whole tribe splits apart in a cyle of killing). And notice that at that point, the original defection has already happened, so can’t be deterred any more, and the injury-risking, potentially-tribe-splitting vengeance has negative fitness. The tribe’s already in trouble—because of the betrayal—and the vengeance cycle could now destroy it. So why does it happen? What selection pressure maintains such severe punishment when it is fitness destroying?