I've recently thought of a good metaphor for an accurate representation of how I view / take on life and people in general. I kinda felt like writing it down and writing it down and sharing it... so yeah. I guess that's what a forum is for.
The metaphor is Prisoner's Dilemma. If you don't know what that is, it's a famous game-theory scenario in which there are two prisoners who were accomplices in a crime, who are being interrogated separately. They both are confronted with the same deal: if they "defect" - meaning they rat out their partner, they will get 5 years of prison. If they don't defect, but their partner does, then they will get 10 years. If neither of them defects, they will walk free because there isn't enough evidence to convict. So while cooperating gives the best result, this only happens if you trust the other prisoner, because you can also get the worst if the other prisoner betrays you. If you don't trust the prisoner, you defect and take the lesser of two evils.
If you make this kind of game repetitive, and keep score by tracking the number of years you go to prison, then strategy enters into the game. In my first computer science course, we had to write a procedure for what to do, before the entire class's procedures were paired off one on one, with score being kept track (by a program, of course).
At first, mine was one of the best. But after running the program once, the teacher would remove the ones who did worse. After doing this only a couple times, mine quickly dropped to the bottom and was eliminated. Eventually, the ones who started at the middle of the pack rose to the top and arrived at a stalemate.
This was because in those procedures, they did something very simple: in the first round they cooperated (meaning they didn't defect). From then on, they checked to see whether the other person defected or not the last round. If they defected, they defected. If they cooperated, they cooperated. Since there were a lot of bad procedures that were rather random at first, they were more middle-of-the-pack procedures, since they sometimes cooperated when the other defected. But once those other procedures did bad in general, they quickly dropped out, allowing the better ones to rise to the top as they encountered such procedures less and less.
You might see where this is going by now in terms of philosophy. I'm kind of tired of writing so I'll keep it short. Basically, I believe in trusting other people by default - and only mistrusting them when they give me a reason to. Because although I will probably be betrayed often enough, it will be worth it in the end. This is more of a general view than a rule, though.
Discuss?
