Long Burn

The Prisoner's Dilemma

You and your partner in crime are put in separate jail cells. The choice is whether to rat out your partner or not. If neithier of you says a thing, each gets 6 months. If you defect and your partner doesn't, you go free and he gets 10 years (and vice versa). If you both defect, both serve two years.

I like this game's Groundhog Day, No Exit sensibility-- it captures a central element of human behavior: trust.

Computer scientists have tournaments where they let their programs play the game over and over again with the prize going to the best algorithm. The first time around a four-line BASIC program called 'tit for tat' won the tournament: if your partner defected last turn, you defect this turn, and if he or she didn't turn you in last time, then you do the same. However later programs were able to beat tit for tat. The problem is that the partners can get stuck in defect mode-- once trust is lost it can never be regained. A better strategy, shown by computer simulations, is 'hard love': usually tit for tat, but occassionally you forgive your opponent. Hard love starts by trusting your opponent, but it is also willing to punish defection in later rounds, and it uses a 1 to 5% chance of forgiveness.

The prisoner's dilemma comes up in Kim Stanley Robinson's book Forty Signs of Rain. The main character is from California and is stuck working in Washington DC. He hates east coast drivers, defectors, every last one. They cut you off in trafic and punish infringements. Everyone ends up doing time. On the left coast on the other hand drivers are enlightened and have faith in their fellow drivers-- they let people merge and make space if you signal a lane change. I drove in LA for years and its true-- there's a lot of traffic, sure, but everyone does a pretty good job of getting along, an easy sentence.

I am reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. I can recommend it-- Dawkins doesn't pull his punches and he knows the terrain. The discussion is ratcheted upwards on every page. Dawkins argues convincingly that there is no need for God the Creator, and a God of the Gaps is on a slippery slope. A double blind prayer experiment showed no difference in the recovery rate of heart patients who were prayed for and didn't know it compared to those who weren't prayed for and didn't know it. Amazingly those who were prayed for and knew it showed a worse rate of recovery; the authors of the study say this might have been from 'performance anxiety': the added stress of not wanting to let the prayers down. The book forces you to be honest about what you believe. And so I wonder if there is room left for a personal God, and the one God I haven't seen Dawkins discuss is the God of the Human Spirit, working psychological miracles through faith, hope and charity, allowing us to trust, grow, forgive, love, overcome.

posted by Matt_J @ 11:00 PM