Cooperate, cooperate / Defect, defect

I have written about the Prisoner's Dilemma several times on this blog over the years. The famous thought-experiment holds a useful life lesson for us all. I came across this excellent version (link below), using a coin game in place of the harder-to-understand dilemma put to the prisoners, but essentially working the same way.

It's you vs. another person. Do you cooperate for mutual interest, or do you try to cheat the other player? More importantly, in the long term - which strategy works best?

[Click through to the game, and have a go for yourself. See what works and what doesn't. It's worth spending a bit of time to understand it.]

Once you've done that, time for reflection. The strategy that is clearly victorious is the one whereby you start off trusting the other person, and continue cooperating with them until the very moment in which they do the dirty on you. Then you break off. Then you carry on retaliating - until the very moment in which they relent and go back to cooperation. In this version of the game, this is called the 'copycat' strategy. It depends on your copying of what the other player does, in the very next round. No need to initiate or think. Nothing smart about this strategy - there are others which depend on you trying to work out the other player's strategy (assuming they have one).

The results are clear - if you carry on cooperating even when the other player is abusing you, you're a sucker and deserve to lose, you deserve to be punished. And if you are abusive you will not get far either; people will work out that you play dirty and will start to hit back.

The 'copycat' strategy is essentially the one deployed by the US in the Pacific War. The Japanese bomb your fleet? You take the war to them. You hammer them at sea and from the air. Hard. Eventually, they surrender. Then you help them rebuild, grow their economy. But watch that they don't defect on you again.

The 'sucker' strategy? Appeasing aggression. Hoping the defector will come to their senses and change behaviour, unbidden. To quote Lenin again; "if you plunge in the bayonet and feel nothing but mush, keep pushing. But if you push in the bayonet and come across steel - stop."

So cooperate, cooperate / defect, defect is the way to go.

Would that it were so simple.

Define 'defect' and define 'punish'? Here is the problem. Is the fact that a friend of yours voted for Brexit or Trump or PiS a 'defection'? Is it reason to 'punish'? And what form should that 'punishment' take? If someone parks their car across the pavement so you can't push through with a wheelchair - is that reason to scratch the car - or is leaving a polite note under the windscreen enough? A house in your neighbourhood continues to burn crap, harming air quality for everyone. Call Straż miejska? Or heave a brick through their window and continue to do so until they switch to a cleaner fuel?

A thought-experiment that is binary in its policy-response choice (cooperate or defect) comes face-to-face with the messiness of reality, composed of an infinite number of shades and nuances. Here, that crucial word 'judgment' (a word so lacking in Polish! - osąd doesn't come close) comes into play. Response needs to be proportionate, balanced and fair; one needs to be alert to infractions and instances of the other player defecting - even when no binary border has been crossed.

This is Putin's strategy - avoid crossing the red lines (such as invading a NATO member), but pushing all the time through social-media trolls, agents of influence and useful idiots for a similar outcome - buying venal politicians and entire political parties, splitting Western societies. The West needs to take tougher action to send the message to Putin that this behaviour is utterly unacceptable. The balanced response would be to step up sanctions against Russian oligarchs who are in Putin's pockets and their assets, while at the same time launching an unattributable cyber-war against Russian IT systems. Cooperate. cooperate / Defect, defect. And keep on hitting back until the very second Russia relents. And should it then renege, return to hitting back. 

And so on until the end of time - the copycat strategy is the one that works best - something proven by millions of rounds of simulation.

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