The simple and best way to live your life.
WARNING – this article was written without the help of AI and ChatGPT. If you are sensitive or offended by poor grammar and/or the spelling of a 7-year-old, please consult a physician or simply move along. However, even Chat GPT and the rest of the soulless AI programs out there would agree with the below message. Not that I care, because I don’t care if my car, vacuum or phone like or agree with me – just do your job and shut the F*** up.
Ok – Onward and upward.
Would you rather be right and win in every area of your life (especially on Highway 37!!!) yet happiness will always elude you in the end, or would you be willing to cooperate and try and create win/win scenarios for all? But to make sure we don’t homogenize a life strategy with a Northern California “Just love everyone” bias (hey NorCal – maybe it’s time to put the bong down).
This new life strategy also includes the following warning – don’t be a pushover.
This column contains the secret to success in this lifetime not because my limited brain says it is but because the math of the universe pencils it out as the best plan. Math of the Universe! Its all in the numbers.
What makes it even better is it’s the simplest strategy for us all. THE SIMPLEST. Again , that’s not my riddled brain saying that because since my brain is now made up of Swiss cheese and relentless sound echoes from the ancient pong video game. Its the simplest based on the math of Universe Principles.
People, trust me on this, we don’t change much once we get to adulthood (at age 59 I am anxiously awaiting my arrival into adulthood!). Also, given my new Swiss cheese brain, it’s my number one strategy for the remaining years on this planet, unless I see a shiny object in the street which I will then retrieve but not by jaywalking!
Without further ado, I bring you my new life strategy – Tit for Tat and we will start with a brain easer.
Brain teaser: The Prisoners Dilemma.
Two bank robbers pull a bank job together. The cops nab them, but without enough evidence to convict them they need a confession. And they know both robbers are unlikely to talk, since if neither implicates the other, the cops can keep them in jail for only 30 days.
So they put the two in separate cells.
They go to the first prisoner and say:
“If you rat on your partner and he stays mum, we’ll let you go and he’ll do ten years. “
“If you both rat on each other, you’ll both do eight years.”
Then they go to the second prisoner and say the same thing.
The first prisoner thinks it over.
“If he rats on me and I don’t rat on him, then I lose big-time. If I rat on him and he doesn’t rat on me, then I win big-time. Either way, the smart move is to rat on him. I’ll just hope he’s a sucker and doesn’t rat on me.”
The second prisoner reasons the same way.
So they rat on each other, and the cops get their two convictions.
If the prisoners had cooperated, both would have gotten off easy. Instead, the rational pursuit of self-interest has put them both in a world of pain.
Tim quote – Or what we call Monday at work.
That is the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It is the most famous puzzle in the scientific field called game theory, the mathematical analysis of strategic interactions between rivals. The puzzle was invented in 1950 by two scientists.
Enter fate.
Robert Axelrod, professor emeritus in U-M’s Ford School of Public Policy, the Department Chair of Political Science and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale, encountered it as a young man in the 1960s. But in the fall of 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis turned his attention to international relations.
The problem of conflict between powerful actors, whether in the cloakrooms of Capitol Hill or in the global Cold War, remained very much on his mind. It was crazy, he thought, that millions of lives hung on the calculations of two players on a global gameboard. Maybe he could use math to make some small contribution to a solution. Were there conditions, he wondered, in which powerful rivals could move past mutual assured destruction toward mutual cooperation?
Could you crystallize those conditions in a mathematical model? Could you somehow weed out all the noisy factors of history and emotion to find insights on the choices that lead to peace or war?
“To me,” he would write later, “the Prisoner’s Dilemma captured the essence of the tension between doing what is good for the individual and what is good for everyone.”
Yet as he read the writings of experts on the Prisoner’s Dilemma in graduate school, he had grown frustrated. “There was no clear answer to the question of how to avoid conflict, or even how an individual (or country) should play the game.”
In 1977, the two ideas came together. He imagined a Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament waged by lines of computer code. Then he invited experts in game theory to submit their strategies.
Just maybe, he thought, some contestant would play the Prisoner’s Dilemma in a way that showed a path out of the trap of self-interest.
Game theorists wanted to do more with it, and they wanted something closer to the real world. In everyday life, from business to politics to diplomacy, selfish actors — “egoists,” in game-theory lingo — compete not just once but often. They get to know each other and act on that knowledge.
So the gamers began to play what they called the iterated (meaning repeated) prisoner’s dilemma. Here the match between the prisoners is staged again and again, like kids playing rock-paper-scissors.
A contestant gets points for each match-up — low points if you cooperate and your opponent betrays you; high points if you betray them and they cooperate; medium points if you both cooperate (or what I call the Bay Bridge! Just stay in your goddam lane people) and your scores are tallied over many match-ups.
You can’t communicate with the other player. But you do learn their moves. So game by game, if you pay attention, you can try to figure out how they act and use that knowledge to your advantage (or what I call the married life…just a joke dear Lynnie -the master of tit-for-tat but to be fair I have helped her develop the “fire back or this will never end” these past 18 months)
So how do you win?
Its a game where the Winner-Take-it-All strategy is not the best strategy. In the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, as Axelrod writes, “the interests of the players are not in total conflict. Both players can do well by getting the reward for mutual cooperation or both can do poorly by getting the punishment for mutual defection… So unlike in chess (or dinner with the in-laws.), in the Prisoner’s Dilemma it is not safe to assume that the other player is always out to get you.
“In fact…the strategy that works best depends directly on what strategy the other player is using”
Lets say that again folks – In fact…the strategy that works best depends directly on what strategy the other player is using.
Read this last line while playing the song “That’s’ life” by Frank Sinatra
That’s life (that’s life)
That’s what all the people say
You’re riding high in April, shot down in May
Axelrod reached out to experts in game theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma. He invited them to submit entries and explained the rules:
— Each contestant would submit lines of code in either FORTRAN or BASIC, the era’s main computer languages. Each submission was a “decision rule” — a program that chooses cooperation or betrayal on each move, based on knowledge of all the opponent’s moves in the game so far. (Or what I call the parking lot after Sunday mass as a teenager – “Wait – didn’t we all just wish each other peace be with you inside the church??)
— It would be a round robin, with every contestant matched against every other contestant in 200 instances of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Each “decision rule” would also be matched against its own twin and against a program called “Random,” which betrayed or cooperated at random.
— Contestants could not communicate with each other.
— Points would be awarded in each match-up as follows: Three for mutual cooperation; one for mutual betrayal; five to the player who betrays when the other player cooperates.
When it was over, each player’s total points would be tallied and a winner declared.
One by one, 14 entries arrived in Axelrod’s campus mailbox. They came from game-theory practitioners in psychology, economics, political science, mathematics and sociology.
He bundled them up and walked them over to the University Computer Center on North University.
He had to wait overnight while the entries were processed and the University’s mainframe chugged through its work.
The next day he went over to pick up the results. He did the tallies, stared at them, checked them. Then he sat back in some astonishment.
He had expected the winning strategy to be at least as complex as the super-sophisticated skeins of code that typically won in computer chess tournaments.
But the strategy with the highest overall score in his Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament was the simplest one submitted. FOLKS – LETS REPEAT THAT. THE SIMPLEST CODE.
The winning “decision rule” contained just two instructions:
- In the first match-up, cooperate.
- In every match-up after that, do what the opponent did in the preceding match-up.
Cooperate immediately after they cooperate. Betray immediately after they betray.
Tit for tat. – MY NEXT TATTOO FOLKS! Although the brains in the family ” Hi Lynnie” mentioned to me it might not be a great idea to put a tattoo that includes the word tit in it.
It had been submitted by a mathematician and social scientist named Anatol Rapoport. His victory in a game of cold strategic calculation was remarkable in part because he was best known as a pioneer in the field of peace research. He was deeply engaged in game theory and made important contributions to the field. But he also challenged game theorists to heed the role of conscience in strategic decisions.
Wait, what’s a conscience? I think that’s the part of my brain that got hit by the car)
From 1955 to 1970 he had been a professor at Michigan. In disillusionment over U.S. policy in Vietnam, he had moved to Canada, where he joined the faculty of the University of Toronto.
Later, Rapoport told Axelrod he didn’t much care for the Tit for Tat strategy. It was a little harsh for a peace researcher. But he had wanted to see how it would do.
It had done very well. But Axelrod figured some bright game theorist was bound to beat it with a more sophisticated decision rule.
So he organized a second tournament.
He placed ads in magazines for computer enthusiasts and he offered more information. He told prospective competitors that Tit for Tat had won the first tournament, and he offered his analysis of why Tit for Tat had done well and others had done poorly. He was setting up Tit for Tat with a big bull’s-eye on its chest (or what I refer to as gym class in middle school)
The second tournament drew 62 entries from the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Norway, Switzerland and New Zealand, including professors in computer science, physics, economics, psychology, mathematics, sociology, political science and evolutionary biology.
The winner: The peacenik Anatol Rapoport, playing Tit for Tat.
“What…again?” Axelrod asked himself.
Tit for Tat had fought off clever and certainly more complex competitors. To name just a few, there were:
— “Tester,” a sneaky decision rule that scouts the territory for the soft-hearted, exploits perceived weaknesses, but retreats to Tit for Tat when it encounters a tough response. (What I call a first date.)
— “Downing” (named for its creator, Leslie L. Downing, an authority on the psychology of extremism). The strategy is meant to figure out the behavior of its opponent, then adapt to that behavior to achieve the best long-term score. Sounds super-smart — but it came in 40th.
— “Tranquilizer,” which tries to lull competitors into repeated cooperation, then slams them with betrayals. (Paging my brother Matt as a teenager).
— “Friedman,” brainchild of an economist, a tough decision rule that is never the first to betray, but once it’s betrayed, betrays in turn on every remaining move. It came in 52nd. (Hello long term relationships)
Why had Tit for Tat done so well? And what did it mean?
Tit for Tat won because it was nice.
That was Axelrod’s term for Tit for Tat’s behavior. To be nice in the Prisoner’s Dilemma means never to be the first to betray a rival.
But Tit for Tat was not a wimp. It did not turn the other cheek. If struck, it struck back. (What we call the Boston Way. See – this article is already bringing together cooperation of different cultures already, NorCal and Boston – love everyone but strike back if they mess with you).
Then it forgave, or was ready to.
Be nice. Be ready to forgive. But don’t be a pushover.
Axelrod, on being a pushover, “Turning the other cheek has its problems, because it actually encourages the other player to take advantage of you if you do too much of that.”
After careful analysis and more testing, Axelrod moved toward a conclusion that turned on its head an age-old suspicion of philosophers and kings — that selfish human beings, whether acting alone in a bar or in great aggregations, are likely to wind up in a state of war.
In the measured, undramatic language of a political scientist, Axelrod puts it this way “The analysis of the tournaments indicates that there is a lot to be learned about being too competitive, not being forgiving enough, and being too pessimistic about the responsiveness of the other side.” (Or what I called family dinner as a kid).
Axelrod argues, under the right conditions it is entirely possible for independent actors, each acting in pursuit of their own interests, to evolve toward a state of cooperation in which all can thrive.
The implications reach into practically every sphere where humans operate.
Axelrod’s analysis suggests that cooperation is possible when people follow four rules:
- Avoid unnecessary conflict by cooperating as long as your opponent does;
- If your opponent betrays you without provocation, respond in kind — once;
- Then forgive the betrayal and cooperate again;
- Be clear and predictable. That is, always follow steps 1, 2 and 3, so your opponent comes to know how you act and can plan on that basis.
“The most fascinating point,” he would write, “was that Tit for Tat won the tournaments even though it could never do better than the player it was interacting with. Instead it won by its success at eliciting cooperation.”
In other words, the encouraging thing about Tit for Tat was not that it was good for itself. It was that it was good for everybody.
True side note not important to this story but funny as F***. I once got picked up by the PoPO because as a 12-year-old I was walking with two of my friends in the breakdown lane of highway 80 (Don’t judge, it was the fastest way to the movie theatre! Remember when kids got to play unsupervised?) A state troper stopped and we all tried to sprint up the hill and over the guardrail to escape. My friends got away but the copper grabbed me by my hoodie and pulled me down into the cop car. He took me to the station as a 12 year old and tried to sweat me out. “Give me the name of the other two boys.” Ha Ha, I said nothing. He put me in a cell and this dayif I see either of those two old friends, drthay buy me a free drink).
Ok, so who is with me? This is my new focus for every day – TIT FOR TAT!!!