Tough but Fair beats Always Being Nasty

 

The Games People Play.

Whoa, the games people play now

Every night and every day now

Never meanin' what they say now

Never sayin' what they mean.

If people are playing games, what is the best strategy for winning those games?

One of my favorite discussions of the Prisoner's Dilemma from Game Theory is in the book Golem in the Gears by Pier Anthony.  The audio of that book can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhajFda83hQ.  The scene on the Prisoner’s Dilemma begins at the 8-hour 21-minute mark in that link.   It describes  how a strategy it calls "Tough but Fair", merely repeating tactics of your opponent from the previous round but otherwise always being nice, will be a winning strategy in the long run.  Tactically it will lose every match but will win the game. e.g. the war.  This same strategy was introduced as "Tit for Tat" by Anatol Rapoport, in which each participant in an iterated prisoner's dilemma follows a course of action consistent with his opponent's previous turn.  The Bible in Exodus would call this strategy “An eye for an eye”. The intent was not to say that  one should not retaliate, but that you one should not over retaliate, i.e. extract vengeance.  The intent behind the principle was to restrict compensation to the value of the loss. And vengeance is up to the Lord.

The law of retaliation, lex talionis , can be traced back to the Code of Hammurabi.   Most of the major religions, e.g. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, etc. promote this strategy. A return to this in our daily lives would honor these religions and be a winning strategy for us in the long run.