Thursday, February 23, 2012

tit for tat

This phrase made me chuckle the first time I heard it for lots of reasons. I'm sure you can guess a few.  So it was a little difficult to grasp the nature of its meaning because of this comical nuance.  but I did and it is interesting enough that I feel i need to log my feelings about it.

This phrase was introduced to me by means of a phenomenon called "prisoners dilemma".  but more fitting an iterate prisoners dilemma.  when you find yourself in a situation where you are in direct competition with someone/thing else for someone/thing, you got yourself a prisoners dilemma.  BUT if this competition is a non-zero sum game, then you got yourself an iterate prisoners dilemma.

 (dammit I hate explaining things cuz I suck at it.  I know we should always try to strengthen our weak points but dammit I almost want to delete that pathetic explanation I just gave about this particular dilemma.  BUT i digress, the act of explaining things does in turn show how deeply you grasp said topic)  (but I am currently this me, so I will just assume whoever is reading this understands what "tit for tat" and "prisoners dilemma" phrases entail)

after being introduced to prisoners dilemma and the various strategies that have evolved from the things that have participation in it, I come to the understanding that the most effective in terms of long term payout is that of tit for tat, or in other words, always cooperate with your opponent unless it stabs you in the back, and if so retaliate with a stab in it's back.  (there are varying levels of forgiveness with this strategy as well, depending on the environment and amount of loss with each stab in the back.)

this makes sense and you can see the immediate use of this strategy everywhere around you.  business partners.  figs and fig wasps.  cows and farmers.  domesticated canines and canine loving humans.  Married people.  These all are relationships that are founded upon an initial mutual cooperation, but under certain circumstances much could be gained from a sudden jab into the heart of mutual honesty.

What has been bouncing around in my mind is us, as products of millions of years of evolution, at various points of our existence we were completely different from how we are today.  What if what we think are 100% "good", void of any selfish intent feelings like "love" and "empathy" are just tit for tat strategies that we began using millions of years ago.  what if the origin of love began when we realized that if we don't cooperate with each other we will never be able to procreate, and as we played the tit for tat game, it became apparent that it was more profitable to have more tit than tat.  this evolved to the point where we exhibit so much tit and so little tat in the game of "love" that we now view it as a pure tit emotion, and any expression of tat within is considered the opposite emotion.   HAHAHAHA!!!!!! this makes my head whirl!!!!!!

What other things in our lives, practices within our culture that we think are "good" are actually just high tit concentration tit for tat strategies?

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