Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/no need to argue/prisoners.dilemma

Text File | 1994-06-30 | 28KB | 550 lines

------ COPYRIGHT HEADER: PLEASE INCLUDE AT TOP OF DOCUMENT ------
------------------ IF YOU ARE RETRANSMITTING  -------------------

ASCII Electronic Copyright (c) 1994 by Barry Krusch

This document may be (re-transmitted) by (any person, group, or
organization) to (any other person, group, or organization) in
(ASCII ELECTRONIC form only) via (any electronic mode or media,
including modem, storage on a BBS server, CD-ROM distribution, DAT,
Syquest, E-Mail, LocalTalk, Ethernet, FTP, ISDN, floppy disc, or
any other electronic mode of transmission) without (financial
compensation to Barry Krusch), provided that (no words are added,
substituted, rearranged, omitted or otherwise altered, other than
for exclusively personal use) and (that no hard copies are made,
other than for exclusively personal use). This right does not
extend to documents saved in a format other than ASCII ELECTRONIC
form.

NOTE TO USER: The purpose of retaining copyright is to insure the
textual integrity of the following document.

------------------------------------------------------------------

                   THE PRISONER'S DILEMMA

        (an excerpt from a draft of the book
              THE 21ST CENTURY CONSTITUTION)

---------------------------------------------------------
NOTE TO THE READER

This ASCII version of the draft has unfortunately lost all
ootnote references, and formatting.  However, the central
material remains the same.

---------------------------------------------------------

Surely no country has taken the concept of individualism as far as
America.  Watch a film made in Hollywood, be it the Western,
Detective, or Science Fiction genres, and you will typically be
watching a film in which the hero stands alone against his or her
antagonist (e.g. Die Hard, Rambo, Aliens, High Noon, etc.).  In
America, books with titles like "Looking Out for Number One"
appeal to an aspect of the human psyche that, in this country, has
reached new heights: the need to have one's point of view, wishes,
and desires fulfilled.  This would perhaps be a legitimate view
were one's self-interest something that could indeed be known.
However, as Henry Hazlitt pointed out in his book A New
Constitution Now, this is not necessarily the case:

Men do not act in accordance with their interests; they act in
accordance with their illusions.  To know what one's real
interests are is an intellectual feat of which few men seem to be
capable. 'If all men acted from enlightened self-interest,' as
Bertrand Russell has put it, 'the world would be a paradise in
comparison with what it is.'

As we will see later on in this section and later on in this book,
this was one of the most significant problems facing the Framers
when they sought to convince the country to adopt a New
Constitution:

Happy will it be if our choice should be directed by a judicious
estimate of our true interests, unperplexed and unbiased by
considerations not connected with the public good.  But this is a
thing more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected.
The plan offered to our deliberations affects too many particular
interests, innovates upon too many local institutions, not to
involve in its discussion a variety of objects foreign to its
merits, and of views, passions, and prejudices little favorable to
the discovery of truth.

This phenomenon, naturally, was and is not confined to America:
virtually everyone is addicted to a form of short-term thinking
which declares that "what's good for me now" is good.  This
problem was originally described in 1832 by William Forster Lloyd,
a professor of political economy at Oxford University. As Lloyd
found, since herd animals are seen as wealth, cattle-owners have a
short-term interest in increasing the size of their herds.  Yet
when the cattle graze on common pasture, an "indefinite increase
in the size of the herds sooner or later produces a number of
animals that is far beyond the biological 'carrying capacity' of
the pasture."  As Hardin (1985) stated, "the basic problem of the
commons is . . . psychological; the consequences are ethical,
economic, and political. The theory is based on the concept of the
'economic man,' that is, a person whose major motive is self-
interest."  Hardin referred to the consequences of this
psychological impediment to progress as the Tragedy of the
Commons, which he formulated as follows:

"Imagine yourself as a herdsman . . . when the total population of
herd animals has just reached the carrying capacity of the land.
Suppose you have a chance to acquire ten more animals.  Suppose
also that you are in complete possession of the facts -- that you
understand carrying capacity and the dangers of transgressing it.
Should you, or should you not, add ten more animals to your herd?
Since the additional animals are (by hypothesis) ten more than the
carrying capacity, all your animals will have a little less food
per capita next year than this.  So will everyone else's animals.
Even so, you expect a net gain from the acquisition, for this
reason: the gain is all yours, but the loss (from transgressing
the carrying capacity) is shared among all the herdsmen.  Your
share of the loss is only a small fraction of the total.
Balancing your gain against your loss you decide to take on ten
more animals.  In economics this is called a rational decision.
To behave otherwise would be to behave irrationally -- in the
short run.
Every other herdsman in a commons must, if rational, reach the
same decision -- not only this year but in every succeeding year.
In the long run this kind of behavior produces disaster for all,
as overgrazing turns semidesert into desert.  Even if you
understand completely the disastrous consequence of living by the
rules of the commons, you are unable to behave otherwise.  The
rules pay you to do the wrong thing.
As a good citizen you might refuse to add to your herd, but what
makes you think every other herdsman would also be a good citizen?
. . . As selfish and rational exploiters prosper at the expense of
the public-spirited, envy will cause some of the latter to join
the 'rational' decision makers in their ruinous behavior.  What
might begin as the selfish rationalism of a few, ends in the
corruption of the many."

Everyday examples of this phenomenon are found in cases of
societal overpopulation, traffic jams, fishermen's use of mile-
long "nets of death" to increase their profits from fishing, the
failure to conserve energy at home, not taking the time to
separate one's trash for recycling, etc.  Lloyd's observation that
people do not act in accordance with their long-term interests
turned out to be a very telling one, and one that grew
concomitantly in importance as society progressed.
An issue of such critical importance deserved further study, and
further study it received. That this thinking style observed by
Lloyd, Hamilton, Russell, Hazlitt, and others was and is a proven
non-starter on a societal basis has been  demonstrated by the
paradox called the Prisoner's Dilemma, discovered in 1950 by
Melvin Dresher and Merrill Flood of the RAND corporation.  Since
the original formulation of the problem is "less clear to the
uninitiated," Hofstadter (1985) developed a parallel example:

"Assume you possess copious quantities of some item (money, for
example), and wish to obtain some amount of another item (perhaps
stamps, groceries, diamonds).  You arrange a mutually agreeable
trade with the only dealer of that item known to you.  You are
both satisfied with the amounts you will be giving and getting.
For some reason, though, your trade must take place in secret.
Each of you agrees to leave a bag at a designated place in the
forest, and to pick up the other's bag at the other's designated
place.  Suppose it is clear to both of you that the two of you
will never meet or have further dealings with each other again.
Clearly, there is something for each of you to fear: namely, that
the other one will leave an empty bag.  Obviously, if you both
leave full bags, you will both be satisfied; but equally
obviously, getting something for nothing is even more satisfying.
So you are tempted to leave an empty bag.  In fact, you can even
reason it through rigorously this way: "If the dealer brings a
full bag, I'll be better off having left an empty bag, because
I'll have gotten all that I wanted and given away nothing.  If the
dealer brings an empty bag, I'll be better off having left an
empty bag, because I'll not have been cheated.  I'll have gained
nothing but lost nothing either.  Thus it seems that no matter
what the dealer chooses to do, I'm better off leaving an empty
bag.  So I'll leave an empty bag."
The dealer, meanwhile, being in more or less the same boat (though
at the other end of it), thinks analogous thoughts and comes to
the parallel conclusion that it is best to leave an empty bag.
And so both of you, with your impeccable (or impeccable-seeming)
logic, leave empty bags, and go away empty-handed."

Hofstadter's "parallel example" is a schematic illustration of the
problem, which as originally formulated is closer to the
following: you and a man named Paul are suspected of having
committed an armed robbery, and you are each placed in separate
jails, with no means of communication.  Some hours later, the
District Attorney enters your cell.  You are informed that there
is enough evidence to convict both you and Paul on a lesser charge
of illegal possession of firearms, but not enough to convict on
the more serious charge of armed robbery.  To avoid a lengthy
trial, you are given a chance to confess, under the following
conditions:

1.   If neither you nor Paul confess, you will both be convicted
of the illegal possession, which carries a sentence of six months.

2.   If both you and Paul confess, you will both get the minimum
sentence for armed robbery, which is two years.

3.   If only one of you confess, that person will be considered a
state witness, and go free; the other will get the maximum
sentence for armed robbery, which is twenty years.

At first, the answer seems simple; neither you nor Paul should
confess, thus limiting the time served by both of you to six
months.  Unfortunately, however, you live in a society where
people are egocentric, and thus see themselves as individuals
looking out for "number one," i.e., the short-term interests of
"number-one."  That being, the case, a disturbing thought enters
your mind: "Paul must surely be reaching the same conclusion as
me.  Therefore, he knows what I'm thinking.  And since he knows
what I'm thinking, he knows that I will not confess.  That means
that if he confesses, he gets off scot-free.  That is a powerful
incentive for him to confess.  But there's even a further
incentive for Paul to confess.  Paul may be thinking, 'Why should
I trust him?  If I do, and he betrays my trust, I'm sunk.'  And
so, because Paul doesn't trust me, he'll confess.  And that means,
then, that I will serve twenty years in jail!  If I confess,
though, the most I will have to serve is two years.  I wish I
could trust Paul, but the risk is too great: a possible 20 years
vs. a certain 2 years.   All I stand to gain by not confessing is
a chance to serve 1 1/2 less years -- but I stand to lose twenty
years, the best years of my life.  It's not worth the chance."
And so, you confess.  And Paul, along the same lines of reasoning,
chooses likewise.  You both end up serving two years, when simple
cooperation would have reduced your sentence by 75 percent.  Thus
operates the "logic" of individualism.

Of course, the problem isn't in the logic -- the problem is in the
premises, embedded as they are in an environmental context.  Note
the problem of the prisoners:

1.   They cannot communicate with each other.

2.   Even if able to communicate, they could not trust each other.

3.   They could not trust each other, because:

   a) they came from a society where egocentrism and individualism
were allowed to flower freely;
   b) there was no arm of enforcement preventing those individual
acts betraying everyone's long-term interests.

But, as the Tragedy of the Commons scenario would indicate, the
Prisoner's Dilemma is not merely an academic exercise.  Consider
these notorious  examples:

--     A club has a fire, and all rush for the exits, preventing
the exit of anyone; as a result, all perish.

--     At a concert, A stands on his toes to better see the
performer.  The person behind A must now stand, and the effect
ripples throughout the auditorium.  Soon all are standing, and no
one has a better view than they would have had in a sitting
position, except that now they must stand versus sit.

--     "Taki 183" writes his names on the subway cars.  The
Transit Authority allows it.  Soon other teens have a role model.
They also write on subway cars.  The Transit Authority allows it.
Eventually, the Transit Authority is forced to spend tens of
millions of dollars to clean subway cars, which they could have
saved had they stopped the problem before it mushroomed.

--     The big kids "pick on" the little kids, and society allows
it.  Thus, a kid must"act tough" to develop a "rep," and avoid
being singled out.  Soon kids become teens become adults, and
fists become knives become guns, and gangs develop, which become
organized gangs, and eventually organized crime, which becomes
entrenched enough to create corruption in government, which
gradually saps out the life-force of the society which allowed the
big kids to "pick on" the little kids.

--     "If one nation maintains constantly a disciplined army,
ready for the service of ambition or revenge, it obliges the most
pacific nations who may be within the reach of its enterprises to
take corresponding precautions." -- from The Federalist

--     Athlete A uses steroids, which gives him a competitive
advantage.  Other athletes are forced to use steroids to retain
parity.  As a result, no athlete is given     a competitive
advantage, but all are subjected to the hazards of steroids.

--     A corporation seeks short-term profits, forcing other
corporations to seek short-term profits to "look good" on Wall
Street, increasing the influence of foreign corporations who have
taken the long-term view.

--     In a college dorm, A blares his stereo.  To hear his
stereo, B must blare his.  Soon the whole floor is awash in a
cacophony of noise as a "stereo war" develops.

--     A says, "never take the first offer."  Soon B says it, and
eventually C.  Gradually, society becomes filled with people who
refuse to take the first offer,forcing those who otherwise wished
to make honest first offers to become disingenuous,  leading to a
society where trust is impossible.

--     Business X pays its bills as late as possible, forcing
others to pay their bills as late as possible.  Soon everyone in
the industry is forced to move from 30 day terms to 90 day terms.

--     A depositor hears that a bank is in trouble, and goes to
pull out his savings.  Others are forced to pull out their savings
as a "run" begins on the bank's savings, and the bank collapses,
when cooperation would have allowed the bank to "get back on its
feet."

--     State X offers a lottery, and soon the citizens of State Y
are sending money out of the state to state X.  State X, which did
not wish to have a lottery because it felt that lotteries had a
corrupting effect on the citizenry, is forced, out of financial
necessity, to have a lottery.

--     Mr. A pirates software.  So does Mr. B.  So does Mr. C.  As
a consequence, the software that would have been otherwise written
for the benefit of Messrs. A, B, and C is not written, because
there is a radically diminished market for software.

--     Mr. Z writes a "virus," which destroys the operating system
of people's computers.  Mr. Z thus provides a role model for
others, who also write viruses, one of which attacks Mr. Z's
computer and destroys his data.

--     Car companies institute a policy of "planned obsolescence"
due to their control of the automobile market.  Foreign automobile
manufacturers are given an opportunity to enter the market, and
the domestic car companies lose market share, and American workers
lose jobs.

--     A college student rips out the pages from a book a
professor has put on  reserve, and other students follow suit,
giving the advantage to those students who cheat and the
disadvantage to those students who are honest.

--     In a public debate where ready access to the facts is not
available, X misstates the truth, and the audience sees X's
viewpoint as more legitimate, forcing Y to misstate the truth to
retain parity.

--     Congressman X votes to keep a military base open to improve
his chances for election, even though it will hurts the country by
adding to the deficit.  Voters vote for a representative who
"brought jobs" to the district, even though the policy on a
national basis has a devastating effect on the economy.

--     A politician utilizes a "wedge issue" to divide the
population, when the population would be better off uniting on the
other issues not mentioned by the politician.

--     A society agrees its form of government is defective, but
no one will agree on a solution, so the government never changes.


Hofstadter gave additional examples of the working-out of the
Prisoner's Dilemma in everyday life, in order of their
seriousness:

--     loudly wafting your music through the entire neighborhood
on a fine summer's day;

--     not being concerned about driving a car everywhere,
figuring that there's no point in making a sacrifice when other
people will just continue to guzzle gas anyway;

--     not worrying about having ten children in a period of
population explosion, leaving it to other people to curb their
reproduction;

--     not devoting any time or energy to pressing global issues
such as the arms race, famine, pollution, diminishing resources,
and so on, saying 'Oh, of course I'm very concerned -- but there's
nothing one person can do.'

While this last example is, in the final analysis, the most
serious, its effects are harder to see. The driving example is
probably the one most likely to be confronted on a daily basis,
and the one which is the most visible. It's probably no surprise,
in a country which has such a love affair with the automobile,
that the Prisoner's Dilemma situations which most frequently
confront us are found in  traffic.  Among these are the following:

--     drivers who don't wear seat belts, thus driving up the cost
of everyone's insurance;

--     people who avoid driving small cars because big cars are
safer, putting the people in small cars at greater risk, which
forces them, in turn,  to buy large cars;

--     the person who drives "gas-guzzlers" because he "likes" big
cars, increasing America's dependence on foreign oil, which
increases the price of gasoline as well as increasing the risk of
war to secure scarce petroleum resources;

--     the phenomenon of rush-hour traffic, which is the complete
congestion of streets, roads, and highways at designated times,
where every person's individual desire to get to work promptly
makes everybody late;

--     the pollution which results from the collective actions of
individual drivers who believe that their one act of driving
"doesn't matter," resulting in air no one wants to breathe;

--     those drivers who go to the front of long lines at freeway
exits and "butt in," forcing other drivers to retaliate or "take
it"; and, finally,

--     the infamous gridlock: which is the total cessation of
traffic flow that results from clogged intersections.  Gridlock is
preceded by a phenomenon known to traffic engineers as spillback,
which results when drivers move into an intersection with no place
to go, and thus block the other drivers from passing through.
Each driver who "spills back" hates being blocked himself, but
since he is not being blocked, "spills back."

As the above situations clearly indicate, the rudeness of driver A
means that driver B has to be equally rude to secure his or her
rights, and the rudeness begins to escalate.  Before long, a world
of mutual respect is transformed into one of dog-eat-dog. Says
Hofstadter:

"I have been struck by the relative savagery of the driving
environment in the Boston area.  I know of no other city in which
people are so willing to take the law into their own hands, and to
create complete anarchy.  There seems to be less respect for such
things as red lights, stop signs, lines in the street, speed
limits, other people's cars, and so forth, than in any other city,
state, or country that I have ever driven in.  This incessant "me-
first" attitude seems to be a vicious, self-reinforcing circle.
Since there are so many people who do whatever they want, nobody
can afford to be polite and let other people in ahead of them
(say), for then they will be taken advantage of repeatedly and
will wind up losing totally."

Boston is not alone.  In some cities, the situation has become so
chronic that frustrated drivers have armed themselves, and even
shot others.

Of course, people in hostile settings can behave in hostile ways.
But the Prisoner's Dilemma is found throughout society, even among
those who are supposedly more "rational" than the rest of us.  In
fact, there is a gloomy illustration of the depths of
irrationality to which our best-educated individuals can sink. In
his June, 1983 column in Scientific American,  Hofstadter
announced a "Luring Lottery." In that lottery, the prize to be
awarded was $1,000,000 divided by the number of entries received;
so, if 1,000,000 entries were received, and your name was picked,
you would win $1.00.  Obviously, the rational behavior for the
purchasers of that issue of Scientific American would have been to
designate one subscriber to enter one time, with the others
holding out. After winning, that subscriber would then divide up
the money among all who cooperated.  Thus, if there were 100,000
cooperating subscribers, each would have won $10.00.  Since the
readers of Scientific American, of all people, could be expected
to be more rational than the rest of us, they would be presumably
be the most likely to discover the most rational solution.
Presumably.  But, as Hofstadter reported,

"Dozens and dozens of readers strained their hardest to come up
with inconceivably large numbers.  Some filled their whole
postcard with tiny '9's, others filled their card with rows of
exclamation points, thus creating iterated factorials of gigantic
sizes, and so on.  A handful of people carried this game much
further . . . Some of them exploited such powerful concepts of
mathematical logic and set theory that to evaluate which one was
the largest became a very serious problem, and in fact it is not
even clear that I, or for that matter anyone else, would be able
to determine which is the largest integer submitted . . .
meanwhile, all this monumental effort [was] to the detriment of
everyone."

Perhaps now we can see why the problem was formulated in terms of
prisoners; in these situations, individuals are really the
prisoners of their own beliefs.

If we want to solve the problem of the "prisoners," there are
three possible ways:

1.   Enable communication between the prisoners.

2.   Establish a culture that encourages the formation of trust
and the social codes which counteract Prisoner Dilemma effects.

3.   Create an organization that would enforce the social codes.

How fortunate the prisoners would have been if an organization had
been set up to prevent self-destructive attention to their own
self-interest. This organization would have set a penalty for
violations -- and failure to observe the social codes would have
resulted in a greater penalty than any possible rewards for
betrayal.  Consequently, both would have cooperated, to their
mutual advantage.  The ultimate act of individualism is to
implement an organization that curbs irrational exercises of
individuality. Left unchecked, this irrationality can "bootstrap"
itself into new heights.  Hofstadter:

"'[I]ndividual' decisions about the futility of working actively
toward the good of humanity amount to a giant trend of apathy, and
this multiplied apathy translates into insanity at the group
level.  In a word, apathy at the individual level translates into
insanity at the mass level."

Thus, the act of one spirals into the acts of all. Hofstadter
asks, "[I]s there any solution to such terrible spirals?" Indeed
there is.  The cure for the Prisoner's Dilemma disease has been
known for centuries: it's called GOVERNMENT.  If, for example, if
people persist in having children in a time of overpopulation,
government can insist that they desist; if companies are polluting
the rivers, government can fine them or put them out of business;
if drivers "spillback" into intersections, government can post
traffic cops at intersections to issue tickets, and can alter the
timing of traffic lights to increase traffic flow; if one party to
a contract breaches the agreement, government can enforce the
contract.  In short, GOVERNMENT is absolutely necessary in a
society that consists of individuals focused exclusively on
satisfying their short-term self-interest. As Hamilton reflected
in Federalist 15, "[w]hy has government been instituted at all?
Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of
reason and justice, without constraint."  And Madison reiterated
this point in Federalist 51: "[W]hat is government itself but the
greatest of all reflections on human nature?  If men were angels,
no government would be necessary."

So, if government is necessary, then it follows that the
government needs to be good, with one of the criteria for
"goodness" being that it "does what's necessary."  Without good
government, we are doomed to enact, on a daily basis, Prisoner
Dilemma scenarios.  And yet the prevalence of these situations in
our society, e.g. crime, environmental problems, child abuse, the
health-care crisis and a host of other problems, leads some to
believe that government in this country is not good -- that is,
it's not "doing the job."

Unfortunately, though many people feel that the United States
government is chronically inept, they simultaneously believe that
there is little that can be done about it.  And these same people
will not hesitate to let others know of their belief.  Here we can
see that the belief of inadequacy leads to inadequacy in fact, and
not only on the individual level. Taken with Asch's insight in the
first section in this chapter, we find that when people verbalize
their belief that they are inadequate to the task at hand, a
climate of belief is created which rewards statements of
helplessness with affirmation, and punishes statements of hope
with either disbelief, scorn, or the "silent treatment," or any
combination thereof.

Thus, a primary Prisoner's Dilemma situation is created.  While
verbalizations of inadequacy might serve to satisfy some
individual's short-term need to relieve cognitive dissonance, the
net result is that society as a whole loses, because these
verbalizations, though unbuttressed by evidence, are seen as
"true."  And this problem may be exacerbated, if those who have
the power to manipulate public opinion are benefiting in some way
from a defective government; Prisoner Dilemma theory predicts that
these individuals or groups of individuals will broadcast and
publish that information which seeks to conserve the form of
government which acts to secure their own short-term self-
interest.

The net result is that a society buffeted by Secondary Prisoner
Dilemmas may be locked into such a situation for centuries, due to
the Primary Prisoner Dilemmas which preserve the status quo.