Bonzinhos e Mauzinhos

Estava a ler uma entrevista de Junho do ano passado ao matemático Steven Strogatz, quando me deparei com esta parte, que me fez pensar na onda de populismo que navegamos hoje em dia:

So in fact what was found in later studies, when they examined prisoner’s dilemma in environments where errors occurred with a certain frequency, is that the population tended to evolve to more generous, more like New Testament strategies that will “turn the other cheek.” And would take a certain amount of unprovoked bad behavior by the opponent ... just in order to avoid getting into these sort of vendettas. So you find the evolution of more gradually more and more generous strategies, which I think is interesting that the Old Testament sort of naturally led to the New Testament in the computer tournament — with no one teaching it to do so.

And finally, this is the ultimately disturbing part, is once the world evolves to place where everybody is playing very “Jesus-like” strategies, that opens the door for the [the player who always defects] to come back. Everyone is so nice — and they take advantage of that.

I mean, the one thing that’s really good about “tit for tat” is that … the player who always defects — he can’t make much progress against “tit for tat.” But it can against the very soft, always cooperating strategies. You end up getting into these extremely long cycles going from all defection to “tit for tat” to always cooperate and back to all defection. Which sort of sounds a lot like some stories you might have heard in history. Countries or civilizations getting softer and softer and then they get taken over by the barbarians.

Fonte: Steven Strogatz entrevistado na Business Insider