The Evolution of Trust

http://ncase.me/trust/ Found this thing floating around the intertubes, thought you fellows might get a kick out of it. It's a very interesting exploration of game theory (in the mathematical sense) and how human interactions can and do work in a framework of risk/reward calculations. The main goal is to muse about the concept of trust and how a friendlier, more trusting humanity could exist. It takes about a half-hour to go through, but it's worth it. (While it is interactive media, I felt it belonged more here than on /inter/, given the content. I apologize if I'm wrong.)

Back in the 80's Richard Dawkins' book "The selfish gene" was being used to justify the 80's philosophy of "take the money and fuarrrk the other guy" and Dawkins didn't like this because he felt it was very much a perversion of his point from people who never got past the title. So he made a documentary called "nice guys finish first" (I'm gonna try and upload a copy somewhere), Where he discusses the same concepts. It's interesting to note that the whole "copycat" vs whatever thing began as a competition where they asked people to submit ais, "copycat" ("tit for tat" was its original name) won from a wide field of sometimes very complex ai.

>>2435 He inserted all that stuff directly into the book in the new editions, if someone manages to find a pdf it should be the chapter after the glorious one about memes

how can we increase trust in society?

>>2443 Be nice to others. System theory and stuff. On a macro level, you'd need to remove entire institutions, depending of the country. I never understood why people on the USA are so extremely paranoid.

There's a book called Trust: Social Virtues and Creation of Prosperity by Francis Fukuyama that I read a while ago you may find relevant to this topic. He puts forward the thesis that social trust (rather than any specific natural-resource or political factors) is the basis for a country's prosperity. He contrasts low-trust societies (which have strong intra-family ties but weak trust outside of the family/clan) with high-trust ones that have a lot of "intermediate organizations" between the family level and the government level of social organization. Examples of intermediate organizations might be hobbyist clubs, churches, professional associations, amateur sport or music groups, hackerspaces, etc. The idea is that if your life is integrated into a wide-ranging network of reliance, then you're more willing to accept that others are looking out for you. If you're extremely family-oriented (e.g. China or southern Italy) then you're unlikely to engage the help of outsiders who might be able to genuinely improve your business or whatever. Same goes for highly independent (although US comes to mind, this trope is a comparatively modern one, ie, post-neoliberalism). But when you can't establish trust at this intermediate level (with strangers) then you have to resort to the higher levels: governments guaranteeing complicated contracts designed to cover your ass (assuming the other guy screws you) or massive corporations whose products are uniform and reliable (the independent grocer might not stock the exact thing I want, or it might be slightly more expensive). Low-trust societies burden themselves by their inability to organize for their own good when it appears to 'cost' the individual (usually in terms of risk) in the short term. (Think about the social inefficiency of all the law suits clogging up America's court system, or the fact that China is still unable to go from the family business to the corporation organically, but rather needs the state as a bedrock on which to build their big companies.) I guess it's a pretty transparently obvious conclusion, but the way he gets there is interesting and the book goes all over the world giving in-depth histories about how business cultures evolved in different countries over the last century or two. Apologies for the hella long post. >>2443 >how can we increase trust in society? According to the above, and it's pretty intuitive I guess, is to encourage the development of local groups and associations that aren't directly friendship- or business-related. Reading groups, market/dumpster kitchens, community gardens, I dunno ... whatever the decent humans in your area might maybe like to do once a week or fortnight.

Interesting, even though I already knew what strategy wins in iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (both in tournament and evolutionary simulation) because of a video I watched on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOvAbjfJ0x0, for those interested), I haven't thought about what happens when the rules of the game change or when there is a chance of miscommunication. Above all, I haven't thought that game theory could be applied to real-life situations outside some very specific circumstances in business. I still think it's a little bit of a stretch to try to base a model of trust between humans off of Prisoner's Dilemma, because there are many more factors behind it, some of which are still unknown or hard for us to comprehend. On a side note, I remember that when I tried to make neural networks play Prisoner's Dilemma with the vanilla rules and evolve, the copycat was able to dominate the entire population within very few generations (4~6, I think). I knew it should happen eventually, but I was surprised how fast it came to be. Even though that may have been just because I started with randomly wired networks and the extinction rate was pretty high.

>>2446 Interesting observation thats true even for myself I think. About people in the US being more paranoid. I think many here even take pride in their paranoia. I wonder why that is though, I think its easy to say cause our government has lied to us a lot but thats true for any country.