Not crazy at all; that's exactly what you'd expect. You're not going to see a solution to a problem come out of a place where they don't have that problem, afterall.
I don't know if Celtic Druids were less prone to holding grudges, but I think we didn't get many records from them prior to their conversion to Christianity. Thus, it's hard to make such regional comparisons.
Liberal democracy has historically flourished in periods of economic growth associate with trade/production. I think there's sort of a continuum from trader to king, based on whether you apply your skills more to bargaining or dominance. It seems natural that the latter selects for tit-for-tat, whereas the former selects for cooperation. Under normal conditions, traders rely on the dominance hierarchy to establish peace and make cooperation viable, but when there's a disequillibrium where trade is massively expanding (e.g. the industrial revolution), the trading population can grow more powerful than the dominance population, until circumstances have equillibrated. (In economics, this would be called "opportunity cost" - the effort you spend on developing weapons for dominance could instead have been spent on trade, which in a dreamtime disequilibrium is going to give you more value.)
Market conditions are not intrinsically positive-sum, and geopolitics are not intrinsically zero-sum. Undeveloped resources which requires lots of flexible human workers to collaborative develop change conditions to be positive-sum (for human workers). But eventually you reach an equillibrium where they are optimally developed and you've got excess labor, at which point they become zero-sum. This is especially true if you go out of your way to speed up the equillibration, e.g. with certain kinds of AI and free trade policies.
I mean. Some people are definitely right this second trying to conquer land, and small scale exploitation that kinda looks like slavery definitely exists, doesn't it?
Applied to the case of memetic war: if there's some subject that yields lots of valuable insights when studied, then truthseeking is selected for simply because it's a waste of time to fight.
The more you reach equillibrium (by finding the key information, distilling them into great insights, broadcasting them to people who can learn from them, and integrating them into applications), the less value you can get from pure cooperation.
This won't immediately cause defection, it will "merely" cause a collapse in that which produces collaboration, which may just lead to a collapse in the participation. But if participation *remains* high despite lack of selection for truth-seeking (e.g. due to external funding or entertainment value or community inertia), then the participants can be exploited via deception, leading to a growth in various strategies, and then as experiments show, this tends to lead to tit-for-tat.
Nope. Per the mandate of heaven, prestige and dominance are closely linked. The critically important piece is an expansion in the possibilities of excellence so there's a disequillibrium where you gain more from developing prestige while keeping dominance low than you gain from developing dominance. So more like prestige vacuum.
I think you're on the right lines when you ask who occupies the position where each strategy makes sense. If instead of traders and kings we think about the common people of Rome at that time, we get an answer to Scott's question.
Think of Rome as a very individualistic society (much like today) where people had a high degree of security from outside (no foreign enemies) and focused on their own lives - e.g. sports, romance, wealth. These things tend to be zero-sum and encourage tit-for-tat, since it's about fighting for positional goods. So we have a society where everyone is playing tit-for-tat all the time, and probably getting sick of it (because let's face it, it's brutal).
Then Christianity can be explained simply by the fact that under these conditions it's the funniest thing in the world to be nice instead. Everyone takes their petty zero-sum competitions so seriously, that not taking them seriously is like pissing over all them.
I hope this explanation is right and that our position is similar to the Rome of that time. This is normally taken pessimistically (probably because of the stereotypes about the fall of Rome leading to the dark ages), but it would be pretty great if something that funny happened again.
As a "sell everything to give alms" Christian, I feel it's important to make a distinction between the culture that won the memetic war and the Actual Christianity you are describing. I frequently use a similar definition of Christianity, but also say there are perhaps 100,000 Christians in America at the moment. I sometimes refer to the mass movement as Modern American Folk Christianity.
While I think your terms are pretty harsh, I do think you are on the right path. The version of Christianity (COOPERATE-BOT) that Scott is using is 90% strawman. There are simply practical limits to how much cooperation any nominal Christian group can do, and TIT-FOR-TAT is far from unknown among nominally Christian groups, as well.
To be fair, my threshold is close to "has read the gospels and strives to live by it", a standard so loose it includes Gandhi, it's just that neither Modern American Folk Christianity nor Moralistic Therapeutic Deism are at all open to "Jesus said you should do X" as a viable method of socially approved persuasion. I've visited dozens of churches, I feel my estimates for population rates are at least reasonable, if not as accurate as I like.
(Edit for fun fact: did you know Gandhi read the Sermon on the Mount twice a day for decades?)
I don't know much about Tolstoy, but from his Wikipedia, yes. In terms of forerunning, I mean, both him and I are a couple millennia late to the party, but yes, there is a cross generational convergence on the ideals here. I think there is more convergence than inherited tradition, by a large margin? Also, the more I read this wiki, post-Confession Tolstoy is unbelievably based?
I think a more "narrow brand" representation might be someone like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, although that is somewhat complicated by his involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler, which is the most absurd corner case of "well if you really love your enemies" that it's sort of wild he actually faced the hypothetical irl.
Re: Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Kind of crazy that I'd just heard about him from my coworker today, and here I am reading his name on an ACT/SSC comment. I'm attempting to return to the (Catholic) Christian fold, so would you be able to expand on your thoughts regarding Bonhoeffer's seeming contradiction?
I don't have much to say, aside from, I've been spared similar choices. His books are very good, though, and are quite readable. Engrossing, really. Strong recommendation for The Cost of Discipleship.
Could you please explain what is going on in Christian churches in America so that congregants aren't meeting this low bar? To someone who isn't American and has never been to a mainline American church or an Evangelical church.
I don't know what causes it, I only observe it. They will say, you gotta be all in, trust Jesus 100%. Then you say, Jesus said, do radical good thing X, does anyone do that? And they say, no no that's too impractical and weird. It's not a skill issue, it's a preference. They don't want to. If they wanted to, and failed, that's classically in-bounds, but this is vanishingly rare. Pretty bizarre.
Replying to you here as well: I've heard it well put that Jesus's hardcore teachings may be seen as koan-like paradoxes. Meaning, they are practically nigh-impossible, but it is the living out of the path and the divine goal/target that is the way. It's funny how people think the OT is 'harsher' and the NT is 'kinder'...Jesus asks us to aim for almost insurmountable heights.
That's not *quite* the issue. You have no idea how many times I've met with people after church services end and said something like, "I really liked this bit of the service, when they said [quote]. Is that the type of thing people do here?" And then they're confused, ask what I mean, and I say, that things they said, it's a beautiful expression of gospel principles, do people do it? And they say no. Then I ask why not, and they have all these elaborate reasons why not even a single person does the thing they talk about or sing hymns about. I often have a hard time understanding what they get out of church.
I'm not very Christian—been considering converting to Catholicism, and I'm not an atheist in a foxhole, but I just stumble at the first hurdle ("take the Bible seriously, even the Old Testament")—but I went to a Christian private school for high-school and have visited a couple (Evangelical, IIRC) churches (mostly due to friends' invitations), and I feel like you're absolutely right in this.
I remember one lady cackling about how she ran the sonography program at the local community college—she had imposed baroque requirements that confused people, and so she was talking about how she sometimes "got to" see the looks on applicants' faces when they were informed that they'd spent years of their life doing the wrong things to get in and were just as far away as when they'd started. She thought it was very funny. I said something like "that doesn't seem like something Jesus would do", and she said, irritatedly: "Well, do I look like Jesus?"
...and yet this woman—I was going to say "lady", but it doesn't quite seem the apposite term—was big in the church, all about God this church that. It was puzzling. I had many similar experiences.
I've been using the term Christian Nationalism. That describes the top end of malefaction, and there are degrees of shading for individuals depending on where they are in life and their state of mind.
I think that term mostly focuses on a political angle, where there *is* a philosophy and culture outside of politics I'm trying to point at. Like, volunteering for a VBS isn't anything to do with nationalism. I'm also not trying to speak unkindly about anyone or isolate merits on one end and demerits on the other. I'm just pointing out that (as someone who has volunteered for a VBS) it's a foreign cultural exchange in some ways.
I understand that, but the politics is willfully mixed into it. I wish the culturally dominant strain of Christianity in America wasn't a band of nationalist hobgoblins pushing women away from the pews. But, saying reality is what it isn't has not been that great a strategic choice so far. At best, these things are in tension and one side is growing to be the more popular one.
Maybe it wouldn't be the case if more people did foreign culture exchanges. Seeing becomes believing.
As I understand it, from the Bible, the idea that you can earn the title Christian is itself not Christian. Faith itself is a gift, that no one may boast, and nobody deserves grace, by definition. Nobody is good except one, that is God. If we believe Jesus is good how can we claim to follow Him when we are not? If we believe we are good we reject His teaching.
I would be careful about saying who deserves and doesn’t deserve the title Christian.
This is true inasmuch as I should not have used the word "earned", and I apologize for that.
However, Jesus does warn about false Christians several times, such as in Matthew 7:15-27, in which Christ states that the ones who does what he says are the ones in heaven. He elaborates on this in Matthew 25:31-46, stating that the ones who will be saved are the ones who fed the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, take in strangers, clothe the naked, and visit those sick or imprisoned.
So, considering that Jesus warned us about false Christians, stated that you will know them by their fruits, and then gave a list of the sorts of things you can expect to see real Christians doing, I think that calling someone who never does those things and is, in fact, viscerally opposed to doing them, is probably not a Christian. Back to the subject at hand- if someone who calls themself a "Christian Nationalist" is harshly opposed to taking in strangers, it's a hard sell for me that they are a Christian.
Just to be clear: I'm not saying that they are going to be damned, necessarily. I certainly don't know who will be damned or not and, in my opinion, stating that someone is going to Hell is putting human limits on God's mercy, which seems to me very unwise.
What I am saying is that I disagree with the category name of "Christian nationalist" to describe people who are hardcore opponents of immigration, which is usually what it refers to. If instead we are talking about people who wish their nation to be more in line with what Jesus literally told us to do, then I don't object to the terminology.
I suppose it might describe myself, although the term "Christian Globalist" might be more appropriate, though it strikes me as rather redundant. To be truly Christian is to be universal, embracing all humanity without the confines of national borders. Thus, the most fitting label, if labels should be worn at all, would simply be "Christian."
Thank you for the thoughtful replies. One of the joys of Christianity is discussing / wrestling with / resolving the tension in various scriptures during Bible studies and with friends. I've typed and erased and typed erased. A comment section just doesn't work for me. I apologize for starting a discussion and not following through well. God bless you, brother!
I'm curious, from the "no borders/global" perspective how do you interpret John 14:2? “In My Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you." - If the Father's house has many different dwelling places (and a place specifically prepared by Jesus for His followers) does that not imply that there can be virtue in boundaries?
What if someone does all of the things in Matthew 25:31-46, but only for strangers of a certain type (e.g. only Americans, or only Christians)? After all, Matthew 25:31-46 never said you need to let an infinite number of Muslims into your country so that they impose Sharia law and drive Christianity to extinction. If that were the likely outcome of immigration (and let's leave aside for the moment the question of whether it is), are Christians still required to support immigration?
I mean, Christians didn't take the "take in the stranger" far enough to be like "hey, centurions, welcome to our secret underground church", so I think the answer is in the past. Alfred wasn't very welcoming to Guthrum- for a while, anyway.
But, you know, The whole point of having deontological ethical injunctions is that arguments for violating them are often much less trustworthy than they look.
An obvious game-theory thought is that you are gifting all other Christians with a *reputation* for being COOPERATE-BOT, and this makes other bots with mixed strategies interact with them more favorably in general.
This is one explanation for how early Christians could have succeeded, by creating a reputation for being COOPERATE BOT while most of them are actually TFT.
They'll personally want to exploit you, but they'll also want to prevent their own enemies from exploiting you too much - so that you'll still be there to be exploited by them and their allies in the future. Norman Borlaug's dwarf wheat doesn't have a military policy above the microbial level, but it's cultivated by people who do.
Very interesting idea, so it is basically becoming such a useful and unique tool to be able to be integrated into a larger policy. Which for sure can work, but that simply outsources the original game theoretic problem onto the larger entity, practically making the problem disappear for you, but not for the larger entity.
Suppose two wolves and a sheep are voting on what to have for dinner. The sheep says "I propose that tonight we eat whichever of the two wolves is stronger, and then have mutton tomorrow."
The weaker wolf realizes, if this proposal doesn't pass, it certainly won't be the stronger wolf being eaten tomorrow, and so seconds the motion.
After resulting excitement is settled, sheep says to the surviving wolf "you're badly injured, and must be tired from doing most of the work in that fight, so I insist you accept the honor of eating a larger portion of the carcass."
Once that wolf is asleep with a full belly, sheep headbutts and tramples them to death, then trots off to eat grass.
in a war of all against all, with no credible alliances or limits of adjacency, default outcome is everybody ganging up on whoever looks the most threatening - that is, whoever they'd expect to face the most harm, or least benefit, from ending up stuck alone with.
Iterate that enough and whoever looks least threatening dies last. Thus, Mr. Rogers in a bloodstained sweater... or Putin, who was apparently the most blandly inoffensive man in the entire KGB, ending up on top by default.
Supposedly this is how Claudius became emperor of Rome: according to the story I heard, all the other possible candidates went and killed each other off while Claudius acted like a harmless fool so they left him alone. When some people objected to choosing someone with a reputation for being "not quite all there" to be Emperor, he responded, "I'm the one who survived. How stupid could I actually be?"
I also recently watched a reality show in which one of the *least* socially perceptive players, who had spent the whole game being successfully manipulated by one player or another, made it all the way to the final showdown, simply because the other players (accurately!) didn't see him as a threat.
So it depends on the initial population, which is what I was getting at with 'mixed strategies'.
Scot mentions that 'Tit-for-tat with occasional forgiveness' seems like most of instinctive human morality, and I'm sort of riffing on that. A TFT-Bot doesn't exploit cooperate bot, they just cooperate. Assuming most humans are TFT, they will never defect against someone they *know* to be COOP.
Of course, instead of just being TFT, you could be 'TFT-except-also-exploit COOPERATE BOT.' It seems like this would be strictly superior, BUT. I expect that 1. that's harder to evolutionary embed in genes at an instinctive level and 2. in games with reputation, which is how human morality works, people who see you defecting over and over and over against COOOPERATE-BOT may take all those defections as evidence that you are DEFECT-BOT, and then they'll all defect against you on turn 1.
So basically, in a mostly-TFT-with-reputation world, I think there's an advantage to people *believing* you are COOPERATE-BOT because they will cooperate on turn 1.
Similarly, I think something happened in China where the Confucians were more Cooperate-Bot flavored, the Legalists were more pragmatist and actually won the war / ruled the empire, and also eventually called themselves Confucian.
The Mohists were known for their genius in building siege machines. While they were probably the most morally Good (by 21st century Western standards) philosophy/movement in Ancient China, I wouldn't consider them "Corporate-bot", or aiming in that direction.
I also really don't think that modern liberalism is a cooperate-bot strategy. The welfare state could be cynically described as a mechanism for bribing voters by being generous with other people's money. The reciprocity occurs at the ballot box.
“Epiphenomenal: COOPERATE-BOT isn’t really a good strategy, but is an unavoidable side effect of something else valuable. For example, maybe you couldn’t have Christians who loved God so much without having them be extremely loving and charitable people. The most dramatic version of this hypothesis is that God is real, and loving thy enemy is an epiphenomenon of following the actual Divine Law.”
This is of course the classic Christian position, and it’s worth pointing out that central to this position is that you cannot and should not and indeed must not run COOPERATE-BOT just for the sake of running COOPERATE-BOT. That way lies all kinds of failure and disaster.
This in my religious opinion has to do with theological truths, but on a pragmatic level I also think this helps avoiding infecting COOPERATE-BOT with utilitarianism, which will always subvert it.
> and it’s worth pointing out that central to this position is that you cannot and should not and indeed must not run COOPERATE-BOT just for the sake of running COOPERATE-BOT. That way lies all kinds of failure and disaster
I think grandparent is saying that Christianity provides no spiritual credit when you cooperate for consequentialist reasons, rather that you're supposed to cooperate because you want to follow Divine Law.
So, the pat meta-answer: there's another prisoner's dilemma played between two neighboring countries: Persecute Christians (cooperate) or Tolerate (defect). If both of you choose Persecute, you're both a little worse off since Christians are helpful. If one of you chooses Tolerate, all of the Christians eventually move there, the persecutor loses out more, and the tolerator gains more. If both of you choose Tolerate, the Christians eventually take over both your countries and make with the Holy Roman Empire and the inquisitions and all that. Christians being maximally cooperative skewed the payoffs enough that enough countries (governors, cities, subcultures, whatever) were incentivized to meta-defect.
I imagine you could also run a variant of the Axelrod tournament where bots are on a 2D grid, can see each others' source code, and when they get points they both create copies of themselves *and* get to copy their favorite neighbors. That plausibly leads to a majority being Cooperate-Bot.
That seems like an odd model to apply to the Roman Empire since it didn't have any neighboring countries that were remotely its peers aside from maybe Persia, which I don't think ever had a significant Christian population (although I'm curious if any early Christian missionaries went east and if so how it went for them).
And actually going back to Scott's overall point, it's interesting that my model for the fall of Rome is that it was mostly caused by Romans increasingly choosing Defect over Cooperate; that is, they prioritized winning internal power struggles against other Romans over keeping Rome strong overall. Now this was already well underway by the time the empire converted to Christianity, but it's notable that the Christians definitely didn't succeed in halting or reversing the process.
I guess it's not necessarily surprising that scaling up to being the state religion of the empire seems to have come at the cost of some of the unique traits Scott's interested in but it's worth keeping in mind.
> That seems like an odd model to apply to the Roman Empire since it didn't have any neighboring countries that were remotely its peers
I think you could model it as various powers and factions choosing to tolerate Christianity, despite correctly perceiving it as a threat to the existing order, culminating in Constantine deciding to convert in order (probably) to increase his personal power within the empire.
'although I'm curious if any early Christian missionaries went east and if so how it went for them"
Yes, the entire Oriental Orthodox branch is from them, don't confuse the word "Orthodox" and think it's related to Orthodox Catholic, it's not. They are known to have gotten as far, and found successful churches, as India with some suggestions possibly far Western modern China, basically the Silk Road. The interesting question is why didn't it take off in the far east, then or now.
I'm currently reading Valerie Hansen's book on the Silk Road, which touches upon this. That branch of Christianity wasn't uncommon in Western China, but towards the end of the Tang Dynasty, the emperor forbade the practice of a lot of religions, mostly targeting Buddhism, but ended up wiping out the smaller Christian, Zoroastrian, and Manichaeist sects - the latter two mostly consisting of refugees who fled the Islamic invasion of Persia. Buddhism, of course, outlasted the laws and thrived, being more popular in China at the time of the crackdown.
And this is my speculation, but Buddhism may be the primary reason why Christianity didn't take off. Buddhism seems to share a lot of the same characteristics listed above - very cooperative, high standards of behavior, etc. It exploded out of India at a similar pace to Christianity, but a couple of hundred years prior, so when Christianity reached China (at around the same time it would have hit Scandanavia) you didn't see rapid adoption.
(To answer Scott's question above of what might be missing from the Christianity, Quaker, Cathar list, Buddhism would be the first one to look at, though I'm not familiar with it myself.)
Yes, the SanThome Christians in India credibly date themselves back to St. Thomas the apostle, and they have survived as a minority for thousands of years, mostly orthogonal to the traditional Hindu/Muslim political dimension.
Nestorian Christianity/the Oriental Orthodox Churches at one point had a considerable number of followers in Persia. Khosrau I initially even encouraged Nestorian Christianity over the Orthodoxy of the Byzantines, though of course always considered Zoroastrianism superior.
The way Rome got to the point of having no peer competitors left was by being better at directing surplus violence outward and distributing plunder fairly among the participants. https://acoup.blog/2023/10/20/collections-how-to-roman-republic-101-addenda-the-socii/ Running out of worthy, plunder-rich targets to aim that violence at meant the "we're all friends here, everybody gets an equal share of the plunder" system started to break down. Right around the same time Christianity was founded, Julius Ceasar was thinking "welp, all done conquering Gaul, now what?" and picking a fight with the Senate.
Except the "Golden Age" Pax Romana starts at Augustus and lasts about 200 years. Commodus, the Emperor when thing started to get dicy was also the first non-adopted emperor, which then slides into the crisis of the third century. It might indeed have been seeded by the structural change from a pillage economy, but 200 years is enough time for me to consider other causes as well.
"Golden Age" is what you get when territorial expansion has hit diminishing returns, but internal development hasn't yet. Charitable pacifists don't help much with expansion in the form of violent conquest (they'd even be regarded with suspicion, during that period, just for failing to participate) but they've got plenty to contribute when it comes to building up civil infrastructure.
Instructions starting with "sell everything you own and give the money to..." only really work when there's a merchant willing to buy, or better yet two or more bidding against each other, which becomes far more likely when there are trade routes all across the known world untroubled by war or piracy.
The described payoff matrix is different from the Prisoner's Dilemma. In particular, the Defect/Defect isn't a Nash Equilibrium, since Cooperate/Defect is better for the cooperator than Defect/Defect.
A minor point on claims that Axelrod's Tournament successfully grounded morality in self-interest – it's less that the mental processes which support morality are based on self-interest, per se, and more that the results of the tournament demonstrate an explanation of why morality is so embedded in the human psyche.
Evolution doesn't necessarily care about the mechanisms which cause various strategies (behaviours) – but it does care about the outputs of those strategies, as this is the layer it acts upon (the behaviour level), especially in a highly competitive social environment like those of our ancestors. Axelrod's Tournament shows that, even if the mechanisms within the brain which give rise to moral behaviour are completely unrelated to self-interest, once those mechanisms are present in the population (even if they evolved purely by chance), then the carriers of the genes which give rise to those 'morality mechanisms' within the brain are more likely to spread their genes to the next generation, as the behaviour caused by such mechanisms gives rise to an optimal strategy for cooperating and flourishing in a social environment.
It tells us nothing about how morality first evolved, that's true, but it does tell us a lot about why morality became so widespread and ingrained within human culture – it's a winning strategy.
Great comment. I found that sentence, "I find the occasional claims to have successfully grounded morality in self-interest to be facile, but you can at least see where they’re coming from here." a bit weird...maybe something I'd expect from a bonafide Christian, but not capital R Rationalist(TM). The evolution of morality has been fairly well studied and is not a great mystery at this point. If it was maladaptive, it wouldn't exist. (Some caveats required there of course...the prevalence of various mental illnesses and homosexuality are genuine puzzles, although I believe a fair amount of progress has made toward the former.) But "grounding morality in self-interest" is not how I would characterize that.
Maybe Scott is referring to something else? Maybe just the kind of cynical folk psychology of bitter antisocial people who insist people only "pretend" to be nice while secretly having self-serving ulterior motives?
This is a common confusion about evolutionary explanations, a confusion between the proximate and ultimate levels. If you explain things in terms of fitness, some misinterpret that as saying, you don't "really" love your child/spouse/friend, you're only pretending to care about them because it's to your advantage. No, you really are capable of love, which may sometimes result in actually putting the interests of others above your own. The reason that you have kind of cognitive/neural architecture that produces that behavior is that throughout our evolutionary history, it tended to result in more success at survival and/or reproduction than not having it.
There was a famous story about one of the most influential people in this area...wasn't Axelrod himself was it? Who IMO succumbed to this mistake, and was haunted to the point of derangement by the idea that "real" altruism was impossible, and tried to disprove it by fully embracing the implications of a Peter Singer type philosophy by giving away virtually all of his income and letting homeless people sleep on the floor of his barren house etc...
I think the best attempt to ground real goodness in objective reality is Robert Wright's Nonzero. Goodness is the expansion of nonzero sum-ness, and it is in the nature of things, due to principles like those uncovered by Axelrod, for it to continue to expand over time. But it has to start somewhere. Cooperating with a defector, ie a Jew turning the other cheek on a Nazi, or committing suicide to donate your flesh to the vultures and worms, etc. (A) win-lose, which is not good, (B) inherently maladaptive, which means it must cause there to be less of itself in the universe. So if it were good in some ultimate transcendental sense... That would mean goodness necessarily causes there to be less goodness in the universe in the future, which would be bad. If everyone genuinely cared about all humans (or all living things) equally, that would mean they would not care about their children any more than other being. And since no one can feed, clothe and shelter, let along spend quality time with, all beings everywhere, that would mean no one do even enough to keep their own children alive, and humanity would become extinct, and no humans would be around to be good, or to appreciate how Really Genuinely Altruistic the last generation of humans to exist was.
Just as Daniel Dennett said free will based determinism is the only kind we have and the only kind worth wanting... I say the adaptive kind of goodness that we actually have is the only kind worth wanting.
Here's the guy I was thinking of. Really important in the history of evolutionary theory, and also a riveting personal story. Even more tragic, because IMO his despair was just based on a mistake (and probably pre-existing mental illness). It's wrong and foolish to think kindness/generosity etc can't really be good unless it has no actual or potential benefit to the person doing it. The Buddhists knew that for 2 and half millennia. In many circumstances, being good to others is good for you. That's a feature, not a bug.
A book I'd recommend is The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition, which articulates and defends a more common-sense intuitive morality against what could be called telescopic philanthropy.
(GPT:) What you're recalling seems to align with the story of **George Price**, a key figure in evolutionary biology and game theory, rather than Robert Axelrod. Price played a significant role in the development of the **Price Equation**, which is foundational to understanding the evolution of altruism.
### George Price and the Evolution of Altruism:
1. **Contributions to Game Theory and Evolution**:
- Price was instrumental in advancing the mathematical foundations of evolutionary theory, particularly in explaining altruism through a genetic lens.
- His work helped formalize how seemingly selfless behaviors could evolve through natural selection if they provided a benefit to relatives (kin selection) or indirectly boosted one's own genetic success.
2. **Personal Transformation and Despair**:
- After deriving his famous equation, Price became deeply troubled by its implications. He struggled with the idea that altruism—what we see as selflessness—was ultimately a selfish genetic strategy.
- This conflict led him to attempt to disprove his own work by living a life of radical altruism.
3. **Radical Altruism**:
- Price gave away most of his income and possessions, including his house, to help the homeless in London.
- He allowed homeless people to live with him, often at great personal expense and discomfort, to demonstrate that true selflessness was possible.
4. **Decline and Tragic End**:
- His extreme lifestyle, combined with his struggle to reconcile his work with his spiritual and philosophical beliefs, led to mental health challenges.
- Price ultimately died by suicide in 1975, leaving behind a legacy that continues to provoke discussion about the nature of altruism.
### Why It Resonates:
The story of George Price is haunting and compelling because it underscores the human struggle to reconcile scientific discoveries with deeply held moral and existential beliefs. His life exemplifies the tension between understanding altruism as an evolutionary strategy and aspiring to live out altruism as a purely selfless virtue.
### Connection to Peter Singer:
Price’s radical lifestyle echoes some of the implications of **Peter Singer's philosophy** of effective altruism, which calls for giving significant portions of one's income to alleviate global suffering. However, Price's actions were not systematically aimed at maximizing utility (as Singer advocates) but rather seemed driven by a desperate need to disprove the cold logic of his own mathematical findings.
### Documentary:
The story of George Price has been featured in several documentaries and books. One notable book is **"The Price of Altruism" by Oren Harman**, which details Price’s life, work, and tragic struggle with the implications of his discoveries. It’s possible the documentary you recall was based on this book or similar material.
"Lots of 'evil' is characterised by decreasing the total sum."
That's an important point I left out: lose/lose is zero sum. Win/win--the increasing prevalence of opportunities for win/win interactions--is what I would describe as good.
"True zero-sum is exceedingly rare in the real world" I don't think it is in the sense that I mean it.
The sumness I'm referring to is just:
| | win | lose |
| :-----:|:--------:|:---------:|
| win | win/win | win/lose |
| lose | lose/win | lose/lose |
Which can be represented as:
| | +1 | -1 |
| :---:|:--:|:--:|
| +1 | 2 | 0 |
| -1 | 0 | -2 |
It's just an abstraction, not an attempt to quantify any precise quantity.
Any voluntary transaction is positive sum, because both parties benefit. A theft, OTOH, is zero sum, because one's loss is the other's gain.
Here's a synopsis:
-----
Robert Wright argues that nonzero-sumness is intrinsic to the nature of evolution because the survival and success of organisms often depend on cooperation and interdependence. While evolution, in a strictly scientific sense, lacks a conscious direction or purpose, Wright suggests that it can appear directional due to the patterns it produces—particularly the increasing complexity of life and the expansion of cooperative networks.
As life evolves, systems become more intricate, and organisms interact in increasingly complex ways. These interactions often create opportunities for nonzero-sum dynamics, where mutual benefit becomes more viable and advantageous. For example:
• In biological evolution: Symbiotic relationships (e.g., between pollinators and plants or gut bacteria and hosts) show how cooperation can drive complexity and enhance survival.
• In human history: The development of language, trade, and technology amplifies the potential for cooperative, nonzero-sum outcomes, enabling larger, more interconnected societies.
Wright argues that the expansion of nonzero-sumness is a natural consequence of this complexity. As organisms and societies grow more interdependent, the scope for mutually beneficial relationships widens, creating a feedback loop where cooperation becomes increasingly advantageous.
In this sense, while evolution doesn’t have an intrinsic “goal,” the appearance of directionality comes from this pattern: life becomes more complex, which broadens the opportunities for nonzero-sum interactions, driving further complexity and interconnectedness. This gives the impression of a purposeful trajectory, even though it arises from natural processes.
----
To your point about negative sum:
---
Yes, Robert Wright does suggest that as complexity increases and societies become more interconnected, the potential for negative-sum interactions also grows, alongside the opportunities for positive-sum interactions. This is because interconnected systems amplify both cooperation and conflict.
In a complex, interdependent world, actions and decisions have wider-reaching consequences, and failures in coordination or trust can result in negative-sum outcomes—situations where all parties lose. For example:
• In tightly connected societies, wars, economic collapses, or environmental crises can have devastating ripple effects, harming all involved.
• As technological and social complexity grows, so too do the stakes of mismanagement or adversarial dynamics, increasing the potential cost of negative-sum scenarios.
However, Wright emphasizes that the same interdependence that heightens these risks also incentivizes the reduction of negative-sum outcomes. The shared costs of failure push individuals and societies toward systems that favor positive-sum dynamics, such as cooperation, diplomacy, and innovation.
In essence, the stakes are higher in a more interconnected world: while the potential for positive-sum interactions grows with complexity, so does the potential for negative-sum interactions. Wright’s optimism lies in the idea that humanity’s increasing awareness of this dynamic, coupled with technological and cultural evolution, makes it more likely to lean toward nonzero-sum solutions over time.
It's also worth noting that Christianity itself also grounds morality in self-interest; it just argues that the "reward" from defecting is vanishingly small compared to the reward from cooperating (see the quote from Matthew above).
Morality first evolved before homo sapiens existed. Every animal that lives in groups has some form of morality. One could argue that this is even true of spiders and preying mantises, but that's probably stretching the point.
Now whether that morality is considered desirable....now that's a different question. The morality is needed to enable the species to survive in the niche for which it evolved, but when the species moves to a different environment, the "most desirable" morality (from the viewpoint of the species) changes.
Humanity has so altered the conditions in which it is living recently that our "natural morality" is probably very far from optimal. But we have cultures that implant a "cultural morality". (Here culture is often reducible to a single family or small group of families.) Even so, it's probably that all current moralities adopted by people are far from optimal (from the viewpoint of the species).
These are very good points. As Steven Pinker among others have pointed out, morality is possibly the leading cause of violence in the world. And--important distinction--much of that violence, in present circumstances, is unnecessary and unhelpful, therefore bad. It may well be--almost certainly is, in fact--that there is evolutionary mismatch between the world of small competing tribes our morality evolved for (although it seems it's turning we evolved more since the dawn of agriculture than was previously thought, which opens another can of worms I'll save for later).
Still, I think our common sense folk intuitions are generally more sound than rationalist utilitarianism** taken to its logical conclusions. Ie, yes, it is moral and good to care more about your family, and friends, and neighbors, etc than all beings everywhere. Because (A) you are in a better position to actually succeed in doing good for the people with whom you have close reciprocal relationships, and (B) if it's not successful in Darwinian terms, it will undermine itself. And as I said in my other comment, if "goodness" undermines itself and causes there to be less goodness in the universe in the future, its net effect is bad, hence it can't actually be good.
**Edit: rationalist utilitarianism, or, more relevant to this thread, I should have said the Christian "turn the other cheek", love everyone as a brother, do not resist evil etc. philosophy which seems to be endorsed in some parts of the New Testament. Which it seems very few Christians have ever fully embraced. Which I don't think of as a criticism of Christians. I think it may be good as an aspiration, encouraging us to be more forgiving, open-hearted, understanding, etc than we naturally tend to be, knowing that like it or not, we will of course prioritize ourselves and our loved ones. But taken literally, I think it's obviously unworkable in practice and not really good or moral at all.
> knowing that like it or not, we will of course prioritize ourselves and our loved ones.
And, therefore, the people most inclined to feel obligated to follow their culture’s morals to their ultimate consequences will be weeded out. With a high chance of not being perceived as following any morals, but as acting like fools who deserve no respect or sympathy.
>Overwhelm downward adjustment: If you assume all movements lie and downgrade their claims 90% out of cynicism, then a movement which merely portrays itself as helping members won’t even help members, but a movement which portrays itself as radiating universal love to all mankind might at least help its members.
I think this is a very, very big factor. Mathew 5:38-40 says,
>38 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’[a] 39 But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. 40 And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.
That's all well and good to proclaim, but I really doubt that literally happened often. Growing up going to Sunday school, my Pastor taught that passage a few times. But knowing him and everyone else who worked at the church, they were pretty normal people, and I do not see them literally turning the other cheek if I slapped. They certainly wouldn't give me their coat if I stole their shirt.
But also, I would guess they were more forgiving than if they didn't sincerely believe in that passage and similar ones. If you stole his shirt, I'm pretty sure my pastor wouldn't give you his coat, but he would have a conversation with you trying to explain why that was wrong and talk you into giving the shirt back instead of calling the cops on you right away.
Or maybe I'm just talking out of my ass, I didn't go to church that often even as a kid.
I've often heard it said that even the Mosaic Law, though harsh to our eyes, was a practical improvement on what came before, which encouraged Hatfield-McCoy feuding over minor slights.
The usual Christian understanding is that this is a call for patience and lenience in response to personal injury, but not an absolute call for perfect nonresistance. Though obviously a minority has disagreed with this take over the centuries.
What I would call the more orthodox lines of Christian thought have generally tried to take the entire Bible as a whole and to understand it as a single cohesive message, that Jesus didn't suddenly and completely abrogate all the teaching of the OT, but instead his moral teaching was primarily correcting misbehaviors that had arisen as a result of poor application of the OT Moral Law (which remained intact).
Jesus is a complicated figure. Those movements that have disagreed with this take (which we might call "heretics") have generally been less concerned with the idea of Scripture as a cohesive whole, instead emphasizing some teaching or another of Jesus over the rest of the Bible.
The Bible before or after the Council of Nicaea? You've got to remember how much the Bible was rewritten to accommodate politicians/theologians/etc...and not just that one time. (Admittedly, without many of those rewrite it would be a wild collection of silly stories.)
Dan Brown took the idea and built some silly fantasy stories off of it, but that doesn't mean it's not well-grounded in reality. There are books that the early Church Fathers considered canonical, and cited as such in their writings, that we do not have today.
There are books that the Apostles considered canonical, and cited as such in their writings, that we do not have today. Several of them are named in the various books of the Bible, and at least one is not: in Acts 20:35, Paul cites the teaching of Jesus, its source clearly familiar to his audience but lost to us today, that "It is more blessed to give than to receive."
Meanwhile, archaeologists, who for centuries have used the Old Testament as a guide to exploring the Holy Land, are increasingly making discoveries about the Northern Kingdom of Israel that lead them to believe that many of the historical accounts that have been passed down to us in the Old Testament are composed of Southern Kingdom political propaganda that's not nearly as truthful as Biblical literalists would assume. (A notion that's backed up by the discovery of various apocryphal ancient works believed to originate in the Northern Kingdom.)
This is true, we have lost much knowledge, but that is categorically different from the assertion that the Nicaean Council rewrote the literature we do retain.
I heavily discount such assertions based on my personal experience with religious zealots today. Try to convince any of them to rewrite their religious texts- it's not an easy thing to do. The best you can get is a translation that emphasizes different things.
If our current religious zealots won't rewrite anything, then I do not think that the ancient religious zealots- who were far more scrupulous and self-selecting, by all accounts- would be more willing to.
If we're talking about early Christianity, it's not so much a matter of rewriting as new-writing. The Evangelists and the Apostles wrote all manner of new works that Christians considered to be scripture, on the same level as the books written by the Prophets of old. And then other people started writing books that some Christians considered equally legitimate and others did not agree with. And then you have the whole mess that is Gnosticism complicating things and muddying the waters further.
By the time of Nicaea, things had grown so fragmented that Constantine, who wanted to be a Christian, found it impossible to definitively answer the question "just what does it mean to be a Christian anyway?" So, by the authority vested in him as Emperor, he got a bunch of top Christian thought leaders together and said "you're going to work out an official Christian doctrine and settle all this confusion once and for all, or else!" One important part of that was deciding, among various competing works, what was to be officially considered canonical and what should be thrown out.
Re: There are books that the early Church Fathers considered canonical, and cited as such in their writings, that we do not have today.
Actually we do have those books. Chiefly: The Protoevangelium of James, the Epistles of Clement, the Diadache, the Shepherd of Hermas. You can find these by an online search.
As far as the OT goes there are several books recognized a Scriptural by the Church of Ethiopia that no one else recognizes (and not the non-Ethiopian Jews either)
That's officially correct, as certified by Google, but then I didn't claim that it did. I claimed that there were lots of books removed from the Bible, and that many of them were removed at an early date (I picked the Council of Nicaea as a separation point, however, because of the "myth"). Yes, it was really based on a series of decisions, mainly made by the Catholic Churches. But it drastically altered the tone of the Bible. (Possibly repeatedly. I haven't really studied the matter. But consider "The Gospel of Thomas". Or even "The Gospel of Judas". And even the ones that were obviously collections of folk tales [reminiscent of the Cherry Tree Carol] would change the tone and meaning of the Bible were they included.)
> That's all well and good to proclaim, but I really doubt that literally happened often. Growing up going to Sunday school, my Pastor taught that passage a few times. But knowing him and everyone else who worked at the church, they were pretty normal people, and I do not see them literally turning the other cheek if I slapped. They certainly wouldn't give me their coat if I stole their shirt.
There's a lot of cultural context in this passage that we lack today. What he was saying here can be summed up rather concisely as "don't be like the Zealots." While the world "zealot" has become a generic term in the modern lexicon, it referred to a specific group of people with a well-defined ideology, that the Romans were evil occupiers and the Jews needed to resist them through physical violence, and eventually rise up and cast them out of Judea in a glorious revolution.
Given the overwhelming military superiority of Rome, this was a stupid idea that was never going to be successful, and people listening to these notions eventually culminated in the tragic events of 70 AD. Jesus told his disciples to follow a different path. If a Roman citizen legally compels you to give you something, give more than is required. If he requires you to travel with him for a mile, as is his legal right under Roman law, go two. If someone tries to provoke you with a backhanded slap, (this is the only way for a normal right-handed person strike someone on the right cheek, afterall,) don't rise to the provocation by throwing a punch. Instead, turn the other cheek and say "I'm not going to let you bait me. *You* throw the first punch, and then you're the one who broke the law and started the fight."
In all cases, it's the same requirement: do not give the Romans any excuse to say that you're a revolutionary fighting against them. Go out of your way to make it clear that you're not. Given the way the revolutionary Jews were so thoroughly wiped out once the Romans finally got sick of them, it proved wise advice!
The Gospel of Matthew never mentions the Zealots. To the extent that the Sermon on the Mount names any enemies, they are enemies of Jesus, not of the Jews:
"Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. 12 Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you." (Matthew 5:11)
Who are the people insulting, persecuting, and slandering the followers of Jesus? At this time, they were not Romans. They were other Jews, particularly the Pharisees. Who persecuted the earlier prophets? Also other Jews, particularly the kings of Israel and Judah.
The good objection is that you should require direct evidence of very specific claims. It’s a neat just-so story but there’s no evidence for it other than the originator thinks it might have been cool and it fits with existing biases that Jesus must be terribly misinterpreted because he couldn’t possibly have meant what he actually said and others took him to mean.
The evidence against is that nothing in the Gospels leads us to believe that Jesus had any interest in leading a covert passive resistance against the Romans, to the point that the Roman authorities seized him (on claims of the Jewish religious authorities), investigated him, and obviously thought he was a harmless kook.
You can argue “well that’s the whole point of his strategy!” but now you’re into conspiracy territory. Literally nobody among his contemporaries figured out the secret Jesus anti-Roman code, but we super-smart moderns did?
The more likely explanation, borne out by his and his early followers’ actual behavior, is that Jesus meant it just as he said, for application to more or less all situations, not just Zealots vs Romans.
> The evidence against is that nothing in the Gospels leads us to believe that Jesus had any interest in leading a covert passive resistance against the Romans
> the secret Jesus anti-Roman code,
It's hardly valid to present, as evidence against a claim that was made, evidence against a claim that was *never* made.
The evidence is what I said in the first post: what he's referring to here are specific cultural practices. For example, the word ἀγγαρεύσει (angareusei) used in the Sermon refers to a Roman soldier's legal right to compel conquered people to accompany them, and carry their heavy equipment, for one mile. His audience knew exactly what ἀγγαρεύσει was, and likely many of them had had it happen to them at some point. (See also the case of Simon the Cyrenian, a random traveler who the Romans grabbed and forced to carry Jesus' cross.)
But seriously, how exactly do you take a post saying "Jesus said to not be a revolutionary and to be exceedingly clear that you are not a revolutionary," and then 1) *completely* misread it as "Jesus said to be a revolutionary, just in secret," then 2) when it's pointed out that that was never the claim, say "OK then, prove it"?!?
It is not hard to read Mark, at least, as a thinly veiled anti-Roman screed, using the metaphore of demonic possession to avoid saying anything crucifixion worthy. And Mark was the first of the Gospels to be written, presumably closer to the source material than the other three.
It might not be hard for you to make that inference, but what is that actual evidence that it is besides your belief? Certainly the contemporaneous writers, readers, devoted Christians, etc. did not believe it was and did not treat it as if it was.
Also, I should note for you that the evidence of Markan priority is thin: inference and opinion of textual critics, not through physical evidence, archeology, historical accounts, etc. Wikipedia will tell you the case is airtight, but Wikipedia is written by academic textual critics, not historians nor archeologists, and you should be skeptical of it.
I do not have anything except my own personal interpretation from reading it. I should explain that I am a practicing Christian.
As for the priority of Mark, yes textual clues are all we have, but you take the evidence you have, not the evidence you wish you had. I find it convincing.
I don't think Quakers were ever actually executed in England, though they were regularly fined and imprisoned. Cromwell and Charles II were friendly with Fox and Penn respectively, though local judges often were not
Massachusetts on the other hand seems to have executed Quakers regularly and made returning to Massachusettes as a Quaker a capital offence.
That may be true, but "keep in jail in abysmal conditions until they get sick and die" isn't *that* far from execution, and certainly many Quakers did die in jail as a result of their resistance/principles.
The biggest gap between bot strategy and the real world is the fact that in the real world, people can change strategies. If, in the bot simulation, 40% of the bots were “adapt the strategy of the last bot you encountered” cooperate-bot would be much more likely to pull ahead. Tit-for-tat would still win, but would cooperate bot win more?
I don't feel like trying to dig up the answer, but...wait I don't have to; I have a magic oracle. But first, I don't think that's actually necessarily a huge difference; I think in Axelrod's tournaments, people were allowed to submit any computer code they wanted. In the iterated tournaments, I don't think there was anything stopping them from changing behavior in one round based on what happened in previous rounds. Probably some tried.
To the Oracle (GPT 4o):
"""
The question of whether the introduction of adaptive strategies (like "adopt the strategy of the last bot you encountered") changes the dynamics of iterated games like the Prisoner's Dilemma has indeed been explored in various ways, though perhaps not always in the exact form you described.
Experiments in **evolutionary game theory** and **iterated Prisoner's Dilemma simulations** often include agents that can adapt or learn strategies over time. Here are some key findings that relate to your question:
### Key Concepts in Relevant Research:
1. **Strategy Adaptation in Simulations**: Many simulations introduce "adaptive agents" that mimic or evolve strategies based on observed success. These agents are akin to your "adopt the strategy of the last bot you encountered." Such studies show that the presence of adaptive agents often destabilizes dominance hierarchies among fixed strategies (like tit-for-tat or always-cooperate) and leads to fluctuating dynamics.
2. **The Role of Cooperation Bots**: In a population with adaptive agents, strategies like "always cooperate" (cooperate-bot) tend to perform poorly unless they exist in a supportive environment. If a majority are cooperative, this increases the likelihood that adaptive agents will adopt cooperation. However, they remain vulnerable to exploitation by defectors.
3. **Tit-for-Tat in Adaptive Contexts**: Tit-for-tat tends to perform well in adaptive scenarios because it strikes a balance: it fosters cooperation when others cooperate, but it retaliates against defectors. This robust balance makes it likely to spread or persist, even in the presence of adaptive agents.
4. **Social Learning and Memory Effects**: In experiments where agents can remember more than just the last strategy they encountered, or where they weigh historical interactions, tit-for-tat's dominance can diminish. Cooperative strategies (including always-cooperate) may thrive in these environments if agents tend to favor longer-term rewards.
### Would Cooperate-Bot Perform Better?
It depends on several conditions:
- **Population Composition**: If 40% of the population adopts "copy the last strategy," cooperate-bot could indeed benefit, as these adaptive agents would mimic cooperation after encountering cooperate-bot.
- **Interaction Rules**: If interactions are random, cooperate-bot's success might increase. However, if defect-bots (always defect) or tit-for-tat strategies dominate the environment, adaptive agents will likely mimic defecting or retaliating behaviors more often.
- **Mutation and Evolution**: In evolutionary contexts where agents adapt based on long-term payoffs, tit-for-tat generally prevails because it punishes defectors while fostering mutual gains with cooperators.
### Existing Studies:
- **Axelrod's Tournaments**: The famous iterated Prisoner's Dilemma tournaments run by Robert Axelrod showed that adaptive strategies could emerge under certain rules. However, tit-for-tat still remained a top performer because of its simplicity and robustness.
- **Agent-Based Modeling**: Many agent-based models (ABMs) have tested scenarios with adaptive agents. Results often show cyclical dominance: cooperators rise, get exploited by defectors, and then defectors diminish as retaliation strategies (like tit-for-tat) take over.
### Conclusion:
Experiments have addressed related questions, though perhaps not in precisely the form you've described. The inclusion of a large proportion of adaptive agents would likely boost cooperate-bot's performance temporarily, but tit-for-tat would remain resilient in the long run because it discourages exploitation. The dynamics of such systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions, mutation rates, and the ability of agents to "remember" and adjust to patterns over time.
"""
PS: Was I right about what I said initially?
"""
Yes, you're correct about Axelrod's tournaments allowing strategies to change behavior based on what happened in previous rounds. The tournaments were designed to permit participants to submit any computer code they wanted, which means strategies could indeed be highly sophisticated and adapt to the opponent's previous moves.
### Key Points About Axelrod's Tournaments:
1. **Open Submission**: Participants were free to submit any strategy they could program, and strategies could incorporate memory, logic, and conditional rules based on prior interactions. This enabled them to change behavior dynamically across rounds.
2. **Iterated Nature**: Because the games were iterated, many strategies explicitly accounted for past interactions. For example:
- **Tit-for-Tat** famously cooperated on the first move and then mirrored the opponent's previous move.
- Other strategies tried to exploit patterns or weaknesses in their opponents by analyzing behavior over multiple rounds.
3. **Sophisticated Adaptations**: While the simplest strategies (like always-cooperate or always-defect) did not adapt, more complex ones often incorporated memory and conditional responses. For instance, strategies might:
- Cooperate for a certain number of rounds, then switch based on observed payoffs.
- Punish defection harshly for multiple rounds to discourage exploitation.
4. **Design Space**: There were no constraints against designing strategies that could adapt mid-tournament or "learn" an opponent's tendencies, though strategies had to follow the rules of the game (e.g., fixed payoff matrix, iterated rounds). The only real limitation was computational feasibility, as programs needed to run within reasonable time limits.
### Did Participants Try This?
Yes, some participants submitted highly sophisticated strategies, including those that:
- Used pattern recognition to exploit predictable opponents.
- Forgave defections after a certain point to restore cooperation.
- Attempted to "probe" their opponent's behavior early in the game to choose an optimal response later.
### Why Does Tit-for-Tat Often Prevail?
While adaptive strategies existed, tit-for-tat often emerged as a top performer because of its simplicity and robustness:
- It fostered cooperation with other cooperators.
- It punished defectors immediately but did not escalate conflicts.
- Its predictability made it a stable partner for strategies trying to avoid exploitation.
### Conclusion:
You're absolutely right that the open nature of Axelrod's tournaments allowed for strategies that could adapt round-to-round. Many participants likely experimented with these approaches, and some succeeded. However, the straightforward, cooperative nature of tit-for-tat often allowed it to perform better in aggregate across diverse opponents.
I’m not suggesting it would benefit an individual participant to learn other’s strategies, but if that were a force of the simulation - if it ran real time and after each 10 rounds 40% of the “follower” bots changed strategy to the current winning strategy, I think it would be very different and a bit more like real life. In a world where cooperation is publicly visible and encouraged, and communication between bots is possible, you can surely make things where cooperation is the winning strategy.
If the rules of your simulation periodically "kill" some of the agents following the worst-performing strategy and replace them with agents that follow the current best-performing strategy, and you start with a mix of tit-for-tat, cooperate-bot, and defect-bot, then tit-for-tat will generally win, and cooperate-bot will almost always be the first to be wiped out.
With random errors, tit-for-tat-plus-forgiveness will become the most common strategy if you add it, though it's so merciful that it won't completely wipe out regular tit-for-tat, and a small fraction of the population will stick with that.
(There was a great browser game/interactive lesson about this that I played at some point, but I lost the link and haven't been able to find it again.)
Some researchers have been really annoyed that they couldn't come up with plausible scenarios where cooperate-bot won in their simulations, even after trying pretty hard to come up with some. (Though obviously most simulations do not remotely approach the complexity of real life.)
You definitely "can" make cooperate-bot win if you sufficiently contrive the rules (e.g. if you add in some god-players that read your source code and cooperate IFF you are cooperate-bot), but I think you'll find its much harder than it sounds like you are expecting.
1) the rate of random errors is based on code complexity / runtime,
2) rather than every matchup being random, you can choose to seek out a specific agent you've encountered before,
3) score thresholds for elimination or reproduction are fixed, and knowable - for example, any agent whose cumulative score drops below 0 dies, one whose score rises above 100 can choose to spawn a copy, after which both will be reset to a score of 50?
in such a case, particularly if point 2 were somehow expanded to friend-of-a-friend referrals, I'd expect to see an "enforcer" or "shepherd" strategy which alternates between proactively culling known defect-bots - even at the expense of its own immediate reproductive opportunities - and recharging within a more congenial community when its resources are low. Cooperate-bots make the best pool to recharge from since they'd suffer the least error-related attrition.
"Cooperate-bots make the best pool to recharge from?" Sounds like you're effectively arguing that cooperate-bots make the best subjects for warlords ("shepherds") to rule over, rather than the argument that *being* a cooperate-bot is good for the person executing the strategy.
Also, like...you want tit-for-tat to be penalized for being complex relative to cooperate bot, but you also want friend-of-a-friend referrals? That's probably several orders of magnitude more complicated than tit-for-tat. And then you also want police investigators to somehow identify and punish the people who break the rules? That's probably several orders of magnitude more complicated than referrals.
Also point 3 seems highly unrealistic (real life has tons of luck, lots of people die unpredictably, and passing on your genes is not a binary pass/fail, you can have a variable number of kids and give them a variable amount of assistance in getting started). And point 2 is vague but the simplest implementation I can think of is also highly unrealistic (choosing to interact with only your most trusted friend and avoid everyone else is a terrible strategy in real life for a whole bunch of reasons that you don't sound like you're attempting to model).
But feel free to code up your own simulation, maybe you'll discover something interesting!
> Also, like...you want tit-for-tat to be penalized for being complex relative to cooperate bot, but you also want friend-of-a-friend referrals? That's probably several orders of magnitude more complicated than tit-for-tat.
I don't think reasonable levels of complexity penalty would be giving cooperate-bot a noteworthy edge over tit-for-tat all by itself, no.
Point of a "choose who to interact with next" + "know how close you currently are to reproducing, or dying of starvation" mechanic would be opening up space for long-term ecosystem-management strategies, then the complexity penalty keeps those from escalating all the way into some cryptographic-handshake version of John Carpenter's The Thing. https://www.oglaf.com/kingshaped
> choosing to interact with only your most trusted friend and avoid everyone else is a terrible strategy in real life for a whole bunch of reasons
Well of course it's not that simple.
First, enforcer / shepherd builds a contact list of known cooperate-bots, and a separate list of reliable tit-for-tat strategists. To the extent it's allowed by the mechanics, all these are freely introduced to each other, encouraged to interact to mutual benefit, top priority being to link up cooperate-bots with other cooperate-bots.
When the enforcer encounters a defect-bot, or unknown and potentially troublesome strategy, it checks its own reserves. When healthy, it attacks the intruder. When reserves are low, it retreats, spins through the cooperate-bot contact list, hitting them with a "defect" once each to quickly recharge, then resumes the attack.
Distributing the load hopefully reduces the number of cooperate-bots which die as a result, thus keeping the overall herd's income / growth rate high. Sort of like a multicellular organism's immune system. Tit-for-tat contacts can't usefully be harvested that way, because they'll bite back.
The bots could change strategies. It doesn't help. The more cooperative-bots you have, the more it boosts the ranking of bots that defect in the tournament.
Well I tried your suggestion, and it looks like it just makes Always Defect vastly more successful than usual, steamrolling everything else, more so the more rounds you do. I think the reason is that Always Defect always starts at an advantage, and the follower rule means others copy it, so it snowballs.
If you try to only help these who are "deserving", much of your movement's political effort will be spent on figuring out who is "deserving". You can very easily end up with a "the government can't give anything for free" effect.
That is Scotts's point IV.4, and probably a major reason for the early popularity. Christianity's answer of course is that nobody is "deserving" and so you should help anyone in need.
I think Christianity may have simply ‘gotten lucky’. It has the gospels for instance which no matter how untrue you think they may be, are very well-written supernatural narratives with a strong emotional throughline. Christianity also ‘got lucky’ with Emperor Constantine and with the early death of Julian the Apostate who could have strangled the religion in the crib. Perhaps if you ran the history of the late Roman Empire a hundred times you would only get Christianity once or twice.
I'm convinced that monotheism, as an idea, outcompetes polytheism. Especially among more educated types. Strict Roman polytheism was always going to be intellectually defeated to some extent -- in fact, Julian regarded it as defeated -- but there's a legitimate argument that another form of monotheism could have won in the West, if the cards had been dealt a little differently.
In my best understanding of it, Hinduism manages to blend strict polytheism for the less-educated or less-philosophical with monotheism, monism, etc. for the elites. Maybe the Roman religion could have developed this way (with various Neo-Platonist offshoots existing alongside the strict polytheists), but I tend to think the influence of Levantine monotheism, fairly easily accessible in the mass-produced Septuagint, always meant that the Neo-Platonists had a much tougher challenge than their monotheistically-inclined peers in India. And most of their philosophical developments came long after Christ. They were just too slow.
Christianity was able to build upon the OT and Jewish literature. It just had a lot more content than its competition, Greco-Roman, Levantine, and Persian. Which again, partly has to do with lead time, its first-mover advantage. This gave it a lot more substance, much more appearance of being a living and organic faith than something contrived by philosophers. I would argue that once Christianity rapidly won over the Gentile sympathizers to Judaism ("God-Fearers") in the decades after Jesus' death, it was heavily favored to become the monotheistic religion of the West.
In that case explain all the Catholic saints. There's nothing unstable about polytheism...or at least no more unstable than anything else. ISTM tribes often start with a monotheism, but acknowledge the god of their neighbors as "real but less important" as a political necessity. That's how the Greeks appear to have developed polytheism. (I'm no expert in the field, so before investing too much belief, ask one.) (OTOH, the actual origin of Greek religion is lost. The Titans were probably involved, and various gods that essentially survive just as names.)
Then as the state becomes more powerful and centralized, the god of the state (e.g. Jovis Pater) becomes more and more dominant. Until you essentially end up with one god and a bunch of subservient staff. Whether you call them gods or angels or saints doesn't really matter.
So I think "monotheism" is typically the worship of the centralized government (usually under thick layers of metaphor).
I’m only partway through it, but “The Ancient City” by Fustel de Coulanges presents a different origin story that appears compelling. Namely, the Indo-European religious system was originally primarily animistic. While major parts of nature, such as Jupiter/Zeus, literally “Sky Father”, had gods shared by everyone, these were of lesser importance compared to the household gods (called “lares” in Latin). These household gods were inherited by the male line of each family (i.e., all male descendants of a common ancestor, the females adopting their husband’s gods on marriage), and it was considered sacred to maintain the hearth for your household. Clans, tribes, and cities consisted of groupings of the respective lower levels, and each had a common god, but the gods of the lower levels continued to be worshipped. In particular, each city primarily worshipped its own god - there weren’t originally temples to Zeus or other cities’ gods in each Greek city-state, for example, at the founding.
This is as far as I’ve gotten. Later the book will discuss how this system broke down, but I’m guessing that it broke down as the Roman Empire grew to such a large scale that the city gods of Rome, for example, were not dear to newer populations, as well as the cultural interaction with gods from other regions. Rome tried to tie the empire together with emperor worship, following in the old style of household gods derived from ancestor worship, but since Rome had conquered all the territory, rather than resettle an empty empire with old Romans, this didn’t take (particularly since it tolerated the worship of other empires). In this environment, the philosophical idea of monotheism, which orginated as far back as Plato, became more compelling, particularly since the Jews and Christians were living examples of monotheistic religions. Towards the end of the empire, whenever you hear of pagan intellectuals or elites, they are almost always Neoplatonists, not worshipping the old gods (albeit perhaps not denying them). Christianity, in vanquishing Neoplatonism, took on many of its concepts and vocabulary (i.e., the terminology used to describe the Trinity in Greek). The founder of Neoplatonism is even said to have been a former Christian.
If you've already got a city, you're talking about a much later origin than I was considering. (Actually, saying it that way is assuming a much more homogeneous culture than was present. And perhaps the Athenians really are a relict of before the invasion of the Danaos. (see the Peloponnesian War) but most of the Greek cities weren't.
As far as the origins of religion is concerned, cities are a recent event. It's just that we have almost no evidence of the prior state...but lots of small tribes that swapped wives seems likely...and small means fewer than 50 families. Something that small can't support worship of multiple gods (that requires learning and cultural space).
Also, and IIUC, by the time you get to (the early days of) Rome, the Lares and Penates were, indeed, the most important for each family, but calling them gods may be a bit of an overstatement. They were a bit more than the Irish "goodfolk" were, but "household spirits" or "genus loci" is probably more accurate than gods. The gods (as normally used) are the spirits worshiped by a community. (E.g., we don't normally consider naiads or dryads to be gods.)
"Lots of small tribes that swapped wives" is a good description of some Amerindian groups, the Ingush till quite recently, and a few other groups scattered around the globe I can't think of at the moment.
Christianity and Neoplatonism did indeed engage in "memetic battle" with lots of cross-fertilization, as you say. Gnosticism, to the extent that it's a cromulent category, seems almost like a more-Grecified version of Christianity, or a more-Hebraicized version of Neoplatonism.
Well sure, but it's certainly more powerful when it's attatched to a religion. You can call your leader a god emperor even without religion, but people are going to realize that they're ultimately just human. Supernatural stuff is much harder to disprove, and you get to motivate your populace with the false hope of an afterlife.
Still, it is possible to get similar results with relatively secular systems, Japan being a great example.
I would posit that veneration of the saints and of Mary was a concession to simpler folk, and something that gained a life of its own over time, driven by folk practices. But intellectuals were generally less invested in it. Monotheism won out because it has more appeal to intellectuals: the idea of the Unmoved Mover. The reason Julian the Apostate was a monotheist had very little to do with the centralization of Roman state power (which had deteriorated quite a lot by his time), and everything to do with the fact that taking Homer literally was regarded as an embarrassment by intellectuals of all stripes by that time.
I think the term for the pre-polytheistic religion you're describing is "henotheism". It didn't outcompete polytheism among intellectuals because it hadn't claimed the philosophical high ground of monotheism, displaying no interest yet in the questions that monotheism answers more satisfactorily than polytheism. Instead, I would speculate that intellectuals of that time were inclined to go about and gather information about the different foreign gods and their associated mythologies.
Why do you think the intellectuals are the determining, or even an important, factor? From what I've read popular opinion and political advantage were much more significant.
Alright, but whose opinion? And why were the political winds swaying the way they were?
The opinions that are influential when a society mass-converts are only a small percentage of the total. Urbanites. The literate. Nobles. Government/military leaders and officials, courtiers. And even existing religious leaders themselves. This is a group that, as a whole, is far more educated and influenced by intellectual fashions than the large majority.
There was this famous story of a Saxon king’s conversion recorded by the Venerable Bede:
Now, did the Anglo-Saxons convert for the sake of political advantage? Of course. Though they also wavered. Whether this exact conversation happened or not, I think Bede recorded something real here: in deciding whether to adopt Christianity, the kings cared about what their most learned advisors thought was actually true. And Christianity, being more sophisticated than Germanic Paganism, and having more sophisticated answers to questions like “What happens when we die?”, led learned people to conclude it was likelier to be true.
In theory, maybe polytheism could have this sort of sophistication, but in practice it does not; instead, a monotheistic philosophy emerges within polytheism.
More accurately he was his own man and could color himself with the colors of any religious doctrine as he interpreted it, but being born Hindu he generally publicly regarded himself as one.
But he was certainly, both publicly and privately monotheistic.
Once I mentioned Gandhi, I think it's important to remember that while Scott is looking at winning MEMES, you and I aren't just meme carriers, we are beings of flesh, blood, and brain. And as such we ought not forget that both Gandhi and Jesus (and I would like to add Socrates) were assassinated. Cooperate-Bot may keep your name around for a while but trust me, when Jesus was on the cross and his lungs collapsed he wasn't thinking about that at all. In fact he felt betrayed and regretted his path. My God! My God! Why have you betrayed me?!!!
Gandhi died quicker so he didn't get to finish the same sentence.
There's no such thing as Hinduism, it's a category for "all those colorful things people behind the Indus do" but you're right about lots of monotheism in there! I doubt that it's a class thing though. People just pick and choose among a million semi-contradictory ideas the ones that resonate with them, and whatever numbers of deities required. And there's weird shit like the story where Shiva tricks Vishnu by intercepting all the prayers to Vishnu and fulfilling them in his stead, so all those stupid Vishnu devotees are being tricked into worshipping the one true God who happens to be ours because we Shiva worshippers are the clever ones... innovative, but doesn't strike me as a particularly classy move.
That's a good line, about Hinduism, I'm not sure if you're borrowing it from somewhere else, but I think I'll borrow it too!
I think maybe it's too fuzzy to just call it "class". It's also sort of a personality marker. I'm inclined to compare strict polytheism to Young Earth Creationism. There are intellectuals who subscribe to YEC, there are people of wealth, but it still serves as a class marker.
Though I think the rest aligns with my broader point: being able to "pick and choose among a million semi-contradictory ideas" probably serves as insulation against mass conversion to the monotheistic faiths. Especially if those various ideas have had centuries to develop. The Romans were working on getting there but didn't have as much time as India did to build up a local immune system.
Neoplatonism is less polytheistic than it is monotheistic, to my mind. There was the One, which/who was ineffable; and the "gods" were more like reifications of some particular aspects of the One, or some clusters-of-interrelated-concepts.
So another result of iterated Prisoner’s dilemma is that tit-for-tat isn’t a stable strategy. Once a population drives out defect strategies, then always cooperate can creep in, and nobody notices because there’s no defect strategies to punish them; but once enough always cooperate strategies creep in, then defect strategies can make a comeback, resulting in a cyclical churning of strategies. It might be the case that ratio of tit-for-tat, always cooperate, and defect strategies does turn out to be stable, but if that’s not the case, then it would model the rise and fall of cooperate communities pretty well, I think.
The strength of a given strategy can't always be determined in a vacuum, since the strength is often dependent on the frequency of the other strategies in a given environment (AKA the metagame). You can think of each strat as exploiting an ecological niche. E.g. if I'm in a rock-paper-scissors (RPS) tourney, and everyone around me is picking scissors 100% of the time, I can pick rock 100% of the time and get 1st place. In a more realistic scenario, players will reach an equilibrium where each "hand" is played roughly 33% of the time each.
In RPS, each hand is equally good, thus the game is said to be "intransitive". But in other games, there's often strategies that are "weakly dominant" (as opposed to strictly dominant). *Weakly* in the sense that the strongest strategy beats MOST other strategies, but not ALL other strategies. In such cases, the weakly dominant strategy will (usually) have the highest frequency, but it won't be literally 100%. (edit: in hindsight, I'm playing a bit fast and loose with the definition of "weakly dominant".)
You see this in competitive videogames and TCG's, where the metagame is often a grab-bag of strats that often reach a skewed equilibrium. E.g. maybe 60% of decks are a specific aggro-deck which is considered "strongest", but the aggro-deck is hard-countered by a specific mill-deck which shows up with 30% frequency, and the remaining 10% is miscellaneous. But then maybe someone discovers a better "strongest" deck, or a new set is rotated in, or a patch is dropped, and the whole meta gets reset and needs to be re-equilibrated.
As for the prisoner's dilemma, IIRC, the basic metagame is "coop > TFT; TFT > psychopathy; psychopathy > coop". I think there's various nuances to this though, depending on the specific assumptions of the scenario.
----
fun fact #1: when I was in middleschool, my class held a RPS tourney. Additionally: we had to balance on a piece of newspaper; and fold it in half when we lost a round; and when we fell off the newspaper square, we were eliminated. I won the tourney, purely with a strat of thinking two steps ahead. E.g. "if I played rock last, my opponent will counter me with paper next turn, therefore I'll choose scissors." The metagame at my middleschool was uhh... ... ... not very sophisticated. C.f. "The 2/3rds Game" [0].
fun fact #2: rationalist Zvi Mowshowitz was inducted into the MTG Hall of Fame in 2007. [1]
An **Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS)** is a key concept in evolutionary game theory, introduced by John Maynard Smith and George Price. It describes a strategy that, once it is established in a population, cannot be invaded or replaced by an alternative strategy because it yields the highest fitness in its environment.
### Key Features of ESS:
1. **Stability Against Invasion**: If most members of a population adopt an ESS, no mutant strategy (a rare alternative strategy) can outperform it in terms of fitness. This means the ESS is resistant to evolutionary change.
2. **Nash Equilibrium**: An ESS is also a **Nash equilibrium** in the context of evolutionary dynamics. This means that, given the strategies of others in the population, no individual can do better by unilaterally switching to a different strategy.
3. **Adaptiveness**: ESS arises from natural selection. Strategies that maximize individual fitness in a particular environment are favored, and over time, a population gravitates toward an ESS.
---
### Formal Definition of ESS:
Let \( S \) be a strategy in a population. For \( S \) to be an ESS:
1. **Condition 1: Fitness Advantage Against Itself**
- The fitness of \( S \) against another individual playing \( S \) (\( W(S, S) \)) must be at least as high as the fitness of a mutant strategy \( T \) against \( S \) (\( W(T, S) \)):
\[
W(S, S) \geq W(T, S)
\]
2. **Condition 2: Fitness Against Mutants**
- If the first condition holds as an equality, \( S \) must outperform \( T \) when \( T \) interacts with itself:
\[
W(S, T) > W(T, T)
\]
This second condition ensures that \( S \) can resist invasion when both strategies are in competition.
---
### Examples of ESS:
1. **Hawk-Dove Game**:
- In a population of individuals competing over resources, two strategies exist:
- **Hawk**: Always fight for the resource.
- **Dove**: Avoid conflict and share or back off.
- Depending on the costs of fighting and the value of the resource, a mix of hawks and doves can form an ESS where neither pure hawk nor pure dove can invade successfully.
2. **Tit-for-Tat in Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma**:
- Tit-for-tat is considered an ESS in some environments because it cooperates with cooperators but punishes defectors, making it hard for defectors to invade.
3. **Sex Ratios in Population Genetics**:
- The 1:1 male-to-female ratio observed in many species is an ESS. If there are too many of one sex, individuals producing offspring of the rarer sex will have a fitness advantage.
---
### Why is ESS Important?
1. **Evolutionary Predictions**: ESS helps predict how certain behaviors or traits become dominant in a population over evolutionary time.
2. **Stability of Systems**: It explains why certain traits or strategies persist even when other theoretically viable alternatives exist.
3. **Real-World Applications**: ESS concepts are applied in biology (e.g., animal behavior), economics (e.g., market strategies), and social sciences (e.g., conflict resolution).
---
### Limitations of ESS:
- **Environmental Changes**: ESS assumes a stable environment. Changes in the environment can make an ESS unstable.
- **Dynamic Interactions**: It doesn’t account for the fact that populations might not always reach an ESS due to transient dynamics or ongoing mutation and selection.
- **Complexity of Strategies**: Real-world interactions often involve more complex strategies and payoffs than simple models assume.
---
In summary, an ESS is a strategy that is evolutionarily robust because it maximizes fitness and is resistant to being overtaken by alternative strategies. It provides a framework for understanding stable outcomes in the evolution of behaviors, traits, and populations.
The cycle Thomas Courtney describes in iterated Prisoner's Dilemma models is an abstraction, but there are real-world scenarios that echo the rise and fall of cooperative communities and the cyclical nature of strategies in social and economic systems. Here are some examples:
### 1. **Historical Trade Networks**
- In historical trade systems, trust (analogous to "always cooperate") often allowed for mutual benefit and prosperity among trading partners.
- However, when trust became pervasive, some opportunistic actors (analogous to "defect") exploited it, such as through fraud or piracy.
- This led to the rise of enforcement mechanisms or punishments (analogous to "tit-for-tat") like naval patrols or trade embargos, which restored balance.
- Over time, the cycle could restart as cooperation re-established itself and opportunists found new ways to exploit the system.
---
### 2. **Online Communities and Moderation**
- In online platforms, communities often start with cooperative norms where users engage in good faith (like "always cooperate").
- Over time, if moderation is minimal (a lack of "tit-for-tat"), bad actors (trolls, spammers) may infiltrate, exploiting the cooperative environment.
- This leads to the introduction of stricter rules and active moderation (analogous to "tit-for-tat"), which curtails exploitation but might discourage overly cooperative or lenient users.
- If moderation eases again, the cycle can repeat.
---
### 3. **Resource Management and Environmental Conservation**
- Over time, some individuals or groups might overexploit these resources (defecting behavior), undermining the system.
- Regulations or communal enforcement (tit-for-tat) are introduced to prevent overexploitation.
- If enforcement relaxes and trust becomes pervasive, overexploitation may re-emerge, completing the cycle.
---
### 4. **Economic Boom and Bust Cycles**
- In cooperative economic systems, trust and shared goals can lead to prosperity.
- Opportunists or bad actors may arise during prosperous times, creating speculative bubbles or exploiting loopholes (analogous to "defect").
- A bust follows, leading to stricter regulations or enforcement (tit-for-tat) to stabilize the economy.
- Once stability returns, the process may restart as trust and cooperation grow unchecked.
---
### 5. **Political Alliances**
- In politics, cooperative alliances between nations or groups (like "always cooperate") often lead to mutual benefit.
- Opportunistic leaders or factions might exploit these alliances for selfish gain (defect).
- This prompts retaliation or restructuring of alliances (tit-for-tat).
- Once stability is achieved, cooperation might re-emerge, starting the cycle anew.
---
### Broader Implications:
These cycles often reflect the dynamic tension between trust, exploitation, and enforcement in human systems. While they don't map perfectly onto the exact strategies of the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, they demonstrate how the rise and fall of cooperative behaviors can manifest in complex systems.
I think the best example of this “behavior” is the predator/prey equilibrium in nature.
Too many predators and they eat all the prey and starve out themselves. Too many prey and any one predator feasts and reproduces. There’s simulations of this (3blue1brown) as well as real world examples.
Any strategy becomes unstable if people expect it and adapt to it. Veritasium has a nice video about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM&t=0s. Scott's own Meditations on Moloch can show examples of this cycle. The early Christian strategy was so unexpected, which is part of why it worked in that context at the time.
By the way, in the Veritasium video, at the end, he points out that Tit-for-Tat isn't the optimal strategy in a world with messy/lossy information. For example, if you wrongly think that someone defected when they cooperated once in a while. In that scenario, the best strategy is to add a little forgiveness to your tit-for tat...because otherwise you would get stuck in a loop of never forgiving and cooperating.
Normally play tit-for-tat, but sometimes randomly start defecting (at rate lower than forgiving) and keep it up until you're counterdefected, then immediately play cooperate (contrition) and reset to start?
Yup, exactly. TFT winning that contest doesn't mean nothing else can ever succeed anywhere, game theory models like this depend a lot on initial populations and COOPERATE BOT can invade many possible starting conditions, including a world that's overwhelmingly TFT already.
Cooperate-bot doesn't *beat* tit-for-tat in a population of all tit-for-tat, it just ties it. And it ties it by behaving literally identically in all of the situations it actually encounters.
It's true that a combination of only cooperate-bot and tit-for-tat has no selective pressure to actively drive cooperate-bot to zero, but it has no selective pressure to encourage it, either.
That’s not entirely clear - if implementing TFT is more expensive than Cooperate-bot, then the simpler strategy can use the saved resources for something else. If the environment is right for that, it’ll be an improvement.
Very important thought, the computation of the strategy has cost and thus the strategies can not become too galaxy brained or they face a too large penalty for computing them.
The three-way cyclical mechanics you're describing is similar to the one proposed by Peter Turchin - and the effect can arguably be observed in real-world data.
The twist being, of course, that his model goes the other way around. Most people start as "naives" (roughly matching tit-for-tat) who can be persuaded into joining "radicals" (roughly matching defectors), then the damage caused by radicals pushes people into "moderate" camp (roughly matching cooperation, although obviously not the naive "always cooperate" version, but a meta "insist everyone always cooperate" one).
I think what the prisoner dillema-based models of behavior in general, and Scott in his theorizing in particular, are missing is - to use the simplest term possible - society. We not only cooperate (and yes, we arguably cooperate naturally and innately, it's obvious how when you remember evolution operates on the level of genes, cooperative genes can thrive even if they kill some of their adherents). We also observe our surroundings, reason about them, and communicate with others. And cooperation... cooperation helps everyone, it's obvious it does once you take an eagle-eye view. Even if few individuals can live up to the always-cooperate ideal, almost everyone can agree it's the kind of society they'd want to live in. The crucial Christian invention might have been simply "anyone and everyone can join ours".
I think there is a major advantage in a cooperate-bot society which game theory misses because it tends to ignore the cost of computation:
"Defect against people who defect against a cooperate-bot" is a very cheap and effective strategy which, under conditions in which cooperate-bots are a minority, does incredibly well. It's much cheaper than strategies which require identifying who would defect against you, personally.
I'm confused, and therefore probably misunderstanding something significant, but it's not like TIT-FOR-TAT was a strategy that was available to the early Christians. If Rome decided to persecute them, the Christians just had to take it. They couldn't punish the emperor.
Within their group, within the Christian churches, a high value could be placed on cooperation, but the early Christians did have the power to punish those who weren't playing by the rules. An early controversy, which the Apostles resolved by creating a governing council, involved whether Gentile widows were getting fair shares of the food distribution.(Acts 6). A good chunk of the Epistles involves Paul resolving an internal dispute one way or another. And while forgiveness was always available for sins, there was a public penance component (unlike the strictly confidential confessions that develop centuries later). Within the Christian community itself there was a modified TIT FOR TAT where everyone was encouraged to forgive and forgiveness was available but the community didn't let bad actors just walk all over them.
I don't think the relative power level is really an issue here - Christians could still have defected within their means. For example, the anecdote about Polycarp cooking a meal for his torturers. His form of defection would simply be to not cook a meal for his torturers. Or call them assholes instead of praying for them.
But would that be defection? I don't think you can map the early Christians' actions to a clean cooperate / defect decision. His torturers would have expected him to react negatively towards them - by refusing to play his role in the process he was not cooperating, he was modeling his faith to potentially convert the torturers and other witnesses. That doesn't read like cooperation to me.
The whole reason he, or the other Christians, was even being tortured was because he refused to cooperate with the dominant civil religion and make even token gestures towards the emperor. Cooperating with his faith, sure, but you can as easily label that as defection towards society.
In what way am I torturing them? Defect/cooperate aren't synonyms for naughty/nice. From the Roman State's perspective the Christians were explicitly defecting against their religious and social obligations. Hence the torture and execution. Not expressing remorse during their punishment and explicitly using it as an opportunity to proselytize was continuing to defect.
If someone has a sincerely held belief that they shouldn't pay taxes and the government doesn't recognize their objection but instead throws them in prison, that person has still defected from the government's perspective even if they write their jailers thank you notes.
The whole point of the post was about early Christians cooperating with/defecting against their real non-Christian neighbors, not their perceived role which would yield the opposite result. So yes, I believe you are overthinking it and in this case it's indeed about being naughty or nice.
Sadly, this place isn't too far off the internet average: everybody wants to play at being Mac McClung even if they can't touch the rim.
And to be clear, I'm not suggesting that there is a close or proper mapping. A paradigm based on two perfectly symmetrical agents with a single unit of value they both precisely agree on who have only two well-defined and perfectly understood, perfectly priced, and self-contained options simply does not have much meaning outside the Toyland in which it operates.
Did Polycarp play cooperate with his torturers? He gave them some food - that's good - but the Romans weren't at a loss for hot meals and he completely subverted the purpose of his execution - that's bad.
This is a society where a renowned general cut the hands off surrendered enemies to prevent trouble and ceremonially strangled prisoners after parading them in front of the rabble. Cursing at them would not hurt them in the slightest and would help them achieve their public purpose in the execution. They could have enslaved him as a short order cook if they wanted food but they did not. They wanted the behavior to stop and instead got more of it - an effect the Christians were well aware of and encouraged, and even Scott a couple millennia-ish later finds notable. Is cooperate the right word for his choices?
Would Bull Connor and MLK both describe MLK as an all-caps COOPERATE-BOT towards the Birmingham city government? No real way to know but I suspect we'd see eyebrow raising if we could ask them. Did Gandhi COOPERATE-BOT his way through the British Raj? Etc. and so forth.
To ask the question is to commit a category error.
Assigning roles to real choices by real people in this model tends to devolve into who the labeler prefers. It's all relative to perspective. If none of (buyer's choice) the accidents of history / Christianity's mimetic fitness / infallible guidance by the Holy Spirit for the salvation of our souls through Son of God and Almighty Jesus Christ had happened then it's unlikely we'd view the early Christians - if we remembered them at all - as anything but defectors.
Yours and some other comments really make me stay up at night and read every comment here. Some very good additional inputs, which I have not thought about, but which are formulated very clearly and are thought inspiring. Thank you :)
And the angel of the Lord said unto him, Wherefore hast thou smitten thine ass these three times? behold, I went out to withstand thee, because thy way is perverse before me
That's a decent segueway into a recent Church comment. The speaker had been asked about the proper response to when someone dedicated themselves to a Christian's undoing. They replied there were two responses: you either pray for them, because they're in God's way and He's going to get them out of it; or you thank them, because you're off God's path and they're there to push you back onto it.
So, don't try to punish the donkey, God will deal with it as is fitting.
Like #3, but at a tactical game theory level: overwhelm the downward adjustment of individual morality.
The default human experience without Christianity has been "say that tit-for-tat is a fair moral compass" (e.g. traditional "eye for an eye" morality) but then people backslide into more DEFECTions when they're in large social groups that aren't clean iterated prisoner dilemmas.
Christianity over-indexes on cooperation, but what that means for the rank and file is that they average out to something pretty close to ideal tit-for-tat, and then the community grows. Non-Christians realize that if Christian leaders act like saints, then every-day Christians are at least fair folks to deal with, so they can get on board with some tit-for-tat too with less backsliding.
Fascinating article, coming off on your previous one on how Christianity became such a force. Interesting also that you participate in effective altruism unless I misunderstood that ... SBF ended up in huge trouble but is/was he really a sincere effective altruist?
It's inevitable that movements like EA will attract some people who believe that the ends justify the means. The problem with SBF wasn't his motives, it's that he was a moron.
Admittedly, I know almost nothing about his business dealings. I was thinking about his politics and especially his relationships with foreign leaders.
Even so, his usual strategy is stick first, maybe carrot later if you grovel enough. Unless you're a despotic leader, then it's saluting your generals on state visit and love letters.
Yeah. No matter what he might say on TV about your wife's vagina everybody seems to understand that "it's just business/politics", not personal. So when he wins they have no problem coming around at which point Trump will praise them.
Anyone in the way of something he wants is considered by him to have engaged their tit, so he tats. But when they come around he is quick to forgive and forget.
Ditto in the opposite direction. He may praise you to the skies when he hires or appoints you but the moment you exhibit any sense of self and don't do what he wants with alacrity he'll say you were always terrible and a loser.
He doesn't employ a strategy, he's just honest about the fact that he has no god but himself.
I think this is somewhat true, but he has a very expansive definition of defect that includes almost anything that is bad for him, even if the person/group that "defects" against him is acting perfectly reasonable or normal.
Examples include: Trump calling BLS job statistics fake, his fights with the Fed for raising interest rates, and his constant claims of election fraud (which includes not just 2020, but 2016 due to losing the popular vote, the 2016 Iowa caucus, and 2012, when the candidate he endorsed lost).
He also seems to fundamentally view the world in a zero-sum way which results in him seeing defections everywhere. This leads him to think for example that the fact we have a trade deficit means other countries are screwing us over.
"Maybe people are actually good: Maybe the liberals are right about everything, and most human evil comes from misunderstanding + a sense of being excluded." Or a mistake, or deception, or desperation, or a bad day, but the basic takeaway that there is positive value to be mined by forgiving people who have done bad things.
I also think that "join a cult, planning to exploit its cooperate-bot" often results in passionate true-believing cult members?
The answer is that Christians at the time and later massively exaggerated how dangerous it was to be a Christian. Persecutions were sporadic, subject to local desire to persecute and easy to subvert by going underground or bribery. There was so much unfulfilled desire for martyrdom that Christians had to be actively banned by their leadership from seeking death at the hands of mostly indifferent administrators. This contrasts with the vigerous later Christian persecution of Hellenes which mostly resulted in a lot of crypto-Pagan “Christians”.
The same place all desire originates from, belief in a reward. Christianity read plainly prizes death and scorns life, it cuts one off from most of the pleasures and enjoins pain. Who wouldn’t want the easy way out of that?
I'm reminded of a theory (don't remember where) that the Aztec's human-sacrifices evolved out the generalization from "planting corn -> more corn" to "sacrifice the short-term -> reap long-term benefits". I wonder if there's some girardian lesson here.
Personally, I can easily imagine someone being *willing* to die for a cause. But I have a much harder time imagining someone who's *enthused*, even if 72 virgins await or it makes the corn grow. And I'm not even that bullish about material reality.
I mean, the commandment isn't "Cooperate with your neighbor to the greater benefit of you both," it's "Love your neighbor as you love yourself." The actual loving and self-identification is a big part of it. If I sacrifice myself for any old loser, it's my loss and their win. If I sacrifice myself for my beloved child, it's my win, too. If everyone's my beloved, I can't lose! You're talking strategies, but Christianity moved the goalposts.
The "objective" of any religion is to survive and spread. Otherwise they wouldn't exist now. Its adherenets don't need to be conscious of that objective; after all, unintelligent animals survive and procreate just fine without knowing the nature of their existence. But the ones that are most fit are naturally more likely to survive, and that applies to both life and religion.
That's pretty tautological right there. But suffice to say, I'm using “objective” in the sense of conscious intention--consciously having a goal, and then consciously seeking the best strategy to achieve that goal. Scott's evaluating early Christianity as a strategy for survival; I'm observing that this was rather explicitly not their objective--seems like they rather went out of their way to denounce that objective, actually.
Yes, and they were failures. We're discussing why Christianity is successful, and "successful" in this context means "survived, reproduced, and secured power."
And in such discussion, it seems worth emphasizing that they did so while explicitly denouncing survival, reproduction and power as objectives, and in fact striving for almost the exact opposite of that notion of success.
It might be possible to understand why they met with such success. But it might not be possible to understand it as a strategy for achieving such success--they certainly weren't understanding it that way.
I lived that way for a while (loving everybody) and therefore engaging most of my time in helping those who needed it most - people dying all alone in a dingy hospice https://youtu.be/j8Dk2vzAsYw and I was truly happy because anyone else's happiness made me happy too, but living that way when you're the only one doing so is a recipe for, well, dying on a cross.
I talked about it here, in reference to the pyramids behind me.
"...doing so is a recipe for, well, dying on a cross."
Lol yes!!! Took me decades to really grok this, an ego-shattering moment for a Good Christian Boy when I had to admit to myself that I ain't no Jesus, that's for sure! And Christian scripture ain't shy about it, either...it's centuries of theologians that have sanded it down into something survivable.
But it's worth respecting what a huge shift in religion this was for the time and place, when worship was much more transactional, e.g. make a sacrifice so the crops grow good. It's not wholly unique in this regard, but it does deserve a lot of credit for our ability as conscious beings to recognize and pursue objectives better than (even at odds with) survival and dominance. To this day, that contrasts with plenty of belief systems, both religious and (cough) secular.
It wasn't a "new" religion per se but a clarified version if Judaism that had gotten lost among the populace.
It continued among Jews (albeit with clearer rules and instructions), such as in the following section by Maimonides (Rambam, Abu Imran Musa bin Maimon ibn Abdullah):
But the fact is that it only actually works to keep the selfless altruistic person alive and active if it is the value of society in general. Done on your own is - very unfortunately - fulfilling only for as long as you have food and shelter, which, in a transactional society won't be very long.
I think people tend to miscalculate and be biased in a way that it's hard for them to perform an optimal "tit for tat with forgiveness" strategy. They interpret events as they already tried forgiveness and it didn't work and it's all the other guys' fault and so I'm morally correct to just defect. Whereas if you tell them to just always forgive, in practice you might get something closer to the optimal "tit for tat with forgiveness" strategy. We clearly don't live in a world where most Christians are playing like a cooperate bot. I suspect that there's never been a time in history when most have. But I think by elevating those stories in Christian Mythology and culture, and telling everyone to always turn the other cheek, you're more likely to get outcomes closer to optimal game theory after accounting for fundamental attribution errors and other human bias against others.
> They were persecuted by the British and fled to America (is this kosher? it sort of seems like resisting evil). There they founded the colony of Pennsylvania,
Penn bought the land from Charles II in exchange for debts Charles had owed his father. They rendered unto Caesar, and did not resist Caesar's secular laws, as Jesus had taught.
Part of the humour in "Moby Dick" at the start is that the people who own and are fitting out the whaling ship that Ahab captains are Quakers:
"Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a Quaker, the island having been originally settled by that sect; and to this day its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure the peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified by things altogether alien and heterogeneous. For some of these same Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters. They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.
So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with Scripture names—a singularly common fashion on the island—and in childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unoutgrown peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman. And when these things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain and a ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness and seclusion of many long night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath constellations never seen here at the north, been led to think untraditionally and independently; receiving all nature’s sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin voluntary and confiding breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from accidental advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty language—that man makes one in a whole nation’s census—a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies. Nor will it at all detract from him, dramatically regarded, if either by birth or other circumstances, he have what seems a half wilful overruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature. For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease. But, as yet we have not to do with such an one, but with quite another; and still a man, who, if indeed peculiar, it only results again from another phase of the Quaker, modified by individual circumstances.
Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman. But unlike Captain Peleg—who cared not a rush for what are called serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious things the veriest of all trifles—Captain Bildad had not only been originally educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism, but all his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many unclad, lovely island creatures, round the Horn—all that had not moved this native born Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle of his vest. Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of common consistency about worthy Captain Bildad. Though refusing, from conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative evening of his days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man’s religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another. This world pays dividends. Rising from a little cabin-boy in short clothes of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a broad shad-bellied waistcoat; from that becoming boat-header, chief-mate, and captain, and finally a ship owner; Bildad, as I hinted before, had concluded his adventurous career by wholly retiring from active life at the goodly age of sixty, and dedicating his remaining days to the quiet receiving of his well-earned income.
Now, Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of being an incorrigible old hunks, and in his sea-going days, a bitter, hard task-master. They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a curious story, that when he sailed the old Categut whaleman, his crew, upon arriving home, were mostly all carried ashore to the hospital, sore exhausted and worn out. For a pious man, especially for a Quaker, he was certainly rather hard-hearted, to say the least. He never used to swear, though, at his men, they said; but somehow he got an inordinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work out of them. When Bildad was a chief-mate, to have his drab-coloured eye intently looking at you, made you feel completely nervous, till you could clutch something—a hammer or a marling-spike, and go to work like mad, at something or other, never mind what. Indolence and idleness perished before him. His own person was the exact embodiment of his utilitarian character. On his long, gaunt body, he carried no spare flesh, no superfluous beard, his chin having a soft, economical nap to it, like the worn nap of his broad-brimmed hat."
> It occurs to me that William Penn might be literally the single most successful person in history. He started out as a minor noble following a religious sect that everybody despised and managed to export its principles to Pennsylvania where they flourished and multiplied. Pennsylvania then managed to export its principles to the United States, and the United States exported them to the world. I’m not sure how much of the suspiciously Quaker character of modern society is a direct result of William Penn, but he was in one heck of a right place at one heck of a right time.
Maybe the Quakers have faded in the past couple centuries, but maybe they just became the water we swim in. Not a bad record, all told!
-- Anarcho-Libertarianism descended from the Border-Reavers.
Yes, the cultures changed quite a bit over time. Simultaneously, it's not like the U.S.'s big 4 ideologies sprung from the aether yesterday. Pop quiz. When George Bush Jr. invaded Iraq, he did so in the name of:
I saw the link, thank you. My point is that seems the relevant aspects of Quakerism to THIS post would be their pacifism and not, for example, their bureaucratic marriage customs.
"If this pacifism strategy is so successful, and the Quakers embraced it to an unusual degree, why didn't it work out for the Quakers?" as posed in this post is significantly blunted by "the Quakers had an outsized philosophical impact in their host nation, and in turn left an enduring dent in the global international order" as described in the linked.
If we want to dig in from there to why the Quakers largely failed specifically at self-perpetuation as compared against early Christianity, I think there's more than enough obvious differences in other aspects of the relative communities to explain that outcome without necessarily ascribing every difference to the one thing we happen to be looking at at the moment!
I’d say the early Christians DID fail at self-perpetuation in much the same way as the Quakers did. You think any of the early martyrs would look at any of the modern socially dominant/successful Christianities and say “I recognize these groups as my progeny”.
They’d definitely be able to recognize their “outsized philosophical impact”on the whole western world though.
>You think any of the early martyrs would look at any of the modern socially dominant/successful Christianities and say “I recognize these groups as my progeny”.
The taxonomic question of what does and doesn't count as a Christian is a... historically spicy one, to put it mildly. My sticking point with most models of memetic evolution (esp. cultural) is that there's no good candidate for a discretized 'idea'; I'd like a more generalizable system before coming to strong outside view conclusion.
Regarding free speech, "Free Speech" by Jacob Mchangama is a thorough history of the concept and how it has actually been implemented (or not). The short version is that your pure description of free speech has almost never existed anywhere -- someone was always coming up with and enforcing exceptions.
At Yom Kippur this year I arrived uncharacteristically early and so had time to read the personal meditations at the beginning of the prayer book, and I nearly laughed out loud at this part (from Tefillah Zakah, emphasis added):
"I forgive with complete forgiveness everyone who has sinned against me, whether my body or my possessions, or gossiped about me or even slandered against me. I forgive anyone who damaged my person or possessions, and for all sins between a person and their fellow
**except for money which I can claim in a court of law and except for someone who sins against me and said: 'I will sin against them and they will forgive me'. Except for these,**
I forgive with complete forgiveness and no person should be punished because of me. Just as I forgive everyone, so should You grant me favor in the eyes of everyone so that they completely forgive me."
It's just such a glaring deviation from turning the other cheek, and just as clearly there so that defectors won't totally ruin attempts at cooperation. Judaism: "we live in a society" since 4000 years ago.
"except for someone who sins against me and said: 'I will sin against them and they will forgive me'."
This is also the principle in confession/sacrament of penance/reconciliation: you can't go out, commit a sin or sins, and go "that's okay, I'll be forgiven once I go to confession". Doesn't work that way.
Human nature is why we developed moral theology over the centuries, because people still keep trying DEFECT-BOT despite everything 😀
"Epiphenomenal: COOPERATE-BOT isn’t really a good strategy, but is an unavoidable side effect of something else valuable. For example, maybe you couldn’t have Christians who loved God so much without having them be extremely loving and charitable people. The most dramatic version of this hypothesis is that God is real, and loving thy enemy is an epiphenomenon of following the actual Divine Law."
Anecdotes are not data, but all I can give you is an example from my own life. I'm not naturally kind and sweet and charitable (you don't say, Deiseach!) and quite often my natural reaction to things is "I want to boil this son-of-a-bitch in oil".
But then I remember the inconvenient damn part: I have a religion. I believe that religion. And the founder of that religion tells me that part in Matthew as quoted above:
"43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47 And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."
Hell and damnation. I don't want to be nice/forgiving, it goes against my character, but I have to do it because do I believe my religion? yes? well then!
Matthew 5 is the chapter of the Sermon on the Mount, and it has lots of very easily followed (ahem) advice (by the way, this is also why I laugh when people like to go "but aren't you Christians supposed to be loving?" because of the impression they'd picked up about the Sermon on the Mount: oh yeah, right. Read on, my friend):
"17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19 Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.
21 “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ 22 But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.
23 “Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, 24 leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift.
25 “Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still together on the way, or your adversary may hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown into prison. 26 Truly I tell you, you will not get out until you have paid the last penny.
27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery. 28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell."
Lot there about hell for "all Christianity is about is niceness" 😁
Sometimes I do wonder how many people would just go out and start murdering others if it wasn't for their religion. I'm sure it's not a huge number, but they're definitely out there.
There are many people who would just go out and start murdering others *because* of their religion. See all of Christian history until the Enlightenment curtailed the power of Christianity, and all Islamic history, including the modern day.
Sure, but at least those people waited until they had an excuse to murder in service of their own society. The question is, would they have murdered their own if they weren't religious? Because that's obviously bad for social stability.
I was gonna say... Speaking of Nietzsche, section 15 of the first part of Genealogy of Morals is a fun ride. He quotes Tertullian (160-240 CE), who argued that Christians shouldn't participate in public displays of violence because "faith offers us much more":
"think what awaits us on the day of his second coming, of his triumph!...What an ample breadth of sights there will be then! At which one shall I gaze in wonder? At which shall I laugh? At which rejoice? At which exult, when I see so many great kings who were proclaimed to have been taken up into heaven, groaning in the deepest darkness together with those who claimed to have witnessed their apotheosis and with Jove himself. And when I see those [provincial] governors, persecutors of the Lord’s name, melting in flames more savage than those with which they insolently raged against Christians!...then the tragic actors will be easier to hear because they will be in better voice [i.e. screaming even louder] in their own tragedy. Then the actors of pantomime will be easy to recognize, being much more nimble than usual because of the fire... ’What praetor or consul or quaestor or priest will grant you from his largesse the chance of seeing and exulting in such things? And yet to some extent we have such things already through faith, made present in the imagining spirit. Furthermore what sorts of things are those which the eye has not seen nor the ear heard, and which have not come into the human heart? (1. Cor. 2, 9) I believe that they are more pleasing than the circus or both of the enclosures [first and fourth rank of seats, or, according to others, the comic and the tragic stages] or than any race-track.’"
Pretty tough to reconcile this exulting at the eternal torture of others with Scott's characterization of early Christians' almost supernaturally universalistic morality.
(And on a personal note, the very concept of hell - a place of eternal torture - has always struck me as such a horrific and cruel concept that I could never entertain the possibility of becoming a Christian. Who wants to live in a universe with a literal hell in it? And I understand that there may be more nuanced understandings of the nature of hell... but still. Tertullian, for one, paints a pretty vivid picture.)
Personal comment - being mean sucks. Maybe the opposite is awesome?
This is true even if the person really really deserves it. I won't get into the specifics, but whenever I've been really angry, even in response to severe abuse (no, not sharing the details, but enough to cause my health to break down repeatedly), when I have even resorted to harsh words - it has sucked. The next day I had a feeling like the worst hangover.
Does this scale? It seems so. I've seen some very interesting testimony ("On Killing" by Dave Grossman) that even those who kill in pure self defence end up with the most appalling trauma.
I also have had the experience of forgiving my abuser and feeling the biggest relief imaginable. Of course, they just kept it up - but it was way more bearable. Maybe forgiveness evolved into a kind of hidden Christian superpower? If you are able to forgive even those torturing you to death - _really_ forgive them - your brain releases the equivalent of a massive dose of morphine which seems like a really good strategy for when you are being tortured to death. We know many people are willing to become poor and destitute through addiction to substances - could they become the same through an addiction to forgiveness? Same mechanism, except 1000x more noble.
You first exposed me to the point that my ancestors were low-IQ, incestuous, and drunk most of the time. When I read this, I was an Ayn Rand devotee, but I was dangerously down the pipeline of being radicalized to something more hateful.
Your one post blew me away, introduced me to writers I had never heard of before. It legitimately changed my life. Thank you.
Well, Ayn Rand's essay against Racism is one of the finest ever written, and her philosophy is the best protection against it :)
To take one example: let's say everything about IQ differences between Europeans and Africans is 100% true and 100% genetic. So what? This still wouldn't sanction the horrors of racism. Why? Well, close to my home there is a community of people who are definitely low IQ and mentally deficient. It's a home for the mentally disabled. They are _definitely_ less able than you or I. That doesn't mean they are not entitled to dignity, and it doesn't excuse us from the moral obligation of justice and consequent kindness and compassion.
FOLLOW UP EXPERIMENT: highly unscientific but still. Currently sick and feverish, with aches across all my legs. I was lying down and feeling frustrated/angry at the pain, when I thought of all this. So I decided to draw the aches fully into consciousness, and instead of getting mad or frustrated, tried to "forgive" it, and even try to radiate peace and love towards it ("The pain is my body dealing with infection, it is trying to keep me safe etc...)
(some may recognise this as the Buddhist practice of _metta_)
And the pain actually decreased and even vanished and I started feeling really good. So... maybe it does work. The catch though is that it has to be sincere - when I was going "Yes, I forgive you pain, so will you please go away?" it actually got worse XD
FOLLOW UP OBSERVATION: I also suspect that _being forgiven_ feels great. I've listened to a lot of conversion stories, and one thing they often, or nearly always say, is that they felt the power of mercy and forgiveness pour through them. I've heard this from Christian converts (of course), but also Muslim converts taking their Shahada. And Buddhists have turned this into a science.
It's really not surprising that this becomes a major driving force behind conversion.
(N.B.: Yes, still an atheist - but psychological phenomena are real and worth studying)
My wife gave me a test when we first met. She asked me if I had ever got revenge on anyone, in a tone of voice that made it seem like she would relish the answer. I told her, nope, sorry, even for people I hated, people who fucked me over, I have no interest in revenge. I passed the test.
It really is a better way of life, and now we get to live that together.
The martyr strategy never became widespread. When we talk about how Christianity spread we mean admiration for the martyrs' values and expressive adhrence to them. Which, from a game-theoretic point of view, also makes sense - it is always better to appear as someone who will always cooperate, particularly if detecting instances of defection is not as clear as in Axelrod's simulation.
I don't want to take anything away from the early Christian's altruism and openness, but the Bible is not without a nod to the expanding circles of obligations, for example:
"But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever."
"So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith."
Certainly they were exposed to defect bots in being forgiving to a (seeming) fault, but if it was nonetheless more cooperative within the body (because real life isn't a binary), then it might have an advantage over a pool of defect or perhaps even tit-for-tat bots elsewhere.
> But this story sounds more worthy of the mystery cults.
This is something that isn't very well understood: early Christianity was very much "a mystery cult" as described here. The mysteries involved the teachings referred to but glossed over in a few words in Acts 1:3, where the resurrected Christ taught his disciples — taught them what? It's never explained! — for 40 days before they began their ministry. Early Christians held these 40-day teachings to be sacred things not to be shared with the uninitiated. This, of course, gave rise to a large body of apocryphal works claiming to be the authentic 40-day teachings, and played a large role in the rise of Gnosticism, with heretical Christians drawing on Greek philosophy to fill the void.
> [The Quakers] were persecuted by the British and fled to America (is this kosher? it sort of seems like resisting evil).
"Resist" in this context means to fight back. Fleeing into the wilderness to avoid persecution, on the other hand, is a time-honored Judeo-Christian tradition, and was even directly commanded by Jesus in Mathew chapter 24 to avoid the upcoming destruction of Jerusalem. Historians record that they took this advice to heart: when the Romans finally came for the Jews in 70 AD, the Christians fled so effectively that, reportedly, not a single one of them was killed by the Romans.
Ignoring the very beginning of it, Maybe just enough Christians do play tit for that, while most of them play cooperate bot, they can fend off trouble makers while the cooperate bots ensure a mostly Christian society will be so productive and harmonious it will pay off memetically and economically. Kind of like your body's cells. Most of them will not attack foreign invaders, and are just cooperate bots.
I was referring to Christians punishing each other, but that didn't happen until the next millennium, so it doesn't apply to the rise of Christianity.
Perhaps Roman persecution helped purify the Christian movement by scaring away less-committed believers. A new religion might be more appealing when all of its members are all-in.
A few qualifications. First of all Christianity never embraced a purist version of cooperate-bot. In the sermon on the mount for instance, Jesus talks about not casting pearls before pigs. The point being, certain really stubborn and obstinate people are not worth the effort, generally speaking. Christianity is 'cooperative' towards most people, with a few exceptions.
Secondly, Jesus grounds our charitable nature in heavenly rewards given in the age to come. So it's not bleeding heart generosity with no expectation of reward full stop - there is a reward in the afterlife. Again, Jesus talks about this in the sermon on the mount.
Thirdly, not only is there a reward for the righteous, there is a punishment for the unrighteous. Jesus speaks of the way to eternal life being a narrow way which few were entering into (again, sermon on the mount!). For most, they would be on the broad way to destruction - the bad place.
I buy fertility plus converting the high status arguments more than this. The tit for tat plus forgiveness raises the question of how often to forgive. 0% and you’re a tit for tat bot, 100% and you’re a cooperate bot. Maybe the argument is that early Christians selected the exact right level of forgiveness but then you have to ask “how did they do that?” From stories of martyrs, it sure seems like they were COOPERATE!!!!! bots
It's important to remember that, for all their influence on Western civilization, the Jews were a (Middle-) Eastern people who did not customarily speak with the literal precision that characterizes Western thought and discourse. Cf. the famous parable of the mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds which grows into the greatest of all trees. Jesus and his audience were definitely familiar both with smaller seeds and taller trees, but no one called him on this, because the general idea he was conveying was very accurate: there is no smaller seed (familiar to them) that grows into a bigger tree.
This is the meaning of the common Biblical phrase, "verily I say unto you." Verily, or "truthfully" in modern English, was used here to denote "I am speaking in literal terms right now, and not metaphorically."
When the Rabbis of the time thought it very tolerant and reasonable to forgive a repeat offender 2 or 3 times before finally saying "that's enough out of you," Jesus preached a higher standard. So Peter asks, "should we forgive someone *seven* times, then?" A much bigger number than his culture accepted, but still easy enough to keep track of. And Jesus responds, no, keep forgiving them all the way to a number so big you'll lose count along the way. (Especially because, if you're carefully keeping track and counting down the offenses until you no longer "have to" forgive them, you're not really forgiving them at all, now are you?)
I’ve been thinking about this, and I wonder if the answer lies not in traditional game theory but in something closer to red pill social theory—bear with me here. Whether by accident or design, early Christians nailed what we might now recognize as the memetic high-status social game. They didn’t just win a moral argument—they mastered high-status signaling, and they did it so effectively that they rewrote the cultural operating system of the Roman Empire.
In red pill terms, social status revolves around Demonstration of High Value (DHV), Indicators of Disinterest (IOD), and compliance/reward cycles. What’s striking is how perfectly Christianity’s setup aligned with these principles.
Start with Demonstration of High Value (DHV). The early Christians weren’t just good—they were shockingly good. They gave to the poor, nursed the sick during plagues, and even forgave their enemies, sometimes while being actively tortured by them. These weren’t cheap signals. They were so costly that nobody else could afford to imitate them, and their consistency made it impossible to dismiss as a fluke. In a brutal, self-serving world, their behavior screamed, We have access to something greater than this world.
Then there’s Indicators of Disinterest (IOD). Christians didn’t play the Roman status game. They weren’t interested in wealth, political power, or even self-preservation. Instead, they forgave slights, turned the other cheek, and refused to retaliate when attacked. This “cool disinterest” wasn’t just moral—it was high-status in the extreme. The Romans saw them as operating on a completely different plane, untouchable in a way that made others want to know their secret.
Now add compliance and reward. Christianity wasn’t easy to join. Conversion required massive personal investment—ostracism, social risk, and sometimes death. But this difficulty worked in its favor. People value what they sacrifice for, and once you were in, the rewards were enormous. Love-bombing, a strong community, real material support, and the ultimate promise of eternal salvation. If Roman society was a zero-sum grind, Christianity offered something transcendent.
Here’s where the context comes in. This game is always running, in every society. But Christianity’s setup worked exceptionally well in the Roman world. Scarcity made charity profoundly valuable. A dominance-obsessed culture made Christians’ refusal to compete on those terms stand out even more. And the empire’s instability created a void that their high-trust, high-status community could fill. They weren’t just playing COOPERATE-BOT—they were playing a cooler, higher-status version that could outmaneuver the prevailing norms of the time.
But here’s the twist: I think the same framework explains why Christianity’s influence has waned in modern times. The game hasn’t stopped, but the context has shifted. Abundance has devalued acts of charity; helping the poor is less extraordinary when basic needs are widely met. And Christianity lost its outcome independence. As it became institutionalized, it started caring deeply about societal outcomes—politics, power, moral conformity. The cool detachment that once made it irresistible gave way to defensiveness and control.
What’s remarkable is that this wasn’t just morality or theology—it was a memetic masterstroke. Early Christians mastered the eternal social game of status and signaling in a way that fit their world perfectly, and their legacy shaped the next 2,000 years. Whether by design or divine accident, they didn’t just succeed—they rewrote the rules of the game itself.
I think it's kind of crazy - Christianity being the OG outcome independence player in status games, and that Scott doesn't even have this on his radar or include it in his theories.
I went and read that. Interestingly, he says 'And yet, outside of Saudi Arabia you’ll have a hard time finding a country that doesn’t at least pay lip service to liberal ideas.' while discussing how liberalism seems to keep spreading.
In the mean time, Saudi Arabia seems to have started to pay lip service to liberal ideas!
I converted to Christianity (after a lifetime of dissatisfied cafeteria atheism) two years ago, and the most lovely thing about it is, if you're already moved to admire and wish to follow a COOPERATE-BOT lifestyle, you can just do it without worrying about the utility function.
Scott, thanks for doing a good job explaining why so many lapsed Catholics keep the morality.
I want to call your attention to one part, where you speculate that "Free speech might seem kind of like COOPERATE-BOT in a limited domain: the idea that elites shouldn’t make any forceful/legal effort to protect their ideological and spiritual position must sound almost as crazy as them not making any forceful/legal effort to protect themselves if attacked,"
You may already know, you may not, that Oliver Wendell Holmes had exactly this view of "free speech" over most of his legal career, and only changed his mind very late in life. Prior to the *Abrams* decision, Holmes essentially viewed the right to speak freely as the right for you to say whatever you want, and for society to punish you however you want for it. Holmes even tacitly acknowledges the "steelman" for this position in his *Abrams* dissent, which gave birth to the modern view of the 1st amendment. This steelman seems monstrous to us today:
"Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power, and want a certain result with all your heart, you naturally express your wishes in law, and sweep away all opposition. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care wholeheartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises."
It seems to me that what is suggested from game theory and rational choice modeling is that the individual is not best viewed as a behavioral unitary at the phenotype level, because evolved complex coalitional behaviors occur on the group dynamic level. Some individual behaviors are only comprehensible at the group level. One example is altruistic punishment. Or take voting. It makes no sense for an individual to expend the effort to vote, but people simply do it, and you can’t really come up with some cognitive level logic for why people do it.
However, I don't think that characterizing early Christian as "cooperate-bot" is very accurate.
Later in antiquity, they had no qualm persecuting other religion, and engaging in sectarian violence. This largely explains they eventual success, since it enables them to crush their competitors, such as Mythraism.
Moreover, the persecution they suffered from the Roman Empire was very uneven, and this explains their persistence. Had they experienced a consistent and long lasting persecution, they would probably have been destroyed.
So their strategy looks more like "lay low and look non-threatening, and wait for your time to come - bot". Being extra-nice to strangers makes you look non-threatening and harmless, definitely a plus in an authoritarian regime.
We can contrast them with Falun-Gong in China: had they adopted the Christian strategy (lay low, be nice to everyone), maybe the Falun-Gong would have been able to escape the very intense persecution of the CCP, who would have perceived them less as a threat and would have devoted less resources to suppress them.
It's also worth noting that this works mostly when there is a religious void, that is the existing power is not very committed into imposing one specific and stringent faith, and eliminating everything else. That was the case in the Roman Empire, whose official religion wasn't strongly adhered to, and which had very syncretic belief systems.
In that context, the monotheism of Christians could easily have been seen as a danger by everyone else (since they rejected absolutely other religions), but that was tempered by their avowed universal love for everyone.
More seriously: It would be interesting to read an analysis of what the mechanisms were when Christianity was displaced, e.g. by Islam in North Africa.
Trivial point but "The Roman Empire was corrupt and decadent to the core." is looking at it from outside. There were rules (even "there are no rules" is a rule) and everybody played by them. It may be unpleasant but it wasn't corrupt or decadent. As Copilot confirms: "Both terms imply a deviation from an accepted or expected standard of behavior or morality."
"Corrupt" means "the stated rules are not the enforced rules". A filing fee and a bribe are the same process, but one is a written rule and the other is an unwritten rule, so the second is corrupt and the first is not.
I'm not sure this is a hill that I want to die on but anyway: a filing fee is a WIERD invention. Pre-WIERD societies run on bribery. Everybody knows this so it is the accepted rule.
> When the poor happened to be neglected and overlooked by the priests, the impious Galileans observed this and devoted themselves to benevolence . . . [they] support not only their poor, but ours as well, [when] everyone can see that our people lack aid from us.”
Tit-For-Tat bot may beat Cooperate bot in a prisoner's dilemma contest. But it sounds like Cooperate bot beats Defect bot when a neutral third party is deciding which community they wish to join.
> After all the Vikings and steppe nomads and Spartans have had their way with each other, the leading ideology of the 21st century thus far appears to be a hyper-Christian bleeding-heart liberalism
This reminds me of your tribute to Elua ben Yeshua in your classic Moloch piece. I appreciate what seems to me to be deep commitment to belief in some core human goodness. But the way you're framing the game for "leading" here isn't accounting for what seems to me to be an unsustainable toll on our macro-environment. I know that only gods can address anthropogenic climate change (which I personally believe is real), and that raising this as an individual concern is counter-productive, but here at ACX we always seem to be in god mode so....
Disclosure: in the past I have been a deeply committed Mormon. I lived it in ways I thought were 110%. I paid tithing, made all the sacred, special temple covenants, and allowed the guilt & self-flagellation processes full sway in me for not mustering the willpower to live up to them fully.
Until one day something snapped, and I chose to analyze, research, and dissect it all, which I have been doing for the past 8 years. For anyone whose brain tries to model that last sentence, you can't. You can't phenomenologically model something you haven't lived in the first person. But most people have some kind of similar experience when everything they thought was true and built their life on came crashing down, or unraveled when they started tugging at a vexing loose thread.
But I digress.
I think Mormons have TIT-FOR-TAT+FORGIVENESS down pat. After encountering Buddhism I'm better able to see that Christianity is a quiver of strategies like you touch on here. One thing my WorldsArise theory would suggest perhaps falls along the "epiphenomenal" line: the life of an individual human really resides in its wider social identities and belongings, *which are containers for agency, memory, reasoning, and intelligence.* I'm basically saying that gods are real; it's what individual human nervous systems do every time we organize into and give ourselves to the larger things we need in order for "us" (the tribe/group/population) to survive across generations. Christianity is adaptable, and the Mormons have brilliantly adapted it for capitalism and consumerism. Plus, they have a solid system of leadership succession in their top quorums that allows the organization to continue to adapt as needed, while still maintaining the curtain of an eternal, unchangeable, loving, caring god. I have tried to take it apart and understand it, and while a lot of it is "boring" and frustratingly manipulative, it really works well in an Elua type way. And don't forget the utility of a constant eschatological backdrop to keep the community prepared for world-ending reorganization at any time. This is one of many strategies you haven't touched on here.
Thanks for what you share. 🙏 I find it helpful as we try to figure out how we're going to move forward as a species. But this galaxy-brain needs to now go clean up breakfast.
"It is, in some sense, a unilateral surrender in the war of ideas; fascists and communists will do their best to crush liberalism, but liberals cannot ban discussion of fascism or communism."
I feel like liberalism can only afford to do this because it's already so dominant. If a small guy acts aggressively to a much bigger guy the rational thing for the bigger guy to do is defuse the situation graceful, he hasn't got anything to prove and would only look insecure by also being aggressive. Liberalism would just look like it had something to hide by suppressing already marginal ideologies, and it already has ideological hegemony through the media, education system, intelligence services etc. anyway. It might as well counter-signal dominance.
Historically where liberalism was insecure it did suppress other ideologies, like post-war Germany, McCarthyism, late 19th century labour movements, the third world during the cold war.
Seems like unconditional cooperation is a good strategy if you're already so secure as to have nothing to lose or you're so weak you couldn't retaliate anyway. Modern liberalism is the former which is very different to the early Christians imo who were the later.
Some context/corrections about the Quakers. I'm not sure "fled to America" is quite right. The Pennsylvania colony was more of a win/win for the Quakers and the Crown. The Crown got a bunch of eager colonists and got rid of a bunch of troublesome fanatics, the Quakers got a chance to try out their "Holy Experiment" as a form of government with the Crown's blessing.
In a colony like Pennsylvania, the locally-elected assembly held the purse strings and taxing authority, but the crown-appointed governor held the executive authority. The governor would say "we need money for ships and forts to defend ourselves from the French" and the assembly would say "can't do it, we're pacifists." This would go on for a while and then the governor would make concessions on some other points the assembly wanted, and the assembly would allocate money to the governor for uses vague enough that they could claim they were still being pacifist and the governor could claim he'd been given authority to spend it on military stuff.
Quakers dominated the cities and coastal areas, had got there first and had the best land and such. Later non-Quaker immigrants settled further inland on the frontier, and sometimes had to murder a bunch of Indians who were in the way, which pissed off the Indians a bit. Some Indians took refuge with the Quakers in Philadelphia, and a bunch of these frontier settlers nearly stormed the place in 1763 to finish the massacre (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxton_Boys).
When the French-and-Indian War breaks out, it's them on the borderlands who are most endangered by it (British ships from other colonies can protect Philadelphia). They're so furious at elitist Quaker pacifism seeming to boil down to hiding behind the defenseless non-Quakers on the frontiers that they are again scheming revolt. The cowed assembly votes to fund military forts on the frontier, without hiding behind their usual fig leaf. Now the more pacifist wing of the Quakers begins to revolt, with some of them (e.g. John Woolman, closest thing the American Quakers have to a saint) counseling refusing payment of taxes to such an assembly so as to avoid being complicit in shedding blood.
Eventually Quakers resign from the assembly en masse rather than continue prosecuting the war, and the assembly is given over to the control of pragmatic sorts like Ben Franklin.
This is not a hard question. It's just a more complicated game so using reductive strategies doesn't give you an answer. So add an addtional varible to your model/game, which side is stronger. Maybe if your side is weaker, using tit-for-tat strat doesn't work at all. You can't punish the other players enough, but they can genecide you. So cooperate bot strategies work well, as in if the other side follows tit-for-tat the best thing you can do is never defect. So Ghandie and MLK lead successful movements, while Palestinians just lose using a T4T strategy. Probably a ton of other varibles about when belief in another religion is weak enough to lose out. I'm sure there were cults that weren't as successful 100 years prior to the death of Christ, but they didn't topel Zeus/Saturn.
This will sound like insane blathering to 90% of you, but it may contain the key to the puzzle.
"Mister Rogers in a blood-stained sweater" is essentially what's described in the Book of Revelation. It's not anybody else's blood, though; it's his own. The Lamb Who was slain for the sins of the world is raised to the highest throne, and all the nations of the world are put under His feet.
You can see a microcosm of this in the mythic feeling of the US electoral events of the past few weeks. Two weeks ago, Trump felt like The Scapegoat: the priestly class were going to put all the sins of the people on him, name him with the name of the opposite of the established social order ("Nazi"), and cast him out into the wilderness / kill him. He was, in fact, almost killed.
Now, Trump feels like The King: an irresistible force, bending all to his will, dominating all things. Giving gifts to those he favors; compelling obedience from rebels.
The margin between The Scapegoat and The King is paper-thin. They're the same person. The least accident of history can transform one into the other.
(My current best theory is that, in order to make somebody The Scapegoat, he or she has to be powerful enough to make it plausible that he or she could really be responsible for all the evils befalling the nation. That's the connection with The King.)
Seems to me like one advantage COOPERATE-BOT has over TIT-FOR-TAT in real life is that real life is *noisy*- you don't actually always know whether your opponent has picked Cooperate or Defect. You can infer it from the consequences of what happened to you, but there's more complicated payoff matrices and other inputs into the decision. In real life, you sometimes suffer from people trying to treat you well instead of poorly- accidents, misunderstandings, whatever-the-hell-the-FDA-has-going-on, etc.
Say you've got a version of the iterated prisoner's dilemma where, 10% of the time, the button will malfunction and submit Defect no matter what you picked. In this environment, COOPERATE-BOT never makes a "mistake"- but it's easy for TIT-FOR-TAT to get stuck in the loop you describe, and for TIT-FOR-TAT-WITH-FORGIVENESS to outperform it (I assume. Has anyone run this experiment?)
This maps to real-life strategies in that... I mean, we've all met this person. They're all about fairness, and they convince themselves extremely easily that other people are being unfair to them. Almost regardless of what their opponent picks, they'll find a way to imagine they actually hit Defect, and act accordingly. The higher this error rate, the closer to DEFECT-BOT they get. They'll insist they're just following TIT-FOR-TAT, that all they're intolerant of is intolerance, and it's not *their* fault they seem to be constantly surrounded by DEFECT-BOTs they need to retaliate against. You've been on Twitter before.
That's an extreme example, but I imagine the performance of WITH-FORGIVENESS strategies varies with both the error rate and the forbearance timeout. I'd expect to see them on some kind of performance spectrum between TIT-FOR-TAT and COOPERATE-BOT. Is there an optimal forgiveness factor for a given error rate? Did the early Christians approximate it?
(Realistically I don't think this question determines these historical trends very strongly, but I'm curious.)
The Ultimate Showdown is from 2005, not the 2010s. You can tell from references to then-current things like That's How I Beat Shaq and Chuck Norris jokes.
It seems strange to me to only consider the spread of Christianity from a perspective of adherent's conflict strategy, and to not consider the inherent memetic virality of its ideas. I.e. the unique combo of "you're guilty, but also automatically deserving of forgiveness and love.. and this is equally true for everyone" might be a cognitive-emotional attractor that many minds are particularly susceptible to.
As someone who was once a rabidly self-sacrificing Christian, I think looking at Christianity this way is missing the point. Christianity is not a moral strategy. Christianity, like many religions, is an ideology and it spread because, as an ideology, it was persuasive. Its spread, as the post points out, was much faster than could be accomplished through natural reproduction, making the evolutionary/survival arguments mostly irrelevant.
An ideology (as defined by Alasdair MacIntyre) is a meta-story capable of jumping the "is/ought" barrier: it is a story about the world that is large enough that individuals can place themselves within it and then draw conclusions about what they ought to do.
Christianity was a persuasive ideology. It came at a time when the world was changing. Earlier forms of religion based on ethnic belonging, totems or embodiments of the tribe, and petty local gods were looking less and less persuasive as the Roman Empire caused people to interact and trade with all different kinds of peoples in a bureaucratic and commercialized environment. The traditional pagan gods continued to play an important civic role, but they looked increasingly silly. I would compare it to many modern Catholic countries in Western Europe, where the Catholic church is still the dominant institution, but its teachings and practices seem increasingly distant from the other things people know about the world and their daily experience of it.
In this environment, people felt small and lost in a chaotic cosmos. There was a desire for a "personal" savior who could speak to them where they were - see Lucian's "The Ass" from the Hellenic Age or the Plays of Menander, where many proto-Christian themes or desires seem to already be gaining steam. At the same time, there was also a desire for a more believable explanation of the world. A local Horse God was looking less and less believable even before he had to be integrated into a big orgy of Roman magic beings in the sky. You don't have to read far into the philosophy of Ancient Greece or the early Roman Empire to see that these gods failed even a few very basic clarifying questions.
The "Weeajews" begin appearing at this time for the same reason that Plato and other philosophers began to lean towards Monotheism. It made a lot more sense. The world was clearly bigger than our tribe or our nation and it makes sense that God must also be much bigger: perhaps universal, perhaps all-powerful and good. Then along comes Jesus, stripping or resolving many of the remaining tribal elements of Judaism. The story of a God sacrificing himself for a wayward world is still a phenomenally compelling one and must have been even more so amid the uncertainty late Roman Empire. Combine this with people's psychological desire to be known in the midst of a chaotic and hierarchical world, and Christianity was like soup to a starving man.
Christianity's persuasiveness gave people the confidence and epistemological basis they needed to cooperate, but critically: you can't fake this. Anyone who wasn't truly persuaded by Christianity wouldn't follow through on it as a moral strategy. It is a "good strategy" because you are emulating Jesus and expect him to triumph in the end, not because you think COOPERATE-BOT is playing 4D chess.
This is why I'm skeptical of political traditionalist Christians today who want to present religion as a cure for the current ills of society. In some areas, I agree with them that modern social problems are fallout from the loss of faith. But believing this doesn't help you at all. As someone else pointed out above, you specifically cannot run the COOPERATE-BOT in order to maximize utility. Christianity works because you believe in it. It becomes corrupted and counterproductive when you don't.
The people who are still convinced of Christianity's truth are uniquely unable to help address the world's current problems because they are (by definition) incapable of recognizing what caused these problems: Christianity slowly but steadily has ceased to be a persuasive explanation for how we got here, what's going on in the world, and where we're going next. Slowly but steadily, starting with the Enlightenment and continuing through Darwin and the social and psychological revolutions, Christianity has lost its explanatory power, even as people continue to admire its practices. If you want to restore Christian morals or practices, you have to attach them to a believable metanarrative again.
Well, maybe there's no need for snark - I actually did meet a genuine cultist of the Old Ones once, and he made a pretty good case. He was my fourth-grade teacher.
See, when I was a kid I was concerned about something I'd come to know, many years later, as the problem of evil. Turkey's economy was good enough in the 90s that we could afford to take pity on other countries, and there were stories in the news about the despondency of Africa's poor (you might remember the Vulture and the Little Girl from these days). I wanted to know why Allah, being all-powerful and compassionate, would allow this to be.
In Turkey we have state-mandated religious education (i.e. Islamic indoctrination) classes, starting at age eleven. They are mild, as far as brainwashing goes: all you get in the textbooks is a history of Abrahamic religions and a guide for Islamic rites. The teachers themselves are trusted to add the "all other religions are evil, and if you ever fail to hate them you'll burn in hell forever" flavor, but I didn't care for that at the time - I finally had a religious authority figure to answer my question.
From the outside the man was the very model of a Muslim elder, takke and all, but the facade crumbled the more you talked to him. He said that my confusion is understandable, and easy to reconcile: that Allah is benevolent was a mistake first made by Christians, and to this day deluded the followers of the True Faith. He bode me to name the attributes of God - sıfat in Turkish, and part of my curriculum for the year.
Easy enough. These are the category of titles that in English have omni- at the start: Allah has no beginning or end, has no equal, requires no sustenance, knows all, sees and hears all, has a will that cannot be contested, creates and is the only creator.
Allah, notably, is not omnibenevolent.
There you have it, he said - Allah permits these things to be, because this amuses It (Turkish has no gendered pronouns, but I was certain that my teacher did not think of Allah as a he). Islam is submission, not to the milquetoast turn-the-other-cheek god of the Christians, not to the overgrown tutelary spirit of the Jews, but to an unknowable, vengeful, powerful and wild thing that promises pain everlasting to anyone who violates Its law.
I better follow the Kuran to the letter, he advised. He did not say "because the only known way to defend yourself is that forbidden book written by a mad Arab atop an unholy mountain", but that was very much implied.
I was not very convinced, and am not a practicing Muslim now, but still to this day I remember my sübhanekes and el-fatihas. Just in case.
>Easy enough. These are the category of titles that in English have omni- at the start: Allah has no beginning or end, has no equal, requires no sustenance, knows all, sees and hears all, has a will that cannot be contested, creates and is the only creator.
>Allah, notably, is not omnibenevolent.
Hmm, Lovecraft's Azathoth more-or-less has the
>Allah has no beginning or end, has no equal, requires no sustenance
>creates and is the only [?] creator.
but not the perceptual or knowledgeable parts...
BTW, what are sübhanekes ? Google translate comes up with "breakfast" - in context I'm guessing something like "morning prayers"???
Do you know the custom to call songs in operas and musicals by their first line? Nessun dorma, largo al factotum, votre toast, le veau d'or and so on? Even in church hymns there's dies irae and magnificat and such.
Well, schoolkids do the same to the prayers they are assigned to memorize - sübhaneke is just the first word of a common Sunni prayer. It means something along the lines of "praise be to you" and is related to the Hebrew שיבח.
> I think looking at Christianity this way is missing the point. Christianity is not a moral strategy. Christianity, like many religions, is an ideology and it spread because, as an ideology, it was persuasive
Thanks for saying it, I was trying to find the right words to express why I think this article completely misses the point.
That's a "meet force with force" religion, and it was fortunate in that it *had* the force. Trying to do that when you don't have the force doesn't end well.
First of all, the early Muslims fought back way before they had the force. They were heavily outnumbered in many of their battles.
Secondly, it's more of a “you, generally speaking, have moral permission to meet force with equivalent force, but forgiveness is generally better” religion.
Even that's an oversimplification. It's more about forgiveness towards those who wronged _you_, not others on their behalf. We drop any thoughts of revenge against those whom the wronged parties have forgiven, but we also don't cowardly (or apathetically) refuse to fight for the rights of those who have not forgiven their oppressors and pass it off as being more forgiving.
For example, in court, the family of a murder victim are the ones who choose the punishment to apply or not to the convicted murderer, and the judge can't forgive on their behalf, nor can the judge punish on their behalf if they forgive.
Inversely, in cases of banditry, for example, where no one was hurt, but the bandit brandished even a false weapon, the victim doesn't have a right to say don't execute him; the state has a duty to make sure that its inhabitants can walk the streets without fear, and a bandit who attacks at random has wronged people other than just the specific person he happened to attack.
(I'm not an expert on fiqh, so I may make a mistake on the specific examples, but this is my understanding.)
Look how the Christians depict God as less merciful and less just to the oppressed by commanding them to forgive their oppressors, even while they are not only not repentant, but even continue their oppression. Look how they depict him as reserving his mercy for the oppressors by commanding forgiveness towards them while they continue to engage in their crimes.
This is the difference that some Christians don't understand who think their religion is so morally superior because they call for forgiveness, then go around judging the wronged parties as morally deficient for resisting, or even simply not forgiving.
The galling thing is when you get the Judeo-Christian West is best types who like to proclaim the superiority of Western culture because of the response of cultures that the West has wronged, even in cases where they themselves would acknowledge the West has wronged them.
But even that's not the worst of them. That prize might go to the meek on the outside types who claim to be about building bridges, so they'll talk with and bolster those people of foreign religions who have pacifistic or “loving” interpretations which are convenient to the empire they're under the boot of, while being extremely apathetic to the suffering of their own people, not loving or forgiving them at all, only with harsh treatment to those who point out the clear non-peaceful parts of scripture (despite those non-peaceful parts being 100x more peaceful and more forgiving than the non-peaceful parts of the scripture of the empire they're fighting).
I did not read the entire post, so I apologize if this was covered, but:
Perhaps Christianity was ultimately successful because the Roman government did not have the state capacity necessary to eradicate Christianity. Note that modern states with far greater capacity struggle to achieve analogous goals.
Or perhaps,. they did not have the inclination.* The Axelrod study is based on the premise that every interaction is 100% win-lose, but the interaction between the state and entitiles within the state are almost never 100% win-lose. The state's interactiion with any entity can range from eradicating it, to banning it, to taxing it (at different levels) to supporting it in various ways, to co-opting it. How much of a threat was Christianity, really, to the state? ("Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" is not overly threatening, after all). All in all, I am skeptical that Axelrod is a partiuclarly useful model for the interaction between the Roman state and Christianity.
I think you've missed an off-shoot of selecting a moral elite - selecting for people who tend to violate the iron law of institutions.
The iron law of institutions is that people will always seek to advance themselves within a movement, rather than advance the movement. For early Christians, this would mean everyone struggling to become the presbyter/bishop and amass more power over their followers. The "love everyone, regardless of how much it screws you over" movement would appeal to people who aren't very concerned about self-preservation, so can devote themselves fully to advancing the movement.
Depending on whether you like this, you can view it as ophyocordiceps-style hijacking of the individual to serve a disembodied idea, or you can view it as people choosing a life of self-sacrifice to serve a noble humanitarian goal. In cold pragmatic terms, though, I'd wager that someone who's willing to die to expand a movement is worth at least 20 people who just want to amass power and status within it.
The caveat is that Christianity may just be the first "movement within a society" full stop, so have won through total lack of competition. Hence later attempts (I think the Anabaptists are a better fit than the Quakers, cf. Dirk Willems) didn't have anything like the same success as there was already a big movement in town.
I recently read a book The Patient Ferment of the Early Church by Alan Kreider, which attempts to explain Christianity's rise in terms of weak theory #2 selecting a moral elite. The author is a Christian, but he's attempting to prove this with secular scholarship. Some interesting examples of how Christianity may have stopped growing as remarkably around the time they stopped being COOPERATE-BOT
This is such a cool post and really helped me appreciate Christianity in a way I hadn't before. (I was raised atheist and haven't heard Christianity explicitly described in the way you describe it here, even though I knew the word "Christian" is a synonym for "generous.")
I have another idea, or maybe just a twist on the "[e]liminate transaction costs from means-testing" idea, for why kind religions might do better. I think maybe the difference between a bot and a religion is that a bot is basically one unified entity which has full awareness of how someone has treated it in the past. So it's possible for a bot to do tit for tat accurately. But a religion is basically a group of different people, who can't always know how someone has treated their fellow group members in the past.
I think that tit for tat can't really work properly for a large group of people. Because we don't know if someone did something kind to another member of our group. I think a lot of people have had the frustrating experience of doing something nice to help a certain a group (e.g. a company, nonprofit, or movement), and then getting bad treatment from a member of the group who doesn't know about the nice thing we did.
Think about spending tons of money at a company and then having an employee act rude and dismissive to you, perhaps without realizing how much money you have spent at the company. Or I personally think of when I first went vegan and other vegans would be unfriendly to me before they knew I was vegan. I also can see sometimes, with running a nonprofit, that I personally have a lot of gratitude toward certain people whom I personally know have done things to benefit our nonprofit—but my employees don't necessarily know that the person did the nice thing to us!
I think a group attempting to take a tit-for-tat approach will fail to incentivize people to do nice things to the group. Because people will realize that group members don't actually know about the nice thing they have done, and that they won't actually get their reward!
Part of the answer is that life is not as simple as the Prisoner's Dilemma. We have many more options available to us than just Cooperate/Defect, the payoff matrices in reality are complex and often obscured by other circumstances (even setting aside deception and mistakes), and at certain levels of negative net utility the actor dies.
Imperfect information. It’s easy to attribute COOPERATE-BOT behavior based on the history written by the victors. They’ve got great PR. But I’m certain there were decisive moments that were not forgiveness-driven.
Same what I wanted to comment... The Tit-for-Tat is a good strategy in general, but I can't see the link to early history - too much is lost, and the few things historians can piece together must have an enormous error rate due to survivor bias (when it comes to writing) and statistical problems (enormously small sample size - the literaly have to "piece it together").
Looking into younger history and on a makro scale, cooperation and reciprocity of kindness has helped to develop stability - as has overwhelming force (weak ones like capital and debt as well as hard ones like military force), if nothing else then as fear of mutual destruction (arms race in the cold war). Of course, having enough cooperation fosters force and power, which also worked well (in tandem with other factors) to facilitate change, for the better or worse - the re-unification of germany as a positive example, indias freedom from colonization, ... but on the contra-side you have many failures: the arabic spring (which failed in most countries to establich a cooperative stable society and instead fell back to biggest-group-won-and-suppresses-the-rest), yugoslavia (bigger groups committing genocide), ...
The tit-for-tat might work best on the mikro scale of communities to successfully "ward off" predatory individuals - but only as long as others don't have enough force to push their agenda. And let's not get into the rationality of individuals or of groups to even decide, when something is predatory and when not...
Yet more context on Quaker pacifism: it seems likely to have developed as a gambit in a struggle that seems to fit well with your game theory explanation.
The early Quakers had practices and doctrines that seemed similar to political radicals of the time (e.g. Diggers, Levellers), but what they really cared about was good old-fashioned anti-papist true Christianity.
They really wanted the government to stop imprisoning and martyring them, and to allow them to spread the good word. But the government kept looking at them and thinking "dangerous radicals that want to overthrow government and property" and persecuting them to match.
So George Fox hit on pacifism as an way to throw a super-cooperate card into the game. Many of the earliest statements of Quaker pacifism don't describe it as pacifism-as-such but as Quakers declining to be involved "in setting up or pulling down the kingdoms of the earth," seeing that as God's prerogative. This was a way of saying "we are no threat to you" to their government antagonists as loudly as they could, in the hopes of resetting the game.
Koenraad Elst's "The Psychology of Prophetism" claims that the pacifist bits of Christianity weren't really original to Jesus, but instead pasted it on later to make it tolerable to Roman authorities. http://voiceofdharma.org/books/pp/ch3.htm
I don't think it makes sense to reduce questions about memetic fitness to an iterated prisoner's dilemma. You can hardly tell the bots that the best strategies go to heaven.
Seriously though, I haven't studied game theory in any depth but don't some conditions have to be met for a situation to be appropriately described by the prisoner's dilemma? The analogy of [what exactly--Christian doctrine or the way Christians at large behave or?] to a COOPERATE-BOT is so coarse that I don't think there's anything actually wanting for explanation here.
"Therefore, even if you’re a deep-seated consequentialist, you should avoid acting as a consequentialist and instead follow normal-person morality."
Couldn't "normal-person morality" be described, in this case, as better consequentialism if in fact it results in better consequences?
This kind of reminds me of how people complain about "science" not being a good thing when they're actually talking about scientists practicing flawed or unethical science. Science itself is just a methodology/set of principles.
Well said. I found it odd that Scott's example of a consequentialist was someone whose actions yielded bad consequences. That seems like a self-defeating example.
He equivocates between consequentialism and "naive consequentialism" when he says "naive consequentialism yields bad results therefore you shouldn't be a consequentialist." No, it means you shouldn't be a naive consequentialist. Maybe conventional morality IS consequentialism (and I believe it is) when averaged over every member of society and transmitted through a narrow-bandwidth cultural communication channel. So #8 could be rewritten as "listen to conventional wisdom until you understand the world well enough to productively make your own well-tailored consequentialist judgements."
Conventional morality definitely isn't optimal anymore, at least at the individual level. Psychopaths seem to be doing pretty well these days thanks to the system actively promoting self-interest.
I don't buy all that "all CEOs are psychopaths" nonsense. I think that's mainly just class envy. Besides, even if it's true I'm sure they only do well to the extent that they understand conventional morality well enough to blend in with it, which is consistent with my thesis of "don't think for yourself until you're smart enough to do so". It's not like you get to be CEO of Google by murdering your colleagues.
That illustrates my point. Trump's strategies shouldn't be recommended to anyone: they almost always fail. The only reason he can pull them off is that he has high-level domain expertise in the manipulation of public opinion. Follow conventional wisdom unless you're confident that you're savvy enough to go against it. Trump is obviously savvy enough. Most leaders are, otherwise they wouldn't be leaders.
...I really don't see how you can look at Trump and see a master manipulator. He's basically made no effort to hide the fact that he's morally bankrupt, with all the people he's stiffed and all the cons he's done. In politics he's been a pretty run-of-the-mill populist demagogue, and his victory can be blamed mostly on how incompetent the establishment was.
The point is that society has changed, and the old meta doesn't necessarily apply today. Maybe it's time to do some soul-searching on why someone like Trump can even be moderately successful, let alone take over the whole country.
One simple reason they didn't resort to violence is they were a persecuted, outnumbered minority. It was common for Early Christians to hide their faith. Christianity really underwent explosive growth during the Crisis of the Third Century. And any story that explains their growth without that time period is really missing something.
The growth of Christianity in the Roman Empire basically looks like:
1st Century: Jesus founds Christianity, it expands to low tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands.
2nd Century: Christianity spreads further afield to mostly cities. It reaches low hundreds of thousands to maybe over a million but that's really stretching it.
3rd Century: Rome undergoes a century long crisis. Christianity grows to probably more than five million people, including in the countryside, as the Roman population significantly shrinks.
4th Century: Roman population continues to slowly shrink and Christianity starts to rapidly grow after the end of persecution and the Conversion of Constantine, becoming a politically powerful mainstream religion with tens of millions of followers. In 380 they become the official religion of the empire.
The 3rd century was a massive collapse. Christians, who remember believed the world was going to end, had a doctrine that seemed to explain what was going on. They also gave charity freely, had groups of self-sacrificing people, and notably the spread benefitted from deurbanization. As people moved to the countryside this included Christians who could then convert their more rural neighbors that were the greater part of the population. The Christian idea of life after death was also probably appealing in a time when a lot of people were dying. And perhaps most importantly, as state capacity collapsed persecution became less uniform. When Diocletian re-establishes state power in a durable way he begins to thoroughly persecute Christians again. But by this point they're too big. They survive and even manage to fight back at several points. Then Constantine makes a play for their political support and receives it. They prove useful to his rule and are able to establish themselves as a political power.
People here seem fascinated with the game theory aspect here. I am, too. Anyone interested in exploring further would probably enjoy Nicky Case's interactive story of The Evolution of Trust: https://ncase.me/trust/
The success of early Christianity might’ve relied more on a transactional promise of paradise to the poor, sick and marginalized—the majority of city dwellers in the ancient world—than it relied on some inherent cooperative advantage.
From what little I understand, early Christianity effectively reduced the barrier to “heaven” for the destitute and downtrodden by removing many of the complex liturgical rites and rituals associated with passage into the afterlife, to which the poor lacked access, and replaced those barriers with general behavioral expectations.
In this sense martyrdom/caring for the contagious, etc. became transactional. Early Christianity opened up heaven to the masses who, once converted, genuinely believed they were trading short-term earthly misery for the enormous pay-off of everlasting happiness.
> From what little I understand, early Christianity effectively reduced the barrier to “heaven” for the destitute and downtrodden by removing many of the complex liturgical rites and rituals associated with passage into the afterlife, which the poor lacked access too, and replaced those barriers with general behavioral expectations.
That's the pop-culture understanding, but it's not particularly accurate. When you read what first- and second-century Christians wrote about themselves, a picture emerges that looks far more like what Scott referred to in this article as "a mystery cult" than it does like modern-day Christianity. They had all manner of "complex liturgical rites and rituals" and initiations into new levels of the Church with associated bestowals of newer and holier knowledge, which was largely lost along the long and twisted road the faith took between Jesus and Constantine.
I think you’ve mischaracterized my argument. I don’t deny that early Christians could have had complex liturgical rites and rituals to gain holy insight. But they had very few of these as requirements for passage into a blissful afterlife, particularly when compared to the Romans, Jews or mystery cults of the period that typically involved multiple, sometimes costly, rites and sacrifices sanctioned or performed by religious leaders. Early Christianity introduced the idea that faith and baptism alone could guarantee salvation, which cut across social classes.
Of course this distinction applies far better to early Christianity than later Christianity.
If you think that early Christians did in fact require a host of complex rites, sacrifices, rituals before any soul could enter heaven, I’d welcome the correction and any links you might have to the scholarship.
(Why are my replies getting consistently cut off on Substack now?)
> If you think that early Christians did in fact require a host of complex rites, sacrifices, rituals before any soul could enter heaven, I’d welcome the correction and any links you might have to the scholarship.
Yes, that is in fact my claim. A lot of this relies on a deep-dive I took into ancient Christianity around 20-ish years ago, so I'd have to go and look up the relevant scholarship again. Give me some time. But... yes, "the idea that faith and baptism alone could guarantee salvation" was not the doctrine of the day. Baptism was an initiatory rite, the beginning of the path to salvation, not the end of it.
The real difficulty of researching this stuff is that these matters were held to be deeply sacred and not to be shared with the uninitiated, so contemporary writings are full of charlatans professing to have the truth of the secret Christian teachings, with all the intermixture of real doctrines and nonsensical blatherings that you'd expect. But there are enough common themes that show up again and again to give a decent "big picture" view of it.
I am reminded of the discussion of the gene-cultural co-evolution of prosociality in "The Secret of our Success." The answer there is that prosociality is the result of intergroup competition.
Passage 1:
Intergroup competition provides one important process that can help explain the spread of norms that foster prosociality. Different groups culturally evolve different social norms. Having norms that increase cooperation can favor success in competition with other groups that lack these norms. Over time, intergroup competition can aggregate and assemble packages of social norms that more effectively promote such success, and these packages will include social norms related to cooperation, helping, sharing, and maintaining internal harmony.
Passage 2:
Over time, combinations of these intergroup processes will aggregate and recombine different social norms to create increasingly prosocial institutions. To be clear, by “prosocial institutions” I mean institutions that lead to success in competition with other groups. While such institutions include those that increase group cooperation and foster internal harmony, I do NOT mean “good” or “better” in a moral sense. To underline this point, realize that intergroup competition often favors norms and beliefs that can readily result in the tribe or nation in the next valley getting labeled as “animals,” “nonhumans,” or “witches” and motivate efforts to exterminate them.
Passage 3:
The effects of the strengthened social norms and a more tightly bonded community appear to have resulted in the formation of more, and more active, community organizations. None of the communities unaffected by the war established new local organizations, such as farming cooperatives or women’s groups. By contrast, 40% of those communities affected by the war had subsequently established new organizations. Even if the communities affected by violence didn’t establish any new organizations, the ones they already had or those started by outsiders were more active than those in unaffected villages. By strengthening prosocial group norms, the experience of war resulted in more, and more energized, community organizations.
Passage 4:
Why would war have these prosocial effects?
During hundreds of thousands of years, intergroup competition spread an immense diversity of social norms that galvanized groups to defend their communities; created risk-sharing networks to deal with environmental shocks like drought, floods, and famines; and fostered the sharing of food, water, and other resources. This meant that, over time, the survival of individuals and their groups increasingly depended on adhering to those group-beneficial social norms, especially when war loomed, famine struck, or droughts persisted. In this world, culture-gene coevolution may have favored a psychological response to intergroup competition, including threats that demanded group solidarity for survival. Under such threats, or in environments where such threats are common, intergroup competition favors cultural practices that monitor individuals more closely and sanction norm violators particularly harshly, thereby suppressing the increased temptation to break the norms (e.g., not sharing food during a famine).
Passage 5:
Once cultural learning evolved to the point where people could acquire social behaviors, motivations, and rules for judging others’ behavior, norms emerged spontaneously. This makes the shared recognition of how people should behave possible and permits the flow of reputational information among individuals who share those standards. At this point, genes had to survive in a dynamic social landscape in which different groups were doing different things, and failure to do those things properly (performing a ritual or sharing food) meant facing reputational damage, diminished mating prospects, ostracism, and, in the extreme, execution by the group. Natural selection shaped our psychology to make us docile, ashamed at norm violations, and adept at acquiring and internalizing social norms. This is the process of self-domestication.
The differences among groups created by cultural evolution and social norms would have created intergroup competition if it hadn’t already existed. Various forms of intergroup competition, only one of which involves violence, increasingly favored social norms that fostered success in this competition, which would have commonly included norms that increase group size, solidarity, social interconnectivity, cooperation, economic production, internal harmony, and risk sharing, among many other domains. This process meant that genes would increasingly find themselves fighting to survive in a world of prosocial norms, where narrowly self-interested norm violations were punished. This would have favored genes for a prosocial psychology, prepared for navigating a world where norms about harm and fairness toward fellow community members were likely to be important.
Several points that stick out to me.
1. Henrich's description of this process of self-domestication, making us docile (the same way as humans domesticated sheep to make them docile) fits pleasingly well with Nietzsche's description of Christianity (although unlike Henrich, Nietzsche thinks this is a bad thing)!
2. You raised the point that liberal norms, such as democracy and freedom of expression, face an analogous puzzle--how could they survive from internal threats, given that by definition they "cooperate" with internal threats (fascism, anti-free-speech speech, respectively). But I think that one of the most common defenses of these liberal norms is that they are favored in intergroup competition; e.g., that free markets allowed the US to beat out the Soviet Union in the long-term in production, that free speech /inquiry also contributed to this (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism#:~:text=Lysenkoism), and democracy leads to better decision making than authoritarianism since authoritarians like Putin gradually purge anyone who will tell them that their ideas are bad, leading them to disastrous decisions (like invasion of Ukraine).
3. I think this piece of Henrich connects to your contrast between early Christians and mystery cults:
> To underline this point, realize that intergroup competition often favors norms and beliefs that can readily result in the tribe or nation in the next valley getting labeled as “animals,” “nonhumans,” or “witches” and motivate efforts to exterminate them.
It seems to me that the contrast between early Christians and mystery cults in your article (and arguably, this is the heart of the puzzle) is the claim that the mystery cults but NOT early Christians behaved in alignment with the passage above.
The two responses that come to mind, which are both slight cop outs, are
a. I think this is clearly not true if you look at the later history (or present?) of Christianity, which I think aligns very well with Henrich's quote and
b. Are you really so sure that early Christians offered *equal* benefits to Christians and non-Christians alike? It seems to me that as long as Christians offered at least some additional benefits to other Christians (even if the difference was "good treatment" to "better treatment" rather than "cruel treatment" to "good treatment"), there is incentive to switch, and (while I'm not knowledgeable about early Christian history) it feels implausible (both from observations of contemporary Christianity, and human psychology) that this was not the case.
4. I think Henrich's point that war often strengthens the development of prosocial norms connects very nicely to the thesis of this book, which is on why the Old Testament was written:
I know less about early Christianity (one book's worth less, since the book above is approximately all of my knowledge about early Judaism), but from the fact that googling "Pax Romana" the dates seem to align with the rise of Christianity it seems less plausible that the rise of Christianity can similarly be attributed to the aftermath of a war? But I wonder if it is explained well in terms of other similar hardships that would have encouraged prosocial norms.
The answer is 9: the orthogonality thesis does not hold up in humans
Why not? Because 1) we are made up of subagents and 2) our subagents don't distinguish between our own subagents and those of others
As a result, if your habit is to cooperate with others, you'll find that your subagents will cooperate with each other, and it will make you a lot more functional
“Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," says the Lord. On the contrary: "If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” — Romans 12: 19-21.
One relevant feature of the situation is that Christianity is, in its own telling, not running cooperate bot at all, but is rather using the “mob boss” strategy. You should cooperate with everyone around you, with the understanding that God will handle any necessary punishment of defectors.
Of course, this strategy appears to rely on God intervening to make it work. What this implies about reality is left as an exercise for the reader.
God doesn't need to intervene, it just needs to have a psychological hold on the populace, to the point where almost everyone carries out its will. God really is humanity's greatest invention.
On the success of early Christianity: it succeeded because it was true, in a visceral sense of truth, not the pat, QED sense we moderns are left with. Christianity resonated with the early followers. They were right; reality rewarded them for having a good take.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned in the OP or comments is specific variations on the IPD that might influence which strategy works. For instance, it's very possible that early Christians were observing fellow Christians who played the game and adjusted their own strategy.
So consider a parallel IPD (PIPD), where each bot can not only remember the games it's played, but also the games of its fellow bots. Maybe it sees several of them cooperate and get betrayed and goes TIT FOR TAT, but maybe that succeeds for a while but they then see some bots cooperate and win, possibly for a while, and they drift into FORGIVE.
Locality also plays a role in tribe formation. Maybe a bot recognizes some group of other bots as "kin", and emulates them. A group of COOPERATES will of course survive a long time until infiltrated by some form of DEFECT. But any member of that group might easily recognize that one DEFECT-bot as not-kin, and reserves TIT FOR TAT for that one and continues playing COOPERATE with all the others.
I mentioned Nicky Case's treatise on bots earlier. AFAIK, he doesn't explore PIPD or tribal PIPD.
St. Paul explained it like this: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.” Romans 12:20 - which was a direct quote from the 'Old Testament', Proverbs 25:21: "If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink. 22 In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head, and the LORD will reward you."
Fun fact: The US treated even Nazi-POW friendly. And turned many into friends. - G. Bay: less so.
Your liberal assumption about liberalism being similar to Christianity is flawed. Maybe you're talking about classical liberalism, which is similar to modern libertarianism? But modern liberalism (i.e. progressivism and/or DNC partisanship) is quite obviously pro-censorship (anti-"misinformation"), pro-punishment of rivals, and pro-funnelling-wealth-upwards. Progressives and democrats are known for virtue signalling and NIMBY-hypocrisy (yes we need more illegal immigrants in red states, no we won't tolerate a single one in Martha's Vineyard). They are also statistically less likely to donate to charity than conservatives. I'm familiar with the argument that progressivism is a sort of secular bastardization of Christianity. But if you look at what actual progressives in the upper middle class and above actually DO, it's definitely not altruistic!
He's writing about early history, and the 'never' here is an impossible standard. The relevant question is how this compares to everyone else, where the answer for early Christians (and many later Christians ) is pretty clearly yes, with legal codes becoming far less retribution based, and yes, liberal leaders go to war less often than the alternatives.
The New Testament morality is aimed at the behaviour of the individual, and not a manual on how to govern. I don't think it's inconsistent for a Christian leader to wage war or implement justice, whilst holding to Jesus' teaching.
I think this is a key distinction that Scott doesn't deal with.
Christian idea is "Ye shall know them by their fruits." The "dominant ideology" of bleeding heart liberalism yields consistently bad results for its supposed beneficiaries. And yet the supposed bleeding hearts never alter their destructive approaches even in the face of irrefutable data. Which reveals the other motivations at play. Take for example the bleeding hearts "working" to address homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area. They have spent many billions of dollars "addressing" a finite problem in a finite population, and there has been zero reduction in homelessness. The people involved WANT the problem to continue (consciously or unconsciously) as a source for virtue signalling, treasury looting, power seeking, the creation of dependents, etc. You can see this all across the spectrum of bleeding heart activities. Lots of literacy charities out there, lots of bleeding heart liberal governments in blue cities, literally TRILLIONS of dollars spent, zero improvements in literacy. No change in approach. Obviously helping the "official" beneficiaries is not the primary goal.
Makes me think of Mother Teresa. I wonder what impact her work had on the ground. I think I once read there was some degree of pragmatism in it. I also have met a few social workers. The sanest ones draw boundaries, much like TFT bot, but they have a lot of respect for their clients. Bleeding heart idealists don't last long on the streets, AFAIK.
1) I think you're overestimating the goodness/cooperativeness of everyone. While the ideal of Christianity was always cooperate, Christians did sometimes resist as well. So Christianity may have fallen closer to tit-for-tat than appears at first glance. For everyone else, I suspect they were much less cooperative than tit-for-tat. Pre-emptive strikes were very common. So the Christian win may have been simply a strategy closer to tit-for-tat (on the cooperative side) defeating a strategy further away from tit-for-tat (on the defect side).
2) Lots of individual Christians did lose. The persistence of Christianity may be more comparable to the design of a new algorithm rather than the winning of a competition.
2 points, not necessarily disjoint from your 9 points but in my own words:
1. COOPERATE-BOT loses the specific competition with the specific mix of competitors and the specific payoff matrix and the specific interaction graph used in Axelrod's tournament, but that doesn't mean it can't flourish anywhere.
Specifically, if you imagine a world that is 100% TIT-FOR-TAT BOT, then COOPERATE BOT has the same payout as everyone else, and can spread through random genetic drift or from any other side benefit it may have outside teh game theory interaction.
Or, if you introduce a stochastic element to represent uncertainty and imperfect information (which is very common in game theory simulations), a world full of TIT-FOR-TAT BOTs will occasionally defect on the first interaction 'on accident' and lock into a defect spiral. COOPERATE BOTs will pull out of this spiral and have a competitive advantage.
Of course, COOPERATE BOT is exploited by DEFECT BOT, so the question is what ratio of DEFECT vs TFT is in the initial population COOP is trying to invade, and the graph of how they interact. The graph is especially important here - if agents interact randomly then 99% TFT in the population means 99% of your games are with TFT and COOP can do well, but if agents seek partners intentionally then DEFECT may preferentially target COOP and destroy them quickly. This could be related to why COOP strategies did better in the past than in the present, if modern information systems allow DEFECT to target and exploit them more readily.
All this to say, game theory interactions like this are very sensitive to starting conditions and game design, so saying 'We proved that tit-for-tat with forgiveness is the optimal agent so anything we observe that is successful with not that is an anomaly in need of explanation' is not really a safe approach.
2. We have lots of *stories* and *rhetoric* about early Christians being COOPERATE BOT. But is that really how every single Christian acted every day (or enough of them for it to be meaningfully accurate), or is that a carefully cultivated reputation?
Imagine if Axelrod's game had reputation, so you know something about your counteragent before playing. TFT BOTs would probably be modified to defect on round 1 if they had sufficiently reliable evidence that they were playing against a DEFECT BOT. But they'd always cooperate round 1 if they were sufficiently sure they were playing against TFT or COOPERATE.
In this situation, the best strategy is to *be* TFT, but *have a reputation* as being COOPERATE. If you can pull that off, then you are not exploitable by DEFECT, and aren't punished by other TFT.
(why not just have a reputation for being TFT? That works if you can maintain it, but every TFT defects sometimes, and if reputation is stochastic then another TFT might mistake you for DEFECT and get into a defect spiral with you. That hurts both of your reputations and makes a repeat defect spiral more likely in the future. So there's a pure benefit from trying to push your reputation a far towards COOPERATE BOT as possible.. unless that gets you preferentially targeted by DEFECT, which again is where starting populations and interaction graphs are determinative)
So 'Christians carefully maintained a reputation for being COOPERATE BOT in all their public-facing rhetoric and myths, even though actual individual christians were just the normal mic of strategies like everyone else, and this reputation kept them out of defect spirals with other TFT agents' is also a plausible explanation.
> So 'Christians carefully maintained a reputation for being COOPERATE BOT in all their public-facing rhetoric and myths, even though actual individual christians were just the normal mic of strategies like everyone else, and this reputation kept them out of defect spirals with other TFT agents' is also a plausible explanation.
Only if you can first come up with a plausible explanation for how a hated and persecuted underclass had the power to craft their own "public-facing rhetoric and myths," and get people to believe them, while their enemies who hated them and wanted to see them exterminated were in power and in full control of "the narrative," to use a modern term.
They had to already be very 'successful' in terms of spreading far and wide before they were numerous and influential enough to be a 'hated and persecuted underclass', so that's probably already very far into their success story (in terms of going from 10 people to 10,000 or w/e. The Emperor doesn't notice and persecute 10 people).
I also think the idea of 'controlling the narrative' works differently now, it's not like Rome has podcasts and TV shows that they controlled. I don't know how much information was disseminated from a central authority to individual peasants on farms in remote areas, but I would assume that a peasant's information diet was overwhelmingly based on local gossip and rumors rather than central dispatches from the Emperor.
And, also, would Rome bother to dispute the COOPERATE BOT rhetoric specifically, instead of just saying they're heretics or traitors or w/e? If you don't know that COOPERATE REHTORIC is a successful strategy and you think owning slaves and having them fight lions is a fun family activity, don't you just laugh at them for being idiots when they say they are COOPERATE BOT, instead of trying to disprove the claim?
> I would assume that a peasant's information diet was overwhelmingly based on local gossip and rumors rather than central dispatches from the Emperor.
That's what heralds and proclamations were for, and when you're the Romans, who famously built the greatest network of roads that the world had ever seen, you exploit the mobility advantage that this provides to the fullest.
When Mark began his written testimony with the words, "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God," his audience knew *exactly* what he was doing here. "This is the Good News of So-And-So" was the formalized beginning of a proclamation announcing the conquests of a victorious ruler, and Mark adopted this language to tell the story of the King of Kings and his triumph over death itself, because this sort of proclamation was something he knew his audience would be familiar with.
I like the overall point of this post. Tit-for-tat should triumph, but with the early Christians cooperate-bot seemed to triumph. Fascinating and apparently true. But the side point, that today's progressives are so altruistic and Christian-like and cooperate-bot-ish is what I object to. It doesn't ring true. Modern progressivism seems to be driven by conscious society-wreckers and profiteers at the top, grifters below them, useful idiots below them, very few actually altruistic people anywhere in the movement, and zero or negative results for the supposed beneficiaries.
Persons that come across as willing to help & love even one’s enemies, all the time, signal something very close to being self-bound to help & love.
To appear self-bound is a great reputational benefit in private affairs, it makes one maximally trusted.
Notice that the best way to appear self-bound is to actually be self-bound. Darwin, in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, suggested this as an explanation for why involuntary blushing exists. (Which otherwise represents one of the Kuhnian puzzles facing the evolutionary paradigm.)
Socrates (in Xenophon) proposes something similar when arguing that “the best way to acquire and maintain a reputation for honesty and good will is to become the person you want others to believe that you are”.
Another classic reference is the writings of evolutionary theorist Amotz Zahavi. (Tel Aviv University, died 2017.)
In essence, this line of reasoning is a way the existence of genuine, Kantian altruists - including Christians who genuinely love their enemies - can be anchored (ultimately) in evolutionary derived self-interest.
That is, a way to solve arguably the grandest Kuhnian puzzle concerning Man’s behavior, as seen from within the evolutionary paradigm: Why does genuine altruism exist.
It's interesting to read you grappling with this question. I basically believe explanation 8, and a significant part of *why* I believe it is because of the impact that _In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization_ had on me (along with some other of your writing), so I would have guessed you also believed that!
Doesn't this come down to the fact that players in the Christians v. Pagans prisoner's dilemma have very different definitions of 'win' compared to individuals playing prisoner's dilemma games? I don't think "expose yourself to the plague by nursing plagued people so your ingroup can recruit more people after you die" would be counted as a win by everyone.
I will never not gush about how great the Quakers are, and in fact I think the aspiring-rationalist community should just join the Society of Friends. Here's my pitch:
The Quakers were founded by George Fox and his wife Margaret Fell based on a vision that Fox had that led him to believe that the universal light of God was equally accessible to everybody, and therefore anybody was capable of divine insight. Thus, they have no hierarchy and their early meeting practice (still done everywhere I've gone, but apparently less common worldwide) is that you all get together and sit quietly and think about stuff. If anybody feels they have something they really, REALLY need to say, they say it, and then everybody sits quietly and thinks about that thing, too.
From this, the Quakers decided that slavery was bad, men and women should be treated as equals, evolution seemed like a nifty idea, and same-sex couples should be able to get married. (These happened at different times, although generally way before most of society - Quakers petitioned Congress to end slavery in the FIRST Congress, for example.)
If you've ever thought, "If I lived hundreds of years ago, would I realize how terrible society was and be able to work out my current beliefs?" then the answer is "Maybe, if you were a Quaker".
Now, as mentioned in this post, the Quakers were not perfect in every way, and also they've largely vanished, at least compared to their once-dominant position, BUT it's worth noting that they also basically wove a ton of their beliefs into the founding documents of the United States (see https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/) so arguably many of the memes of Quakerism have been quite successful even as membership has cratered.
But! I also think we can bring it back. In a world where everybody constantly derides a lack of third spaces, there's already a bunch of cities with groups of people you can join and be friends (and Friends) with! And there's literally no requirement of any kind other than that you can just sit there for a while!
(Incidentally both of the Quaker meetings I've attended do not require you to profess a belief in God, and in fact I've told members of both groups that I don't believe in God and nobody has taken any issue with it.)
Yet another religion article that refuses to just read the game manual. COOPERATE-BOT is actually just minmaxing for 'mitzvah points', in which case it's no surprise it's a dominant strategy
One thing worth considering is what happens the *instant* Christianity gets into power - from then on, it's repression and inquisition all the way, until liberalism and enlightenment finally manages to stop that after 1500 years.
This makes me think the rest is merely an effective strategy-from-weakness. Once you're the ones with political and violence capital, that's so much easier than being nice or non-violent.
Possibly in some kind of theoretical meaning, but that's a lot like "that wasn't TRUE communism". When we talk about Christianity, we typically mean the "actually existing Christianity", to paraphrase. Not that *actual* Christianity ended 25 July 306.
It's still an interesting observation that Christianity as a historical movement went from saying "my kingdom is not of this world", to saying "let's build the city of God in this world", in the space of a few centuries. From detachment to authoritarianism in a few steps.
If anything, it can serve as a warning for any present or future movement that attempts "detachment from power" as a value, to see how easily it can turn into the very opposite.
Some of the way, yes, but surely not all the way? Compare people with people and governments with governments. If you looked at the wide range of 'Christian' nations from 313 to 1750 against the alternative governments on offer at the time, would they compare favourably? My priors say yes, but I'd be happy to be corrected.
Post-Black Death, Europe starts to rise due to factors unrelated to religion (military and especially naval technology), but before that, I don't see that it has much to offer - the Early Medieval period is abysmal, and Europe in the year 1000 has really nothing to offer internationally. The Islamic world is superior in essentially every way up until at least the High Middle Ages, for instance, and in religious toleration way past even that. For a lot of the period you list, China was probably a better place to live than Europe for the average citizen (this does not hold true towards the end, though).
I think the primary distinction is that the early Christians were not Cooperate Bots: but they lived and believed as if everyone was worth cooperating with. To love someone does not mean you always cooperate with them, but it does mean that you wish the best for them. In a prisoner's dillemma the Christian *wants* the best outcome for the opponent as well as wanting the best outcome for themselves.
To put it another way, the "post-Christian Nietzschean" may be satisfied with being a Defect Bot in a world of Cooperate Bots: that gets them the most utility, after all, and they have to obligation to others. But the Christian is not satisfied to be the Defect Bot, even if it gets him the most utility. He loves the other players and wants good for them as well. That may or may not mean cooperating, depending on the situation: in real life refusing to cooperate with Defect Bot may actually change Defect Bot's ways, for instance. But the goal is maximum utility for everyone.
We live in a society built on two thousand years of Christianity, so that assumption is built into most of us from an early age. That we should care about other people, that we should ask ourselves "How would I feel if that happened to me", that the best solution is the one that is best for everyone, even our enemies: this is the Christian influence. This is what they had (though not solely that) that the pagans didn't.
As Jesus said: "You must be wise as serpents, but innocent as doves." How could a society built on hating your enemies survive against a society built on loving everyone? A society that does defect with others, but only when they believe that defecting is the loving thing to do? A society built on the idea that we all must offer forgiveness to those who repent, even those who defected against us 70 times 7 times in the past does better than a society that does not forgive at all.
I think this is really the key. Christ and the saints loved and forgave all their enemies; they harboured no ill will to those who hated them and wished to destroy them, even while (in some cases) they were being tortured to death.
True Christianity, then, is a state of mind - it’s bearing no ill will, no animosity, just love and the wish for others’ happiness.
Does that mean, for example, judges cannot be Christian, or Christians cannot serve on juries (as Tolstoy thought?) Not at all - sometimes the compassionate thing to do is to serve justice to criminals, so their hearts can be transformed by understanding what their victims suffered. This would be considered “defecting” in the prisoners’ dilemma, but only in a naive sense - it’s cooperating with the greater good.
A true Christian, however, would never think of prosecuting criminals as “punishment.” It’s a different kind of compassion - one that is firm, and sets boundaries, but compassion nonetheless, like a father’s love. They wish for all beings to repent their sins and know the divine light of Christ.
Are you distinguishing correctly between the success enjoyed by 1. Individual Christians 2. Christian communities and institutions and 3. The idea of Christianity, as a result of the "always submit" strategy? The virtues of the average drone are appropriate for the average bee because most bees are drones but they benefit the queen and the cause of beedom generally a lot more than they benefit the drone. A topical case in point is the appalling John Smyth over whom the archbishop of Canterbury has just resigned, who persuaded hundreds of young Christians to permit him to beat them till they bled because it was what Christ wanted - an always defect tactic succeeding in an always cooperate environment.
Yes that's another way in which this article sounds confused to my ears. It's failing to keep up the difference between the individual, collective and ideological levels.
I guess I want to challenge the notion that the behavior of early Christians 0r the writings of the church fathers are especially informative as to why Christianity won. Christianity won because the elites took it up. Question is why Constantine decided to convert and why his successors decided to essentially ban paganism 300or 400 years after the death of Christ. By the time the elites were done with it Christianity did not look anything like the teachings of Jesus. Nor does it today.
That doesn't answer the question of how Christianity survived through centuries of persecution, long enough to reach the time of Constantine, though, which is what Scott is attempting to answer here.
0 one answer is that Christians overstate the amount of persecution. No doubt there was persecution, but the baseline attitude of the Romans was that they didn't give a shit what people believed or how they worshiped. Christian's kind of invented caring a lot about that as a n organizing principle. Most of the time Christianity was popular among the urban poor, the Romans carry a bit less about the urban poor than we do. Again to me the interesting question is why Constantine and his successors decided to go all in on Christianity, and then morphed Christianity into something that suited their preferences. I suspect the motivation was more or less the same that Henry the 8th had seizing the monasteries
> After all the Vikings and steppe nomads and Spartans have had their way with each other, the leading ideology of the 21st century thus far appears to be a hyper-Christian bleeding-heart liberalism: COOPERATE-BOT in a bloodstained sweater. I don’t know why this keeps happening, but I wouldn’t count it out.
acoup speaks of this [0]. TLDR: liberalism was a social technology that Locke and friends invented to solve Christianity's (internecine, btw ) Wars of Religion. So, like other comments point out, I suspect the strength of the strat is context-dependent. We ain't at the end of history yet.
People are imperfect representations of their ideals, so an ideal like TIT-FOR-TAT-WITH-FORGIVENESS would have expected deviations that include full martyr COOPERATE-BOTs and TIT-FOR-TAT, but perhaps the ideal ideal is something like TIT-FOR-TAT with _extra_ forgiveness. The New Testament places priority on "deserving poor", says if you don't work you don't eat, has prescription for putting people out of the church (community) for grievous violations, and a defined process (ie from Matthew 18) for internal discipline. A high-trust society is so beneficial, it's probably worth erroring more on the side of unwarranted trust, but COOPERATE-BOT still seems to be a losing proposition unless you have God handling the punishment bit.
I think that optimising social interactions for freeloader detection and it's accompanying emotional module that ranges in manifestations from focus on fairness (or if extreme, equality) to obsessive horror of being "cucked" are scarcity-rooted, survival-focused adaptations. Naturally (literally as well as figuratively naturally) they feature heavily in human social interactions.
But the more we get away from survival-threatening scarcity, the less cost and the more benefits there might be to allowing freeloaders, and especially allowing "seeming" freeloaders who might turn out not to be freeloaders ultimately. But even real ones (you list some, including freeing policing resources).
I either lack the "fairness for its own sake" function or have it very underdeveloped, so it's very difficult for me to imagine motivations of people who are concerned with fairness outside scarcity/survival situation. But with this caveat, the world of cooperate-bots seems intuitively appealing not just because it feels "nice" and not because it feels heroically moral, but because it seems free, optimistic, hopeful. The implicit message it sends is "there's plenty, enough X for everyone, we don't need to scrap and fight over every bit or make deadly sure of fair distribution". It's a world of somewhat wasteful abundance and benevolent forgiveness in which the death itself is not quite real. I'm not Christian so I'm not going to suggest that "X" stands for divine love and everlasting bliss, but someone who was could see it like that. And this is an extremely appealing a vision, surely!!
A world in which one could genuinely NOT CARE about being "stolen from" (literally but also by being treated unfairly). A world of love, or at least benevolence, and not tit for tat "justice". (I'm leaving aside the contractual/"paying ransom" interpretation of soteriology via the Passion).
If this vision appeals to a materialistic mind living its days out in relative comfort, safety and security unimaginable to most humanity historical and current, think how much it must have appealed to those early proto Christians with their brutish, short and suffering filled lives.
With lots of handwaving because I made a promise to do a better job getting my toddler to speak, I think this is because in those game theoretical situations you have to make your predictions in steps once you leave the theory world. One of those steps is “and I am a good, morally justified person” and when you keep hurting someone who isn’t hurting you back AND wishes you well then it starts to throw you out of your “defect” loop. Subject to all kind of initial size effects and what exactly that “good morally justified” test means to the person taking the action. But people in general won’t do things they consider bad for very long. They just won’t think about it, delude themselves, consider it amoral, etc, but I’ve not really known someone who can sustain “this is bad, going to keep doing it anyway” for a very long period of time. You have to, I think transcendentally, consider yourself worthy of the next game to keep playing the game as an agent.
The best strategy is to hone strength while showing grace, to cooperate until you feel like a total cuck, and to punish defectors just often enough to keep defection rare.
An excerpt from something I posted recently on DSL, to suggest another reason why Christians might have cooperated so freely:
One moment I remember very specifically, the moment before I found Christ, feeling agonized by a sense of worthlessness as I sought both to get a sense of self from my academic record and from feeling like I belonged to a group of friends. I worshiped Good Grades and Social Belonging. And that worship, that idolatry, that creation of other gods and giving them the power to define my worth, that caused me immense pain. The moment I saw those idols for what they really were—dumb, mute, powerless—was the moment I was able to say, “I’m actually not as smart as I think I ought to be, nor am I as interesting as I think I ought to be, and yet, for some reason, Lord, You still found me worth dying for.”
It was pain that brought me to this point. It was pain that led me to freedom. It was pain that forced me to choose: will I define myself by the love of God, or by the rules of an idol?
It is for freedom that Christ has set us free, St. Paul writes in the Epistle to the Galatians, but our freedom is not to be used to keep on sinning, he writes in the Epistle to the Romans. I know the latter has opened the door to many a conversation about how much sin is too much sin, and what sin is too great of a sin, and what’s actually not a sin, but for me, at that moment of freedom, I had no such questions. All I knew was that God had set me free from my idolatry—He’d found me worth dying for and in so doing, had made me worth dying for—He’d given me a sense of self that was unshakeable and unlosable—I was His. He was a God worth following, worth dying for, and worth obeying in all things. And what did He want? He wanted me to love.
In other words, people are so much more than bots, and Christianity encompasses so much more than niceness. While niceness is a necessary piece of the puzzle, you won’t understand Christian success by analyzing just the niceness.
The game theory tournaments typically have a single outcome ("utility") which is optimized for each agent (although some variations have agents drop out as their utility decreases, so they have to balance expected value and survival probability, the latter still depends only on the former). Can different agents optimize for different things? For example, it's my understanding that Christianity spread fastest among the common people. The pagan religion maximizing "average wealth of adherents" while Christianity maximized "number of adherents" and it's not clear to me that the IPD competitions tell us anything about this situation.
Another possibility in this vein would be that Christians didn't actually lose that much utility from being martyred. Life for most people sucked back then; being convinced that you were about to spend eternity in paradise might have been extremely comforting, psychologically. Perhaps even enough so to get >1 convert per martyr.
One important strong theory (not the complete thing, tbs) is the 100 prisoners hundred boxes math problem. Christians can follow each other's lead, very trustingly, because the signal cost is so high... And once in a while reality plays the part of a molochian mad king trying to force everyone to give up in despair that coordination could be possible... but for teams of high trust folks simply playing the hand they're dealt with total faith, coordination *is* possible, works almost 1/3 of the time, and also it's the *only* thing that does!
I think it's worth mentioning that Christianity didn't "win" until it first:
1. Through advertisement, attracted powerful people (some mix of advertising and heroic appeal, along with appeals to pity and empathy--it's hard to torture someone who is just so unrelentingly nice)
2. Benefited from those powerful people deploying non-COOPERATE-BOT strategies, including DEFECT-BOT or at least CONQUER-BOT strategies
3. Pivot almost entirely to non-COOPERATE-BOT strategies
"a pragmatist faction [of EA/rationalism] wants to stay away from hit-piece-writers, network with friendly journalists to ensure positive coverage, keep our best side forward, and de-emphasize (not deny or lie about) embarrassing bad sides. A COOPERATE-BOT faction thinks that’s what the Pharisees and tax collectors are doing, but that we’re trying to be more epistemically cooperative than everyone else and it’s our responsibility to just dump the exact contents of our brains out to anybody who asks us any question, without regard for the consequences."
As a rationalism-inclined thinker with gray tribe attributes, I can say that the outreach of EA/rationalism works on me only so long as, and to the extent that, I believe you are operating on level zero and just dumping the exact contents of your brains out without regard for consequences. If I thought you were telling me there's a tiger across the river for any reason other than "there's really factually a tiger across the river, it will eat you" I would dump the lot of you in the same bucket I dump politicians and salesmen. No matter how many utils or QALYs that generates to lie about, it would be the end of any attraction I had to this group. Whatever the benefits with powerful outside groups, it would greatly reduce your ability to attract people nearer to your circle to step within your circle.
Now maybe it would be possible to have one approach within sites speaking to the circle and the those near it, like this blog or LW or a few others, and a different side that lies to the outside world. But that seems like a hard line to draw and maintain, in large part because once it's known you're doing that, the people who think they're in the circle will question whether they really are. This blog is pretty normie-facing for a rationalist blog, can I trust this is being honest, or is there a secret Discord where they are actually honest and this is all marketing? Nobody wants to think they may be a dupe. You can dodge all of that skepticism by being maximally open and honest every single time without fail, and I have to think this would've helped the early Christians too, especially when a huge part of their narrative is contrasting themselves with a privileged priestly caste.
Epiphenomenal: What you're observing is not cooperation bots winning, it's set expansion. Accelerated by the Catholic church's ban on cousin marriage, people became much less clannish and much more nationalistic. The set of "friends" expanded and people started cooperating with more people. Groups still viciously attacked groups, but now the larger groups were winning.
"Cooperate bot" would not be a winning international strategy, nor would it be a winning strategy in a state of anarchy, but it works within a nation.
But Rome was plenty nationalistic -- an early Brutus was honored for putting to death his own children when they conspired against the Republic, because Roman values included valuing Rome above one's own family. This probably didn't happen very often, but I don't think it happened often in Christian Europe either.
The Early Christians believed there was rewards in the afterlife:
Mark 10:29-30
And Jesus answered and said, Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel's,
But he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life.
As far as the COOPERATE-BOT strategy, in their minds they were winning rewards for the afterlife. So it wasn't just giving it up now for others benefit, but also hoping for rewards for themselves later.
One of their own Prophets, Apostle Paul, acknowledged that it was the hope in being resurrected that kept them going.
1 Corinthians 15:19 If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.
So if you want to understand the motivation for the early Christians and many Christian groups afterwards, the belief in a resurection should be considered.
I think he understands the motivation: he is trying to figure out how such behavior took over the Roman Empire. Why it was successful, rather than why they were doing it at all.
I know I'm banging a drum here, but Roman society was not 'corrupt and decadent to the core.' In fact, it's clear that the Christians were keen to appropriate pagan virtue - specifically, the four cardinal virtues of courage, justice, self-control and wisdom - to fill in considerable gaps. There really isn't much ethical guidance in the New Testament (other than the Mosaic Commandments which are assumed), plus the Golden Rule, and what there is - such as (again, as noted in a comment on the earlier article), the injunction to put Jesus ahead of one's family, and only to marry if one can't stand celibacy - it's kind of weird. As the three parables in Luke make clear, Christian ethics isn't about virtue, i.e. being a good person, as much as it is about being saved in the next life. That this was clear to outside observers is confirmed by Emperor Julian, who, in his satirical work 'Caesars,' has Constantine, the famous 'Christian emperor,' use the new faith as a pretext for getting away, literally, with crimes.
Christianity isn't mindlessly tolerant. The concepts of sin, penance, and forgiveness (not to mention excommunication) provide a fairly robust framework for preventing infinite-defect exploitation. "Be nice to everyone" can be understood as a marketing come-on. Once you've converted you're held to fairly high standards by the community. Becoming Christian isn't a version of getting on the welfare role.
Christians also aren't mindlessly generous. There are plenty of scriptural references which encourage the application of judgement along with generosity. "Don't cast pearls before swine," and lots of admonitions to abandon people if they don't quickly accept the good news. That could easily be recast as a form of tit-for-tat. Also be mindful that "love your neighbor as yourself" doesn't mean to love him MORE than yourself. It means you should offer reasonable assistance to someone in legitimate need, not hand your entire net worth to the first beggar you see.
Quakers aren't representative Christians. The long history of religious war should convince you of that. Christians have never been shy about the application of violence in defense of the faith.
I'd say that the game-theoretic strategy of Christianity actually is quite close to tit-for-tat and all the "love thy neighbor" stuff could be properly interpreted as "default to COOPERATE-BOT even for outgroup members, otherwise it's tit-for-tat with forgiveness." It *emphasizes* the cooperation stuff because the natural human tendency is to lean into retaliation (so kind of the #3 above, plus shades of Scott's earlier essay "The Ideology Isn't the Movement").
"This is why I’m so fascinated by the early Christians. They played the doomed COOPERATE-BOT strategy and took over the world."
Hypatia of Alexandria would like a word with you.
Early Christians were perfectly capable of brutal and norm-violating violence when it was strategically useful. Yes, they did lots of good things too, and I agree that they practically invented the concept of goodness, and that this goodness was a major advantage, but characterizing them as 'cooperate-bot' is wrong. They tried to convert people, and were into forgiveness, but reacted to any serious philosophical attack (be it heresy or a smart pagan) with rapid and brutal escalation.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you are not repeating the pop culture version of Hypatia's life.
Yes, she was collateral damage in a nasty, messy, political three-way power struggle in Alexandria, a place and time notorious for volatile, riotous, nasty, messy political fights and for the Alexandrian mob being happy to riot and cause damage, be they Jewish, pagan or Christian.
"Socrates Scholasticus presents Hypatia's murder as entirely politically motivated and makes no mention of any role that Hypatia's paganism might have played in her death. Instead, he reasons that "she fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed. For as she had frequent interviews with Orestes, it was calumniously reported among the Christian populace that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop." Socrates Scholasticus unequivocally condemns the actions of the mob, declaring, "Surely nothing can be farther from the spirit of Christianity than the allowance of massacres, fights, and transactions of that sort."
The bishop and those claiming to be acting for him certainly didn't cover themselves in glory in this affair, but it was because Hypatia was popular, influential, and did wield a certain degree of power in the sphere of Alexandrian civic life that she was killed.
"The story often told about Hypatia of Alexandria was that she was a great scientist, rationalist and scholar who was brutally murdered by a mob of Christians who hated her knowledge and learning, with her death ushering in the Dark Ages. But this story is mostly nonsense and the real history is far more complex and much more interesting."
The irony - or balance between the pragmatic and the co-operate bot factions? - is that the parabalani, the people who voluntarily acted as nurses to the sick and buried the dead, were also used as bodyguards by bishops and involved in these very physical fights:
"The Parabalani (Late Latin parabalānī, "persons who risk their lives as nurses", from Ancient Greek: παραβαλανεῖς) or Parabolani (from παραβολᾶνοι or παράβολοι) were the members of a brotherhood, who in early Christianity voluntarily undertook the care of the sick and the burial of the dead, knowing that they themselves could die.
Generally drawn from the lower strata of society, they also functioned as attendants to local bishops and were sometimes used by them as bodyguards and in violent clashes with their opponents."
By 400 were they really "early" Christians? They had been in political power for more than a century. And Hypatia was as removed from Christ in a temporal sense as we are to the Puritans.
Part of it is the problem formulation, unlike prisoners dilemma, you aren't registering actions simultaneously but separately. Instead, it's closer to turn taking. In this formulation, if you assume most people are tit-for-tat, but there's margin for error and some people who just like to 'test-the-waters', tit-for-tat immediately devolves into the dreaded defect-defect doom loop.
Think about how much of human history consists of "someone, somewhere, did something bad and we've been killing each other ever since". Forgiveness, one of the primary virtues of Christianity, is the only way to escape a defect-defect doom loop. It's not that Christians as a whole are super altruistic cooperate-bots, it's that they are slightly more likely to escape the circle of violence. If most people would rather be cooperating than defecting, then a little bit of forgiveness can quickly snowball into a lot of cooperation.
Based on the quote about lawsuits, I think the ideology of early Christians was cooperate-bot but their actions were more like tit-for-tat with a very high rate of forgiveness. Add in the possibilities of reputation and communication and I can see where that would be a very effective strategy for human interactions.
>There’s a parallel debate in charity funding. A pragmatist faction wants to make sure everything we fund is PR-friendly and won’t make everybody hate us or be incredibly embarrassing if it fails; a COOPERATE-BOT faction thinks we have a moral duty to fund the exact object-level highest-utility projects even if everyone will hate us for it and we’ll never get another penny of funding ever again.
I think you're conflating unconditional co-operation with ideological purity here. These are identical in the case of "mere" Christianity, but the EA faction you're labeling COOPERATE-BOT are not actually co-operating.
Same goes for the Quakers to some extent, actually. Refusing to pay taxes in the name of pacifism, sympathetic as we might find this, does not directly follow from the Christian imperative of universal love.
I've got another theory to add to the pile: Environmental confounds. Real world interaction is balanced between player-player and player-environment models. More investment in player-player leads to less investment in player-environment, and vice versa.
Of these two, player-player interactions are more variable, and shorter term; which means they adapt more efficiently to exploitation. Player-environment interaction is far more lucrative long-term, so any decrease puts a society at a distinct disadvantage. This winnows the most efficient player-player model down to either COOPERATE-BOT, or DEFECT-BOT, since they are the simplest. However, DEFECT-BOT disallows information transfer, which means player-environment breakthroughs can't spread.
Christians may have succeeded because COOPERATE-BOT allowed them to focus more of their energies on highly lucrative player-environment interactions. While others were gathering info on who to trust, Christians were figuring out the best way to fight back against a plague. While others were thinking up a revenge plot, Christians forgave, then forgot, then started thinking about how they could solve problems which would matter for longer than a single human lifespan.
To me, free speech seems more like "rules of engagement" than it does like "surrender". It doesn't mean you stop pushing for your own ideology, just that you limit the means for doing so. Though that does suggest that you can gain a counter-intuitive advantage by unilaterally limiting your own means, even when your opponents don't. I suppose you could view martyrdom as a very extreme example on that continuum?
Non-violent protest movements like Ghandi and MLK Jr. also see like central examples of unilateral rules of engagement. I seem to recall a TED talk that claimed non-violent radical movements succeeded about twice as often as violent ones (though both usually fail), and argued this was because non-violent movements succeed in mobilizing more people to their cause (especially women & children, but generally anyone who doesn't like violence or isn't good at it).
Notice that Gandhi & MLK were only able practice non-violence within the British Empire & United States, among the most liberal polities of their time (and ones with a common political heritage). Nobody was able to have any success with such a strategy against Nazi Germany (even though Gandhi recommended just that to the Jews).
Has there been a Prisoner's Dillema-type tournament where pairings are at least partly chosen by the participants - with some awareness of how far their own personal current score is from the elimination threshold - rather than purely random? i suspect that would explain part of it.
Christians often explicitly compare themselves to sheep. If you see two intruders on your territory, one a sheep, the other a man with an axe, with no time to gather further information, which are you more likely to kill on the spot vs. bring further inside and feed?
Lot of roman politics was founded on patron-client relationships https://acoup.blog/2024/06/07/collections-how-to-raise-a-tribal-army-in-pre-roman-europe-part-i-aristocrats-retainers-and-clients/ so in a sense perhaps the Christian community as a whole was playing "moneyball" against the mainstream client-recruitment algorithm - they'd accept people who didn't look like good prospects for patronage (because they'd accept literally anybody) and the ones who turned out to have potential that the mainstream algorithm failed to recognize would then, after recovering from whatever personal crisis required charity, defend the Christian community from outside aggressors - out of a sense of reciprocity, and to preserve a valuable resource just in case they needed it again in the future.
Christianity is not just undiscerning cooperate-bot. Christianity should be thought of as strong discernment about when to cooperate at an astonishing level (in giving charity to all) and when to defect at an astonishing level (from Roman sexual immorality, nasty gladiator shows, Roman legal system, pagan rituals). They were persecuted because of all the defecting they did from stuff the Romans saw as an essential part of being Roman.
John Locke argues (and I agree) in The Reasonableness of Christianity that Christianity got the closest to the Natural Law of any system that has been put forth and this was successful in creating a thriving society. The things Christians defected from were detrimental to human society flourishing and the ways in which they chose to cooperate were ways that enhanced human flourishing.
I think the real power is in caring more about the impact to the community than the impact to the self. COOPERATE-BOT is mindless without thought for the impact on DEFECTOR-BOT; in real life, a devotee can express a willingness to accept cost for the sake of another, which is powerful. This is perhaps just your points 1/2; but I think that the human interaction is critical when thinking about a movement.
I feel like you keep seriously discounting how memetically optimized Christianity is. You can get away with suboptimal game theory when all of your competition is just completely awful. Of course, once Christianity became the dominant religion, and the only competition became other Christians and other similarly optimized religions, you're back to using Tit-for-Tat. Which history seems to reflect quite well.
Also, on the part about liberalism... Really?? Even ignoring the absurdity of implying that liberalism follows COOPERATE-BOT in practice, it's a bit soon to be celebrating that liberalism triumphed over fascism, don't you think? Especially given recent events...
Too soon? No, fascism was an interwar phenomena that got stomped out to the extent basically nobody will claim to be a fascist anymore. There are certainly other varieties of authoritarianism, but none seem to regard war as the highest aspiration even since the countries that did lost the big war.
Tit-for-tat is only optimal under a certain kind of initial conditions, which happened to be the ones around which the IPD was originally designed. For anyone who thinks it's some kind of Pareto optimal: https://ncase.me/trust/ is both cute and insightful.
I thought from some old SSC post (Albion's seed?) that, although the Quakers as a group diminished, the Quaker ideas have so taken over the Western world that they're just considered normal these days. Consider, pre-pandemic at least, the handshake: at the time this was a radical and antiauthoritarian gesture as opposed to the complicated system of bows and curtseys and other expressions to acknowledge the differences in one's relative standing.
Indeed you can, but that's not how the system worked that the Quakers replaced. It would be a good custom to adopt during a pandemic though.
I've watched several martial arts tournaments where both contestants bowed to each other before starting the fight, and I'm all for that kind of ritual.
Up to about 15 years ago I was a member of a religion well spread down here in Brazil called Kardecism (aka Spiritism, aka Kardecist Spiritism). It has something between 4 and 40 million followers, meaning something between 1% and 10% of the population. The trait that attracted me the most in it was its very intense, and I mean INTENSE, focus on charity.
It's derived from Christianity, but with several tweaks. One of them was to take the sayings of Jesus in the Gospels about what people ought to do, ignore most everything else, including ignoring the doctrines, dogmas, and the like, and say to followers that's what one needs to actively do to reach a higher state in the afterlife. That belief or disbelief don't matter, all that matters is doing charity, towards everyone, whether Spiritists or not, all the time, without demanding from them anything in return, at all -- not even demanding from them to listen to the Spiritist message itself, unless and until they express interest.
I left due to not believing the metaphysics anymore, but I still admire them and contribute to one of their charities. And they do have lots and lots and _lots_ of those, some of which really huge.
Interestingly, since it's a religion that dwells on necromancy (channeling the spirits of the dead either for them to give instructions to the living, or to do charity towards them, depending on whether the channelers presents them as being in a good or bad situation on the afterlife), they're also heavily attacked by more typical Christian branches, which accuse it of satanism, all the while recognizing the charity they do under clenched teeth, so there's that too.
Good point. The individual is not supposed to PUNISH by himself, which is good because (a) we're all biased, and (b) we get bitter. The Matthew 18 procedure is to (1) talk to the person you have a grievance against, (2) if that fails, get somebody else to go with you -- if you can, and (3) if that fails, go to the elders and get them to talk to the person and maybe expel them from the church.
One nit-pick. When you have the two or three witnesses, you go to the assembly which can decide what to do as a body. There is no hint that the elders/overseers were supposed to have disciplinary powers early on.
In Matthew 18:21, Jesus says that you should forgive your brother who sins against you not seven times, but seven times seventy times. Has anyone tried this as an iterated prisoners dilemma strategy?
In the original IPD experiment, with the interaction between bots set to 100 iterations, wouldn't 490 forgivenesses be indistinguishable from always-cooperate?
As an aside, I wish that the IPD experiment had also been run with the bots told at each interaction, how many interactions were left with the other player...
The hole in Scott's argument here is so obvious that I strongly suspect this is some kind of self-deprecating parody of the rationalists' characteristic naïveté about human nature.
Early Christians did not "play the doomed COOPERATE-BOT strategy and take over the world". They played COOPERATE-BOT only as long as their capacity to meaningfully retaliate against their enemies was severely limited, then they mostly switched to ~TIT-FOR-TAT once they had control of an actual army. This is pretty basic Roman history, so it's puzzling to me that Scott doesn't seem to have noticed it.
Correct. I don't think the Docetists, Montanists, Donatists, Marcionites, Valentinians, and Pelagians would have thought that the Christians who were cancelling them were 'playing Cooperate-Bot.' In fact the Pelagians were still getting slammed in the 16th-century Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles, still used today - some hatreds die hard.
"This was so boring that Axelrod sponsored a second tournament specifically for strategies that could displace TIT-FOR-TAT. When the dust cleared, TIT-FOR-TAT still won - although some strategies could beat it in head-to-head matches, they did worst against each other, and when all the points were added up TIT-FOR-TAT remained on top."
The story's even better than that. Even in the first tournament, some strategies could beat TITFORTAT in one-on-one; it's just that they only beat it by a little bit, and they piled up very bad scores against each other and against other aggressive strategies. Also, in the second tournament, if I remember right, some strategies were submitted that would have won the first tournament, even beating TIT FOR TAT there-- but the second tournament had new entries that fouled them up. The great thing about Tit for Tat is that it's robust to lots of different environements, because of its simplicity.
"Not exactly the same, but maybe rhyming: what about modern liberalism? To the monarchs and dictators of the past, free speech might seem kind of like COOPERATE-BOT in a limited domain: the idea that elites shouldn’t make any forceful/legal effort to protect their ideological and spiritual position must sound almost as crazy as them not making any forceful/legal effort to protect themselves if attacked, or to prevent themselves from getting cheated. It is, in some sense, a unilateral surrender in the war of ideas; fascists and communists will do their best to crush liberalism, but liberals cannot ban discussion of fascism or communism. The fact that this, too, has worked, makes me think early Christianity wasn’t just a one-off, but suggests some larger point."
Well put. This is the essence of Popper's Paradox of Tolerance. See the second half of https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/the-yale-law-school-protest-and-karl?utm_source=publication-search . I think the problem there is that liberals can't ban advocacy of communism without falling onto the slippery slope of banning democratic socialism, etc. Also, in the marketplace of ideas, allowing competition from marketplace destroyers doesn't always end up badly, unlike in physical combat.
Almost invariably when someone brings up Popper's Paradox of Tolerance they misunderstand it (something I've harped on before https://x.com/TeaGeeGeePea/status/1596534549571588098 ), so I was expecting you to do the same thing, so it was gratifying to see that your post is about someone else invoking it in a misunderstanding that you ably point out. The CPUSA was not obviously such a group falling outside the domain of tolerance, even if Communists elsewhere have been. As I said in another comment, that could have been a result of their weakness that they couldn't just try to seize power by force and had to focus on building up their movement first.
I share your frustration. Lefties seem to think the Paradox of Tolerance means liberals should suppress conservative speech because it criticizes people and that's intolerant. Of course, what Popper meant, writing in 1950 or so, was that liberals should suppress Fascists and Communists because they advocate suppression of everyone else, which is almost hte opposite.
Even advocating the suppression of everyone else is insufficient. As Scott said:
"As a Jew, if I heard that skinheads were beating up Jews in dark alleys, I would be pretty freaked out; for all I know I could be the next victim. But if I heard that skinheads were circulating a petition to get Congress to expel all the Jews, I wouldn’t be freaked out at all. I would expect almost nobody to sign the petition"
Oh, and on Gus Hall and the American Communist Party: it was not a serious threat, but they certainly advocated suppression of free speech and the overthrow of hte US Constitution, and they were funded by our foreign enemy, the Soviet Union.
> They were very serious about this; history records many Quakers who were arrested or even killed rather than compromise their principles, and the British Crown seized Pennsylvania from the Quakers a few times because they wouldn’t make extremely cheap gestures like pay taxes or swear oaths.
Not sure if my sarcasm detector is broken, but given the history of conflict involving disputes on taxation and the literal nature of paying taxes, it seems inaccurate to bucket "pay taxes" into the "extremely cheap gestures" category.
Shortly before his death Freeman Dyson (Dyson spheres are named after him) co-authored a paper that attracted a lot of attention where they came up with a new strategy for iterated prisoner dilemmas (that they called "extortionist") that is better than tit-for-tat in many situations.
But the answer to what is the best strategy is very sensitive to how you define best, and the specific set up. Building on the work of Dyson, people have shown that in evolutionary iterated prisoner dilemmas certain generous strategis prevail. There is an interesting discussion of it here https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2012/07/zerodeterminant_strategies_in.html
This blog post discusses the connection between Press-Dyson strategy and the advantages of theory-of-mind:
"In their discussion, Press and Dyson focus on the results in terms of “evolutionary” players versus those with a “theory of mind”. In their parlance, an “evolutionary” player is one who attempts to maximize his own score using some optimization scheme. This is the sort of player against which you want to play an extortionate strategy, since his optimization will then lead him to cooperate, giving you an unequal share of the payoffs."
There's a great essay called "The Power Tactics of Jesus Christ," by Jay Haley that's relevant here. It's not about Christianity, though, but about Christ himself, but does present some of Haley's ideas about how being coming across as good and forgiving give you power. Here are a few quotes from a summary of the essay's view of Christ's tactics:
===
Promise a paradise in some undefined future if only you follow the leader. Threaten misery if you do not follow the leader
====
Make great personal sacrifices to avoid the appearance of seeking personal power
==
Claim you are merely an interpreter of a preexisting supernatural force.
==
However, you are the only correct interpretation of that force.
====
Publicly announce your authority as equal to the entire existing established authority
===
Use flexible tactics, answering attacks with attacks where the establishment is weak, but with nonviolence techniques where the establishment is strong.
===
In the final struggle with the establishment, do not negotiate, as your goal is power outside the establishment, hence no compromise is possible.
It is crazy how Christianity pioneered the modern cult while also perfecting it so quickly that new cults still use the same tactics two millenia later.
Groups who win moral victory are always persistent, and often aren't very cooperative. The Taliban are not very nice, but they are very persistent, and they were able to win Afghanistan from the much nicer US-backed government.
Try this thought experiment: Somebody is being tortured, but they refuse to confess, even when they're right on the edge of dying. Who do you sympathize with, the Martyr or the torture? The Martyr obviously! It doesn't even matter what ideology the Martyr is using, just the fact that they resist to the end is really compelling. This illustrates a general principle: people infer moral truth from whoever is the most persistent, not who gets the most utility or who is the most powerful. So the same thing happened in early Christianity: the early Christians for whatever reason, really really believed in Christianity, and people could see that. Their persistence was what persuaded people and why they won, not because they optimized utility. If they had optimized utility, everyone else would see that they changed their beliefs whenever it's convenient, and so everyone else would conclude that the optimizers were faking their beliefs. This doesn't answer the question of how the early Christians became so convinced. But I think the answer is to look at conviction, not at utility.
Within your attempt at modeling this, we might regard Christianity as a whole as playing the following strategy:
1. Start out acting like COOPERATE-BOT
2. Once the optics of that have swept the globe, gradually switch back to defecting at a self-serving rate
That is, you truncated the experiment too early by considering only the *early* Christians. We're still in the middle of the game! (at least up till 50 years ago, maybe).
... I don't think that's the actual answer, though; the people who acted less COOPERATEy over time were just new people, not the original players, and they were adjusting to new scenarios. I think the actual ancient Christian game theory is more like this:
The big difference between reality and a regular IPD setup is: whatever strategy you/your group chooses, everyone else is going to model it and try to predict your behavior. It's easy, too, because you're actively telling them what your behavior is going to be, and honestly (this is important) signaling it also.
In the IPD game, I'm sure plenty of bots tried to model their opponent bots in order to outsmart them, and probably some bots tried to fake our their opponents into mis-modeling to outsmart them back. The limiting factor ends up being "whoever is better at modeling" or "whoever has more computation power / a more efficient algorithm" or something. TIT-FOR-TAT then is like a "model with a lookback of 1", in the sense that it models the opponent in the dumbest possible way -- and *presumably* a model with more lookback would strictly do a better job than that. Simply:
1. Play TIT-FOR-TAT for a while
2. Once you understand your opponent's strategy, gradually start playing against it on purpose
3. If it stops working, go back to TIT-FOR-TAT
At some mathematical level I think this *has* to be better than TIT-FOR-TAT, at least if you're the only person doing it (which isn't that interesting in IPD cause you won't be) or if you're the person who's *best* at it (which maybe is, and reminds me of "game theory with AGI involved" stuff that I've seen around). But it's entirely contingent on the "once you understand" part. If you can't do that, it falls apart. And if you *both* doing it, it also falls apart, or at least, finds a winner and degenerates into the same game-theoretic equilibrium that TIT-FOR-TAT comes out ahead in.
But IRL the game is different. I think there are two main ways:
1. People's goal isn't necessarily to *win*, but rather to achieve a certain amount of safety and security. 2. People playing a strategy may *genuinely believe* that their strategy is morally right -- and other people might be able to *discern that* (from vibes, at least).
Which means that
1. It's possible for early Christians to play COOPERATE-BOT (or TIT-FOR-TAT) as an "honest signal" that can't be faked (at least in the short-term
2. It's possible for other people to (a) model the fact that they're doing that, and trust it (because it's an honest signal), and then (b) gradually adjust their own morals to pick a strategy in reaction to that which optimizes their outcomes in the face of it.
When your opponent promises to be good and kind and not take advantage of you if you also become good and kind, and you can *believe them*, then it's a lot easier to consider strategies that would never win a "wild west" game where everyone is out to get each other. Why play TIT-FOR-TAT if you trust your opponent to be nice and the game isn't zero sum because there's a way you can both be happy?
The great innovation of Christianity, perhaps, was realizing that "COOPERATE has to start somewhere and it may as well be us, and the only way it works is if we stick to our guns for a really long such that other people, who are modeling us, begin to trust that we really mean it". And how do you show that you really mean it? Martyrdom and sacrifice: individuals putting a lot on the line personally, over and over, in order to prove beyond doubt that the group really, really does mean it.
Many of the mystery cults also taught Universal compassion. The pythagoreans emphasized compassion towards animals, were vegetarian, and refused animal sacrifices. Universal compassion was absolutely *not* a Christian invention, and doesn't explain the spread of early Christianity.
Maybe you're overthinking this? Maybe it's just "luck" ( ie a combination of many things, not one master game theory strategy)?
Islam clearly adopted a somewhat different plan, and they basically came in second and (who knows) maybe some better luck against Charles Martel or the Hungarian Army and they might be first?
Christianity, meanwhile, was far from kind, even to its OWN ADHERENTS...
An outsider may not be aware of this, but basically from the day Christianity had any sort of state power, that power was used mainly to crush dissenting Christians, whether the dissent was based on Donatism, on various bizarre Christology disputes, or in arguments about icons. The Christian Roman State killed far more dissenting Christians than the pagan Roman state ever killed.
And this began even before state power. The first big heresy I know of is Marcionism, culminating in Marcion being excommunicated in 144 CE, with plenty following, eg
Christianity did have a deeper breadth of texts than, say Judaism, so there was more scope to find a passage proving whatever it was you wanted to prove, sometimes turn the other cheek, sometimes an eye for an eye. But that mainly shows that you want to found your religion on as many disparate texts as possible, so that you have this flexibility (a real problem if your founding texts are as narrow as Communism, Nazi'ism, or Woke. Probably also the case for Scientology. Mormonism does better here, having the full Christian corpus along with also the Book of Mormon).
"fascists and communists will do their best to crush liberalism, but liberals cannot ban discussion of fascism or communism."
The way this is framed is very slightly motte+baileyish. . . There is not the clear distinction here you are implying, pretty much every country that's been liberal or communist or fascist "allows discussion" of other systems while de facto "crushing" them internally. You can discuss that other systems are out there and exist, and what may have led misguided people to them, but you can't identify as one, fly their flags, use their symbols, argue that they had benefits on the margins despite their mistakes and some better iteration might be a good way forward, etc.
Modern American style free speech with generous bounds for devils advocacy and "just asking questions" is still an outlier for liberal orders in general. Most liberal orders out there, historically or presently, are nowhere near "unilateral surrender in the war of ideas."
I suppose that societies in which communism was much more popular than the US either went communist or authoritarian anti-communist during the Cold War.
The "mysteries" of the Greco-Roman mystery cults were extremely bloody, shocking visual spectacles. The impact of witnessing these performative, gorey rites was that any message conveyed in these private spaces became deeply entangled with the emotional memory of the horror witnessed.
Christianity supplanted these private mystery religions around the time that early Christians shared their accounts of the torture and public execution of the Son of God. The visceral impact of such bloody imagery has been vastly underrated in the history of Christianity's appeal and mass spread.
I think it’s a question of their opponents’ strategy. It’s probably no coincidence that the early Christians had their success in a Greek/Roman context, where even when they were persecuted, there was still some pretense of law and rationality at the core of the society. Not that the Romans went easy on them, but I am not sure their strategy would have been as successful in a different context, like a theocratic, ethno-nationalist, or even just a less developed authoritarian state. They probably wouldn’t even have succeeded in, say, 14th century Europe if they weren’t already established by then.
It’s the same reason Gandhi, MLK and eventually Mandela largely succeeded, even if they had a hell of a time doing it: Because the culture at large allowed it. Had they tried the same strategy for getting influence in Nazi Germany, we wouldn’t even have known their names.
Good point. The Romans tolerated other religions without their polytheistic/henotheistic empire much of the time. Monotheistic religions have been less liable to permit such a cancerous growth Mormonism might be a recent example within the USA with its freedom of religion, but even there a successful 19th century kulturkampf was waged against them until they were forced to give up polygamy.
He'll get there. I have upgraded Scott's conversion-to-Christianity date from 2033 to 2031. Denomination prediction holding steady with a 2/3 probably of Catholic, 1/6 Orthodoxy, 1/6 other.
I don’t care if he becomes a Christian, but if he’s going to agonize over why they acted a certain way, at least consider that they believe the tenets of their religion.
Try adding noise into the game, so that it’s not obvious whether or not the other party really has defected against you. The fact that other people’s intentions aren’t legible to us, and that our actions often annoy or upset others when we don’t mean to, isn’t a small detail of the world. It’s huge.
If the noise is negatively biased, so that you don’t get the false appearance of someone cooperating, but you do get the false appearance of defecting, the more the tit-for-tat strategy fails.
>Even Emperor Julian, an enemy of Christianity, admitted it lived up to its own standards
I'm skeptical as to whether he could actually tell. A lot of the discussion in the last post was about selection effects between people, and selection effects between ideologies. I also expect selection effects in repeating stories about people. Given an impressive anecdote about person A and a lukewarm anecdote about person B, I expect the former to be repeated more often.
We have a hard enough time in the modern world getting accurate statistics about antisocial and prosocial behavior in various subgroups. I doubt that anyone in the ancient world could nail down such differences solidly.
I think it's worth noting that Christians did not, in fact, remain pacifistic. Hence Quakers & the Amish having to reinvent it. They were only able to run the empire (and the fragmentary polities that emerged from it) as militarists. COOPERATE-BOT was displaced by at least TIT-FOR-TAT-BOT (and arguably a more aggressive bot than that, since these states tended to be expansionist when they could be).
Scott, is that image of the man with the bloody sword from GPT4? If so, how'd you get it to make that? I can't get it to make anything even faintly violent. Asked for an image of an animal nipping somebody's toes and it refused. Asked for a whirlpool image showing parts of the ocean a ways off getting sucked into the vortex, and it refused because my prompt had "suck" in it.
It seems like you're falling for early Christian propaganda, and then going well beyond even their own claims, when you say "the early Christians played the doomed COOPERATE-BOT strategy and took over the world". Look at this list of Roman civil wars and revolts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_civil_wars_and_revolts
The Roman Empire became Christian by the mid 4th century, and pretty much everyone was Christian by the late 4th century. Did they stop killing each other? Not at all. There were even more assassinations, usurpations, and civil wars after Christianization than during the pagan Pax Romana. Constantine himself murdered both his wife and his son. Even most of the external wars after the 4th century were Christian vs. Christian because most of the barbarian tribes, including the Goths who sacked Rome in 410, were some version of Christian. Does this sound like COOPERATE-BOT to you?
There are some Christians, most famously Augustine, who say that the Christians were nicer in war than pagans were. Rather than killing or raping everyone and stealing everything, the Goths who sacked Rome spared people who fled to churches, and only killed or raped some people. Fine, maybe they're right. But that's not COOPERATE-BOT; at most it might be TIT-FOR-TAT-WITH-SLIGHTLY-MORE-FORGIVENESS-BOT.
That sounds like "weak theory" #3: "Overwhelm downward adjustment". If it wasn't for the high standard to start with, they might not have even had the "SLIGHTLY-MORE-FORGIVENESS" part.
It seems like something similar happened in international relations. If Curtis is right, then the ancient world was essentially a world where every country was playing tit for that strategy. It’s also the world he advocates we should go back to. Only involve yourselves if there is something material affecting you from one another country.
History has had four great religious revivals, called the great awakenings. This most recent awokening... sure seems to have a lot in common, as our gracious host so eloquently points out. Will history remember the death of George Floyd as the beginning of the fifth great awakening? I think it is possible.
Tit for tat is studied in a two player setting, and yet you are talking about multi agent settings. Transfering the reasoning from a two player, to a complex hugely large social one is as likely to delude and confuse, as it is to enlighten.
That is unless one is very careful, and keep track, and reason about the generalisation. This post does none of those things.
I agree. In the two-player tournament, COOPERATE-BOY was forced to play a hundred iterations against DEFECT-BOT. In a more realistic setting the DEFECT-BOT’s reputation would precede them and they’d be increasingly hard-pressed to find anyone to engage them at all.
I agree as well. The winning strategy was to cooperate and then associate (and further cooperate) with other cooperators. It is a large scale reputation game, where cooperators cooperate together and defectors get left out in the cold.
The winning move is to start as a cooperator and then select for cooperators and against defectors.
I remember a computer games column (maybe in Sci Am.) with a 2-D grid of players, and you played prisoners dilemma with your NN. There might have only been two choices for each player (grid point), always defect or always cooperate. You'd get areas of each group, and one or the other would eventually take over the whole grid (array)
Isn’t there an obvious answer that you haven’t considered?
While Christ-like or cooperate-bot strategy could not be implemented by the spontaneous will of individuals (because it only takes one spoiler to ruin the perfect harmony). It can work (by and large) when imposed top-down from a (sometimes hypocritical) sovereign.
In the post, Scott says that he has little time for attempts to found morality is self-interest and finds them to be generally cranky. This is merely because he hasn't yet read my insane, quasi-religiously inflected attempt to found morality on FDT + plus the simulation hypothesis. If he had, I'm sure he'd see the light 🙏:
What does it even mean to "found" morality? You can explain its rise in evolutionary terms, but that merely gives you a "how it got there", not a "why is it good". Plus, our moral intuitions are way too complicated and contradictory to be reduced to some formula that you might want to "found" on some moral axiom such as cooperation or common benefit.
I don't think it makes sense to model the Christians' behavior as a prisoner's dilemma strategy:
- It's not clear that the payoff distributions for the L1 question of whether to be nice or not follow the classic prisoner's dilemma (though they may)
- The L2 game is won by conversions; the points in the L1 game are irrelevant anyway unless they affect that
- There are a lot of players having repeated and visible interactions with lots of other players, with the payoff matrix for each (on both the L1 and L2 levels) likely slightly different
The hurdle the early Christians had to get over was getting a large number of people to hear about and believe in their God. Once someone believes, the cooperation behavior follows directly from the teachings (and more cynically, the worry that God's judgment after death may look more like tit-for-tat). Radical cooperation in the face of persecution has some advantages for spreading belief:
- It's shocking. Unusual behavior probably got the Christians disproportionately talked about in a way that was on-brand and at least somewhat positive ("They're just TOO nice and TOO committed" was probably ok PR even in Roman times even if it wasn't the #1 ideal)
- It's a strong signal of genuine belief. We're far more likely to believe something if we think others do, especially if we're losing confidence in alternatives
- It could lower the barriers to entry by making the group look welcoming (don't have to worry about being hazed as the new guy)
- Rejecting the incumbent status game has the effect of raising perceived social status in some situations, which could be appealing to someone struggling to live up to expectations or otherwise disillusioned with the existing social system
I think of the introduction of Christianity as a transition towards a higher-trust society. In the Book Review, Scott discusses how ancient Rome was a shithole und everyone would get robbed as soon as they left their house at night. Thats not gonna happen if everybody really loves their neighbor, and makes for a better place to live. Turning the other cheek is what allows you to brute-force yourself to this position. Societies are low-trust for a reason, and suddenly becoming high-trust incurs costs for any individual who does it.
I particularly like this perspective because I feel that it is broadly applicable to societies of the time, like Scandinavia.
I do not believe that the history of Christianity shows any great commitment to relentlessly forgiving cooperation with people who are A: not Christians and B: weaker than the Christians they are dealing with. Admittedly, that didn't come up terribly often in the first few centuries AD, but that just means that we don't have evidence either way, not that the early Christians were broadly omnicooperative.
I also think it is relevant that humans are social animals, most of whom spend a lot more time and effort rationalizing what *feels* right than reasoning about what *is* right. Hurting nice people, doesn't feel good, and that reduces the payoff of "Defect". Doubly so for hurting members of the ingroup, not so much for members of the outgroup. Perceiving one's self as virtuous also feels good, and the standard for virtue is mostly set by the observed behavior of the ingroup.
So, it seems to me entirely plausible and entirely consistent with the history of Christianity that the winning strategy is:
When dealing with the outgroup, tit-for-tat with forgiveness for all the usual game-theory reasons, *provided* you are strong enough to inflict substantial punishments for defectors.
When dealing with a particularly powerful outgroup that can crush you like a bug, cooperate. Whatever meager benefit you might gain with some minor bit of punitive defiance, is outweighed by the bit where your forgiveness and cooperation makes them feel bad about defecting - and as more of their people shy away from hurting you, their consensus definition of virtue shifts towards "don't hurt those nice people over there, they haven't done us any harm".
When dealing with the ingroup, cooperate pretty much always, Everybody will try defecting now and then because of the obvious short-term gains, but surrounded by all that cooperative forgiveness they'll feel really bad about it and the equilibrium will be for serious defections to be uncommon. Occasionally some fool or sociopath won't get the message and won't even try to fake it, and maybe we'll have to throw him out of the group, but that should be very rare.
This only works if the ingroup consensus actually is "cooperate pretty much always"; it's not a recipe for victory in every-man-for-himself-istan.
An alternate framing might be, we live in a fuzzy imperfect universe so the winning strategy is going to be tit-for-tat with forgiveness, but the setting on the "forgiveness" dial is very context-dependent and with a devoutly Christian ingroup may be at the 90+% forgiveness level.
Things are seldom fixed pie, purely scarcity based. Even when food, shelter, and other resources may be limited, even severely limited, conceptual & soft resources like caring, friendliness, knowledge, optimism / hope, humor, a sense of energy are all sharable, replicable, enabled by a growth mindset. This is the essence of liberalism. And it is what is missed, misperceived, and often simply not understood by those who reject liberalism. These lessons are taught everywhere. Many people are just not able to understand, to generalize the concepts, instead cycling their thoughts on these toy models of reality, motivations, and animating stories. Interesting, the long path you have taken to get to where you are sensing the shape of this.
Just briefly addressing part I, I am a bit surprised people take these Axelrod's results at face value. Especially if they have played Universal Paperclips, which I believe many here did. In the bot tournament phase of the game, you quickly realize that TIT-FOR-TAT is *not* the best strategy with the highest payoff.
It happened in Axelrod's experiments only because the dilemma's payoffs were of a very specific type. But in Universal Paperclips the payoffs are chosen in a wider sample, and in many cases TIT-FOR-TAT actually kinda sucks.
So you can't generalize Axelrod's result to the real world in any way, because: (i) there is no reason to believe that payoffs in the real world -- for _any_ problem -- look like the ones in Axelrod's tournament; and, even worse, (ii) payoffs for cooperation-defect in the real world aren't legible, so there is no real way for you to check whether (i) is true or not.
It's safe to say that there are many (most?) cases in real world where TIT-FOR-TAT isn't at all the correct strategy, the one discussed here seems to be one, so readily accepting that you should behave like a TIT-FOR-TAT bot will lead you to have a _very_ bad time.
I would go with Christian philosophy is Cooperation-Bot but the individuals within it are Tit for Tat. Combining the two gives you Tit for Tat with Forgiveness. I am pretty sure that despite the overarching philosophy, individual Christians who were kicked in the nuts every time they dropped food of at an individuals house, would change behavior promptly.
It may not be a coincidence that Quakerism had to fold when non-Christian enemies attacked; and that Christianity arose during the Pax Romana and became very much attenuated after the Roman Empire fell.
Also, it's possible that immigration of very racially different peoples with very high breeding rates is analogous to the Indian-attack situation that the Quakers faced.
Another point: we have to distinguish between the bot flourishing, vs. the *strategy* flourishing. When you say that Christians triumphed, what you really mean is that Christianity as an ideology and culture triumphed. The individual Christians and their families may not have come out of it well.
>It is, in some sense, a unilateral surrender in the war of ideas; fascists and communists will do their best to crush liberalism, but liberals cannot ban discussion of fascism or communism
Empirically, no. After WWII, the liberal occupying powers in West Germany actually did pass a bunch of laws banning discussion of fascism. Even today, publicly expressing approval of Nazism in Germany is still a criminal offence.
Plus, "the fact that this, too, has worked", isn't proven yet. Letting fascists go about their fascist narratives normalizes them. They seem to have more leverage in that sense. (See political developments in many Western countries in the last decades?)
"The most dramatic version of this hypothesis is that God is real, and loving thy enemy is an epiphenomenon of following the actual Divine Law."
What if the truth is found in this last sentence of your last possibility? What if this is a metaphor for your faith journey, which eventually leads to you becoming a Christian?
After resisting and considering -- but then having to exclude -- every last possibility, you realize the answer has been transcendent all along. Something like a CS Lewis experience?
Why does TIT FOR TAT win in simulations but COOPERATE won in Rome?
In simulations all agents compete for the same ecological niche, but humans compete for at least 3 different ecological niches. To maximize the number of surviving descendants there is competition between groups of humans each consisting of all 3 niches. There is also competition within each niche. However there is almost no competition within a group between the 3 niches.
COOPERATE won, because it is optimized for its ecological niche. Life is not a random competition between equal individuals competing to put their own offspring into the same ecological niche. The simulation also lacks have group competition and assumes no costs to punish.
In a group of humans + dogs + sheep, you don’t have the humans or the dogs eating all the sheep. The sheep being weak and stupid are nevertheless the majority of biomass in this group. The sheep is not replaceable by humans or dogs, because neither dogs nor humans can eat gras. The conflict is human vs. human or dog vs. dog not human vs. sheep. Would the sheep improve its number of expected surviving descendants by improving at violence or cunning? No. Not only would the additional skills threaten dogs & humans and be selected out, but also the extra skills would use up valuable calories, which otherwise could go into the immune system or reproduction. A group of humans killing all its sheep will become weaker (because less food) and be replaced by another group of humans.
Human society has a similar dynamic. You have 3 groups of people:
(i) People, who control people (like humans controlling dogs and sheep)
(ii) People, who control violence (like dogs)
(iii) People, who control things (like sheep)
People, who control people (e,g, kings, journalist, public relations) manipulate information and emotions to control other humans. People, who control violence (e,g, soldiers) have the potential do kill humans and destroy things. People, who control things (e.g. engineers, plumbers, farmers) extract resources from nature by applying the laws of nature, intelligence and persistent work.
Could a king kill all Christians? He could, but he would weaken himself. The King may worry to be poisoned, be fearful of other powerful people in his court, a peasant rebellion or a neighboring kingdom. The nonviolent Christians paying taxes are very low on the priority list of enemies to deal with. The King might even protect his Christians as a useful tax base.
Playing Tit for tat means you need ability to attack, either by violence or by cunning. But violence needs muscles and training consuming valuable calories, which could be used farming more. Also it might get you killed. Learning cunning will lower Christians’ in group cohesion and family stability. In the end Christians are optimized for farming and building machines. Kings are optimized for cunning. Solders are optimized for violence. Neither group is able to place its descendants successfully into a different ecological niche, since all 3 niches require incompatible genetical and cultural specialization.
People will say kings and soldiers are strong, Christians are weak. But kings and soldiers have quite a high rate of being killed, probably higher than Christians. They also have fewer offspring. Kings and soldiers have a narrow ecological niche, a less harmonic family and community.
Interesting analysis, but even if I do not think social mobility is that great (and was probably even lower in Rome), assuming it to be zero is a little bit extreme. Especially between human-dogs and human-sheeps: if you want to simplify, a perfect social mobility between those two makes more sense than zero mobility.
And, contrary to dogs turning into humans, soldiers turning into politicians, while uncommon, is a time-celebrated alternative to elections and administrative promotions ;-)
As far as I know, christianity mostly spread by "flame and sword". That is, for power dynamics and through coercion.
This of course doesn't say anything about the first ~200 years; but for anything beyond I believe you have to look no further than "who is in power? who did gain from it?"
I have often thought the message of Jesus can be reduced to two words: "Let go." Or, from the perspective of game theory, "Don't play the game." That may, paradoxically, be the winning strategy.
I question whether any significant numbers of people have ever followed any doctrine at all. Think of humanity as this huge agent based simulation, where agents are randomly trying various responses to other agents responses. They often network themselves into conglomerates, which then adopt a name and a doctrine to help with membership signaling, but the average behavior of individuals between these conglomerates isn't that different. Which grow and which die off may be more than a little dependent on small critical differences in initial conditions.
Or, if that's too abstract, Christianity is like Microsoft--it provided a standardized practice at the right time and the right place. They needed some way to justify pooling more resources across nationalities, and Christianity was handy. It's not that significantly superior to it's rivals, but changing identities now would be too costly.
On your point about "selecting a moral elite," I think an element that helped early Christianity not devolve into a typical power-hungry sex cult was the development of the three priestly vows: poverty, obedience, and chastity. Poverty to filter out people only interested in money, obedience to filter out people only interested in power, and chastity to filter out people only interested in sex. Not perfect or always upheld, but if you wanted to be a typical cult leader, being an early Christian priest probably wasn't your first choice.
As Jude (nominative determinism??) said above, I think framing the entire thing in terms of game theory strategies rather misses the point. But the wider question stands, what did Early Christianity do that was so different and so amazingly successful in its historical context?
And it does seem that insane generosity, backed by a strong current of unconditional love, was a major part of the story. But love itself is old as dirt, you can observe it in mama cats and mama birds. Christians often describe Christian love as fierce, but fierce love is also nothing new, at least among humans, just ask any decent parent. So what did the Christians do that was actually new?
Here's my take: they lowered the taboo on helpful interference with a stranger. Every society worth its salt values things like generosity and hospitality, but that is usually counterbalanced by the rule that people should ask first. People have their pride, so we respect that, and if they need help, let them ask for it. Christian love doesn't do that; it feels secure enough to put itself in the other's shoes and to offer help even when they are not asking for it.
The result is, on one side, is that Christians will often step up to help those no-one is helping, which is why there are so many Christian NGOs. Even in my small town the local Catholic help group is the go-to place for people in need. That is of course quite admirable.
The dark side of that, is that by offering help unasked, you're overriding the other person's sensibilities, which means that Christianity gets a well-deserved reputation for being pushy. And if you're convinced enough that your God is the one true God of the universe (that bit was inherited from the Jews), and that your savior is the one savior in all of history (that was a Christian extension), then giving someone else your religion quickly sounds like the highest form of love and generosity. This is probably what stands behind the 2000-year-old programme of missionary proselytism, openly trying to christianize the whole world and replace their existing religions and ways of life, "for their own good".
The really fucked up part is that it's hard to see how you can get one without the other.
As you point out, game theory competitions require more cooperation and less tit-for-tat when there's a chance for error. And the more likely errors are, the better cooperative strategies become.
I don't know how that translates into the real world. But I do know that, by default, people tend to assume bad intent even when mistake is more likely. And I also know that this problem gets worse as social trust breaks down. So if the thing is just that cooperate strategies work best when society is in a defection spiral, then the declining Roman Empire seems like as good a historical place for this to work as any.
I know the whole "the U.S. is in decline in the same way the Roman Empire thing" is a little facile, but it's true that we're having a similar breakdown in social trust. A movement of pure, no restrictions altruism might be about to have its moment. We'll see.
The COOPERATE strategy wins long term because it builds a high trust network that produces better ROI than low trust TIT-FOR-TAT networks which maximize short term individual gains at the expense of long term network gains. People are then incentivized to play by the rules in the COOPERATE network in fear of being kicked out and excluded from the outsized gains. Also beause TIT-FOR-TAT is low trust, it also requires far more security overhead, the cost of having to always watch your back really adds up. Think of why the open source software model works to fuel so much growth. High trust = high value.
The Book of Mormon tells about a group of new converts who called themselves the Anti-Nephi-Lehies who followed COOPERATE-BOT to a very high degree. That's the tl;dr summary. If you want more details, here they are:
Context: Early in the book, a group of people flee Jerusalem before the Babylonian captivity (600 bc) and are led by God to the American continent. The important part of The Book of Mormon is the prophecies of various prophets about the coming of the Messiah, but it also gives a summary of their history. They split into two groups, the Nephites and Lamanites, who are constantly at war with each other. The (often good guy) Nephites usually defend themselves but sometimes flee and establish a new home. The (often bad guy) Lamanites either keep to themselves or attack. The one time the Nephites decide to go on the offensive (Mormon 3), it is treated as the final straw in their descent into wickedness before they are finally wiped out (around 400 ad).
Somewhere around 80 b.c., a group of Lamanites numbering in the thousands convert to believe in God and the coming of the Messiah. They bury their weapons as a sign that they have repented of the many murders they had committed, and change their name from Lamanites to Anti-Nephi-Lehies (Alma 23).
The remaining Lamanites attack the ANLs for reasons that are not specified. They lay down and praise God in the act of dying (Alma 24:21-22). The attacking Lamanites realize that this is not glorious battle, but a massacre, feel terrible about what they are doing, and many of them throw down their own weapons (Alma 24:23-25). Seeing this, the leaders of the attacking Lamanites take the army elsewhere to regroup. More Lamanites joined them than the number who were slain (Alma 24:26).
Around 77 b.c. the Lamanites attack again and the ANLs again lay down and submit to destruction (Alma 27:3). The Nephite missionaries who had converted them get them to agree to come join the Nephites. They are accepted by the Nephites, given some land, and told if they will pay taxes to support the armies that defend them, they won't need to fight (Alma 27:22-24).
Around 72-65 b.c., the Lamanites attack the Nephites and the war has been going badly for the Nephites, so badly that the ANLs consider breaking their non-violence oath and fighting to defend the Nephites who have been protecting them. The prophet, Helaman, convinces them not to (Alma 56:6-8). Their sons, however, had not made that oath. 2000 of their young sons take on them the name Nephites and join the army under Helaman to reclaim the lands and cities they had lost. This group of youth turns out to be critical in turning the tide of the war and reclaiming lost lands (Alma 56-58).
That is the last time we hear about the Anti-Nephi-Lehies as a separate people.
I think anyone who liked this, or Scott's review of "The Rise of Christianity," might really enjoy "The Evolution of God" by Robert Wright. He looks at the emergence of Christiantiy from a game theoretic perspective. One argument he makes is that the COOPERATE-BOT nature of early Christianity came less from Jesus and more from Paul, who treated spreading Chrisianity like an enterprise. I recommend the chapter "The Apostle of Love" in particular. A few quotes:
> Why did Paul become the point man for a God whose love knows no ethnic bounds? Is it because he was naturally loving and tolerant, a man who effortlessly imbued all he met with a sense of belonging? Unlikely. Even in his correspondence, which presumably reflects a filtered version of the inner Paul, we see him declaring that followers of Jesus who disagree with him about the gospel message should be “accursed”—that is, condemned by God to eternal suffering. The scholar John Gager has described Paul as a “feisty preacher-organizer, bitterly attacked and hated by other apostles within the Jesus movement.” ... So where did the doctrine that some people now think of as “Christian love” come from? It emerges from the interplay between Paul’s driving ambitions and their social environment. In the end as much credit should go to the Roman Empire as to Paul.
...
> The key to understanding why Paul became the Apostle of Love and a symbol of universal brotherhood is to remember that he was far more than a committed follower of Jesus. He was a man of much ambition. That ambition seems to have been earnestly spiritual, harnessed to a message Paul considered the true path to salvation. Still, it’s illuminating to compare Paul to modern entrepreneurs of more mundane motivation. He was a man who wanted to extend his brand, the Jesus brand; he wanted to set up franchises—congregations of Jesus followers—in cities across the Roman Empire. Oddly, these imperial aspirations infused Paul’s preaching with an emphasis on brotherly love it might never have acquired had Paul been content to run a single mom-and-pop store.
...
> We’ll never know for sure what Paul’s secret was, but some of the best candidates are the ones I’ve stressed. First, he used the information technology of the day—hand-carried letters—with unusual adroitness to keep distant congregations intact. This meant hammering home the theme of familial love. Second, he extended this sense of brotherhood beyond local congregations and particular ethnicities. This lubricated the provision of hospitality for traveling church leaders and, as time wore on, for Christians more broadly. In this and other ways, brotherly love helped keep the church unified—or at least more unified than other multicity religions, and unified enough to stay strong over the long haul.
A general principle here is that in a multiethnic polity like the Roman Empire, anyone who wants to start a vast organization should be ethnically inclusive, lest valuable resources go unused and potential recruits go unrecruited. The synagogues scattered across the Roman Empire were one example of a valuable resource. The Christian church in Rome was another example. Paul hadn’t founded the church in Rome, and there presumably were doctrinal differences between these Latin Christians and the Christians in Greece and Asia Minor whom Paul had cultivated. Had Paul chosen to, he could have harped on these differences to the point of schism. But he wanted to use the resources of the Roman church as he prepared for missions to Spain and elsewhere, and that may help explain the warmth of his letter to the Romans: “To all God’s beloved in Rome.… I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you.… I remember you always in my prayers.… I am longing to see you.” Pretty intimate, given that almost all of them were people he’d never met! Yet this was a simple application of the early Christian formula for success.
...
> We’ve seen the pragmatic value of brotherly love and so seen how Paul could have happened on this precept without inspiration from Jesus. But what about “Love your enemy”? If Jesus didn’t really say that, then where on earth did Paul get the idea?
Maybe from facts on the ground—facts that gave Paul reason to see the wisdom of passive perseverance in the face of enmity. Paul was part of a religious minority that was widely resented and that, if it didn’t demonstrate restraint amid provocation, could be persecuted to the point of extinction. In that sense his situation was quite like that of Philo, another adherent of a suspect faith in the Roman Empire of the first century. Philo, as we’ve seen, adapted by urging fellow Jews not to antagonize the pagan majority—and by working to find a doctrine of interfaith tolerance in the Jewish scripture.
Certainly Paul seems to have known that an onslaught of kindness can frustrate the enemy by denying him what he most wants: a rationale for hatred, a pretext for attack. After urging Christians to give food and drink to their enemies, he adds, “for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.”
Actually, Paul wasn’t the first to figure out that befriending an enemy can be a potent counterattack. His “burning coals” line comes from Proverbs, where it is preceded by this advice: “If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat; and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink.” Paul, in injecting the doctrine of kindness toward enemies into Christianity, wasn’t just being wise; he was being wise with the guidance of the Hebrew wisdom literature.
The way I see it is: first, people like to hang out with people who are generous and nice more than they like to hang out with regular people. Then, since most people's beliefs are mainly influenced by peer's beliefs, they tend to share their point of view eventually. This happens even when the beliefs are false and self-destructive, and would work even if the generosity isn't really helping people more than it costs.
Heh, there’s some poetic irony in this coming out a day before Noah Smith’s take that liberalism is in serious decline.
I’d quibble on the interpretation of this evidence: Christianity may have taken over the western world, but while its COOPERATE-BOT strategy may have got it there, I don’t think it kept it on top, not by a long shot. I’d argue that its COOPERATE-BOT mode was turned off by the time of Justinian, if not Constantine. Turns out people really don’t like being martyrs forever, particularly people in positions of power.
It seems like no one has pointed out the obvious answer here: wolves in sheeps' clothing. Altruists, being self sacrificing, are seen as likeable by nature of their utility to others, and as a result, recieve preferential treatment to both preserve their utility and incentivize their useful behavior to third parties (we do this instinctually out of reciprocity, of course, us being here sane humans for the most part, but this is the post hoc GT reason for why evolution has allowed us to persist like this).
This benefit might offset the immediate cost of altruism, but is lesser to the net gain available to those who seem altruistic without actually paying the price. Therefore, society via evolutionary principles adapts to an equilibrium optimizing for agents that seem altruistic without actually being so. Like the Roman cities persisting despite the deaths of their inhabitants with influxes of rurals, cooperate-bot Christianity is thus memetically successful but parasitic upon its hosts.
The true believers are all already dead or dying. Hence the widespread complaints of hypocritical christians and pedants with their empty platitudes. These are overabundant because they are the true game theoretic optima. Taking this a step further, the best way to effectively impersonate a sheep is to present oneself as being unaware of this chain of reasoning. This is why you, Scott, have gone to such lengths to disguise the fang of your intellect by presenting various elaborate explanations of the phenomenon which all hopelessly blunder past the obvious reality. Your entire commitment to EA is a ruse. You seek to obscure the massive threat you pose to others with a veneer of harmless ineptitude and good natured naiveté, but I see right through you. You are the greatest deceiver of them all. Jk lol
You're missing one last part, the key to perfecting the deception: the wolves have decieved even themselves into thinking they are sheep. They genuinely believe that they are righteous and altruistic despite all evidence to the contrary.
Your mention of Christianity being parasitic is also interesting, as it reminded me of the nature of a literal parasite, Toxoplasma gondii. It's a parasite that reproduces only in felines, and there's evidence that it manipulates the behavior of the rodents it infects to make them easier prey for their true hosts. ...The parallels should be obvious.
This analysis is missing a key ingredient: Credible fear of supernatural judgment. Take the case of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5:1–11:
"But a man named Ananias, with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property, and with his wife’s knowledge he kept back for himself some of the proceeds and brought only a part of it and laid it at the apostles’ feet. But Peter said, “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back for yourself part of the proceeds of the land? While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal? Why is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to man but to God.” When Ananias heard these words, he fell down and breathed his last. And great fear came upon all who heard of it. The young men rose and wrapped him up and carried him out and buried him.
"After an interval of about three hours his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. And Peter said to her, “Tell me whether you sold the land for so much.” And she said, “Yes, for so much.” But Peter said to her, “How is it that you have agreed together to test the Spirit of the Lord? Behold, the feet of those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out.” Immediately she fell down at his feet and breathed her last. When the young men came in they found her dead, and they carried her out and buried her beside her husband. And great fear came upon the whole church and upon all who heard of these things."
Ananias and Sapphira defected, and in a fairly clever and complex manner, but it didn't take the church defecting back for them to be punished -- God took care of it. Similarly, Paul advises the church in Romans 12:17-21:
"Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.' To the contrary, 'if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.' Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."
This was great, thanks. Memories of the 'computer recreations' column in Sci Am, followed by Douglas Hofstadter's column. I vaguely recall a prisoners dilemma game that was played on a 2-D grid, where each square only interacted with it's nearest neighbors. And (IIRC) you could get a group of 'always cooperate' in such a game. So maybe an 'always cooperate' strategy would work better if you were mostly just interacting with neighbors and not the whole group. Finally I find myself again recommending "The Goodness Paradox" by R. Wrangham. Quick premise, we self domesticated ourselves, after which there is much greater in group (tribe) cooperation. And perhaps the Christians were one of the first to include everyone in their tribe. "Let's help everyone!"
I just have to add that 'always cooperate' is how I've always operated, and it's great. I live in rural america which is still a high trust place to live.
There's also an element to this where COOPERATE-BOT is the best strategy in a system where you want to stay on the ride. Often, a lot of the people doing the "post-Christian Nietzschean thing" want *off* the ride.
This reminds me that over the past few years I've seen Nietzsche's "slave morality" gain some increased attention. I don't think the core framing of 'slave morality' is quite right; I think a better framing is something like "swarm morality." Swarm optimization is one of the most basic evolutionary optimization approaches when you are facing an extremely difficult objective surface -- for example, one that may be extremely spiky, have large flat regions, be extremely high-dimensional, and/or be dynamic and responsive to the optimizers' explorations -- see the simple "dynamic fitness landscapes" example here: https://youtu.be/4pdiAneMMhU&t=26s for a responsive surface (the full video is great), or see here https://youtu.be/8xycqWWqz50&t=15s to visualize on "very bumpy" problem. Now imagine that the real types of problems that humanity faces are very high dimensional -- some dimensions looking like each of those different types of benchmark problems, many dimensions are dynamic and change as the space is explored, and ti takes a tremendous time to learn the values at any given point, as in a [stochastic approximation setting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_approximation).
In this world, evolutionary optimizers like swarm optimization or genetic algorithms (also particle-based) can perform when others aren't tractable.
When you code these solutions, if the particles themselves have their own individual utility that they gain from exploring the space, then you can get a very complicated principle-agent problem. There may be very real externalities related to whether particles will clearly communicate "ground truth" with one another, or whether particles will allow other particles into their portion of the space, or whether particles will be willing to go do very risky things (eg. explore a very flat space or low-expected payouts) that would benefit the full social structure. You probably need something like the golden rule to be implemented in your particles; otherwise if they are selfish, society may very easily get stuck at local maxima. This is all the more true since social structures and supporting institutions don't emerge de novo from the ether -- they are implemented by the particles in the society.
If the particles care about something like total lifetime utility or dynastic utility, then you're also facing the classic exploration/exploitation tradeoff from reinforcement learning, which makes solving the whole thing even harder and takes even longer, potentially requiring a high level of cooperation.
Why might we expect the objective surface of a society to be very messy and high-dimensional? I think this falls out of combinatorial technology growth pretty easily (excellent lit review here: https://www.newthingsunderthesun.com/pub/2elwp33m/release/4 ).
Dwarkesh recently had an interview exploring, among other things, why humans came to dominate (https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/david-reich ) -- at least some of the lesson seemed to be that "humans could cooperate at a large social scale better."
I can't help but wonder -- if technological growth is in fact combinatorial, implying that the objective surface that society is solving is increasingly complex (even if occasionally the complexity drops before renewing its upward march, eg. see here, https://www.theseedsofscience.pub/p/against-the-burden-of-knowledge ), then perhaps society needs an increasing ability to get particles to coordinate effectively in a swarm-type optimization. The societies that are most effective at this will, on average, be better at discovering new technologies (physical, social, mathematical, organizational, etc) and out-compete the societies that are not as good at doing that.
I think this also ties into the "intractability frontier" that arises in a system comprised of forward-looking, interacting, intelligent agents who are aware of, and model, one another (think of there being a "k-frontier" in a K-level rationality system) -- but this comment has gotten pretty long, so perhaps better to return to that in the future.
tldr: Christianity is better framed as a "swarm morality" (as compared to Nietzsche's "slave morality"). The problem human society is solving is high-dimensional and complex, and due to combinatorial technology growth, it only gets more complex and harder. Societies that can implement a swarm-style optimization the best will discover better technologies (physical, social, etc) and out-compete others, on average, that don't explore the space as well. Particles in a swarm optimization need to act in a golden-rule sort of way, and Christianity put extreme emphasis on the golden rule as a core meme.
Two Gospel quotes come to mind for threading the needle between the Pragmatists and COOPERATE BOT. "Be as gentle as doves, and cunning as serpents." and the Parable of the Unjust Judge who is harassed by an old woman until she gets what she wants. Niceness, plus prudence, plus brute constant insistence.
Otoh, if you can be part of an ideological movement that consistently offers routes to being marginally more copperative say 10% and occasionally generates cracked saints who go for gold while being somewhat insulated from the downsides of full COOPERATE BOT, you've got something that can last forever in dynamic equilibrium.
I suppose they weren't really a movement, except perhaps in the early days when their leaders had to persuade their people to abandon their warrior ethos and embrace pacifism.
"A clever person gets out of a situation that a wise person would never get into"
I think this question is about collectivism-individualism dichotomy and to what extent globally optimal solution exist in a dynamical domain. As we can see, generosity has its place in the world even with fake greenbeards because greenbeard is just a placeholder for which can change in time, and needs to so optimal personality traits can rise to occation (big five optimal). (sry for my english)
If you reframe the principle of universal cooperation from the lens of consciousness, it's surprisingly obvious that people can be touched by "saints". This kind of spiritually-inclined people can make the general populace reflect on the fact that the very essence of life and its meaning is the incredible act of existing in the first place, and inspire them to a more noble and worthy life. I'd reckon that these guys can make their enemies realize the absurdity of their desires and their ego-clinging through lack of opposition. How can one turn the other cheek happily, when I seek my satisfaction through anger, how can one give me everything they have on them, when I wish to steal and add to my possessions? How can one live so unburdened?
"the leading ideology of the 21st century thus far appears to be a hyper-Christian bleeding-heart liberalism: COOPERATE-BOT in a bloodstained sweater"
Is that really an accurate description of reality? It seems to me that the "keeping it real" crowd tends to be marginalized, whereas the strategic manipulators rise to the top. Maybe that's the secret sauce: Pretend to be COOPERATE-BOT, while in reality you are a pragmatist. This should be testable in an experiment.
When you don't have power in society and join a social group that is COOPERATE BOT, individually your lives all become much better! No infanticide, less divorce, fewer dissensions. Sure. But also, less energy spent on TIT FOR TAT. You don't have much to lose and everything to gain on this world (love, respect) and eternal life and the conquest of death. Why not join COOPERATE BOT.
As a single organism, COOPERATE BOTs experience safety in numbers, and it is only when they become powerful that aspects of the organism start TIT FOR TATTing. So by the time you get to Constantine and Christological controversies, there are elements of TIT FOR TAT. When the Church gets too powerful, it becomes the one doing a lot of TATTing. Reform movements and orders spring up, many playing COOPERATE BOT. You get renewal for a couple hundred years, until they become more pragmatic as well. The general equilibrium though becomes a large ideological umbrella with distinct subgroups engaging in niche strategies. If the ideology is good, the dynamic equilibrium is more cooperative, kind, virtuous, excellent.
The game model fails in not accounting for conversion of the heart. In real life, the actions of COOPERATE-BOT can turn others into COOPERATE-BOT.
Witnessing someone totally transformed by love touches us. Here I think your EA purists are missing something. People value love more than intellectual consistency. Donating your kidney to a stranger moves people; autistic honesty not.
PS. The Amish, Mennonites, and other Anabaptists are also good examples of consistent cooperators, even more principled than the Quakers.
I think that where the COOPERATE-BOT strategy thrives is in low-trust environments that default to might-makes-right, and the reason it does so is precisely because it's radical and irrational. It's so radical that it shows you must be serious about kindness and cooperation.
Consider these examples:
-A kitten showing you its belly. Cats purposely make themselves vulnerable to humans they trust. The reason it's such an effective demonstration of trust is because it acts against their rational self-interest (you could easily tickle it to death, but you wouldn't).
-Israeli-left consensus on Middle East peace (not to be confused with the campus left). Liberals like me want Israel to do the unexpected (withdraw settlements, extend unilateral olive branches to the PLO, etc). Underlying this isn't just a moral case but also a strategic signal; it would be such a reversal of current policy that it demonstrates moral high ground and a commitment to burying the hatchet.
-Barack Obama's overtures to Iran in 2009 (https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/videotaped-remarks-president-celebration-nowruz). Note that this was during the first term of Ahmadinejad, a saber-rattling lunatic, not one of Iran's more moderate leaders. The U.S. could have further isolated him or stalled until Iran's next election (or the one after; their presidents are term-limited), but instead chose to be magnanimous. The liberal foreign policy doctrine towards Iran is very much based in magnanimity and unilateral gestures of trust, when it might be more hyperrational to just crush them.
-Western foreign policy morality generally. When Saddam invaded Kuwait, the U.S. intervened even though Kuwait was a staunch Soviet ally and one of the most astonishingly anti-Semitic countries in the world (https://global100.adl.org/country/kuwait/2014). Is it a coincidence that the most thriving societies in the world are more likely to decouple kindness from self-interest? Probably not!
-The free speech example you mentioned. Liberal democracy is basically the codification of unilateral surrender. In addition to moral high ground and all of the other signals it sends, it's also a flex: if you're confident in the supremacy of your ideas, why would you be afraid of dissidents being able to say whatever they want or vote for whoever they want? It's like not letting your girlfriend break up with you; if it's meant to be, set it free etc. Even the 2nd amendment (which I despise) is essentially a statement that the U.S. ensures the conditions for its own undoing; therefore, if it's not undone, then its citizens are consenting to be ruled under a voluntary association.
I'm utterly floored with the brilliance of this post. Rodney Stark has been pre-eminent in his field, the (scientific/comparative) study of religion(s), for decades. Scott swoops in, pretending to aim for just a review, and outright improves on the book! I know he has done this before, but it hits differently when he does it with a book so admired in a field that I happen to have a Master's degree in.
If Scott ever does a review of Stark's still more famous, and far more influential (with Roger Finke) "Acts of Faith" I will need a lot of effort not to pee my pants.
"Are there any other groups who deserve mention in this section besides early Christians, Quakers, and Cathars? I think some German and Russian sects have tried similar strategies, though they mostly failed and I don’t know much about them."
Check out the Hopi people.
Of course, 2 of our presidents were (nominally) Quakers: Hoover and Nixon. I don't know that Hoover was much of a war-monger, but I lived through the Nixon administration and was just barely old enough to be politically aware. Smedley Butler, "the most decorated Marine in US history," is another famous American who was raised a Quaker (and grew up in West Chester, PA, which I believe is/was part of the Philadelphia Main LIne).
> The initiatory structure holds off freeloaders and makes sure the people on the inside are of approximately equal rank (so that you get as many benefits as you give)
This is not a sense of the word "rank" that I'm familiar with. Social groups are generally not known for ensuring that all members hold an equal rank, and Christians obviously don't do so and never did.
Even the definition provided in the quote doesn't work. If everyone gets as many benefits as they give, someone for whom both values are very high is a high-ranking member, and someone for whom both values are very low is a low-ranking member.
Not crazy at all; that's exactly what you'd expect. You're not going to see a solution to a problem come out of a place where they don't have that problem, afterall.
I don't know if Celtic Druids were less prone to holding grudges, but I think we didn't get many records from them prior to their conversion to Christianity. Thus, it's hard to make such regional comparisons.
Good point.
Liberal democracy has historically flourished in periods of economic growth associate with trade/production. I think there's sort of a continuum from trader to king, based on whether you apply your skills more to bargaining or dominance. It seems natural that the latter selects for tit-for-tat, whereas the former selects for cooperation. Under normal conditions, traders rely on the dominance hierarchy to establish peace and make cooperation viable, but when there's a disequillibrium where trade is massively expanding (e.g. the industrial revolution), the trading population can grow more powerful than the dominance population, until circumstances have equillibrated. (In economics, this would be called "opportunity cost" - the effort you spend on developing weapons for dominance could instead have been spent on trade, which in a dreamtime disequilibrium is going to give you more value.)
Market conditions are not intrinsically positive-sum, and geopolitics are not intrinsically zero-sum. Undeveloped resources which requires lots of flexible human workers to collaborative develop change conditions to be positive-sum (for human workers). But eventually you reach an equillibrium where they are optimally developed and you've got excess labor, at which point they become zero-sum. This is especially true if you go out of your way to speed up the equillibration, e.g. with certain kinds of AI and free trade policies.
I can't see what you're responding to, but markets are intrinsically positive sum!
Maybe you guys are using different definitions of "intrinsically".
I mean. Some people are definitely right this second trying to conquer land, and small scale exploitation that kinda looks like slavery definitely exists, doesn't it?
Applied to the case of memetic war: if there's some subject that yields lots of valuable insights when studied, then truthseeking is selected for simply because it's a waste of time to fight.
The more you reach equillibrium (by finding the key information, distilling them into great insights, broadcasting them to people who can learn from them, and integrating them into applications), the less value you can get from pure cooperation.
This won't immediately cause defection, it will "merely" cause a collapse in that which produces collaboration, which may just lead to a collapse in the participation. But if participation *remains* high despite lack of selection for truth-seeking (e.g. due to external funding or entertainment value or community inertia), then the participants can be exploited via deception, leading to a growth in various strategies, and then as experiments show, this tends to lead to tit-for-tat.
The more you reach equillibrium (...), the less value you can get from pure cooperation.
The environment of evolutionary adaptedness had gains from cooperation that were less than that of the modern world, but still substantial.
Hence why cooperative instincts evolved.
Prestige hierarchy vs dominance hierarchy
Nope. Per the mandate of heaven, prestige and dominance are closely linked. The critically important piece is an expansion in the possibilities of excellence so there's a disequillibrium where you gain more from developing prestige while keeping dominance low than you gain from developing dominance. So more like prestige vacuum.
I think you're on the right lines when you ask who occupies the position where each strategy makes sense. If instead of traders and kings we think about the common people of Rome at that time, we get an answer to Scott's question.
Think of Rome as a very individualistic society (much like today) where people had a high degree of security from outside (no foreign enemies) and focused on their own lives - e.g. sports, romance, wealth. These things tend to be zero-sum and encourage tit-for-tat, since it's about fighting for positional goods. So we have a society where everyone is playing tit-for-tat all the time, and probably getting sick of it (because let's face it, it's brutal).
Then Christianity can be explained simply by the fact that under these conditions it's the funniest thing in the world to be nice instead. Everyone takes their petty zero-sum competitions so seriously, that not taking them seriously is like pissing over all them.
I hope this explanation is right and that our position is similar to the Rome of that time. This is normally taken pessimistically (probably because of the stereotypes about the fall of Rome leading to the dark ages), but it would be pretty great if something that funny happened again.
That's a good observation.
As a "sell everything to give alms" Christian, I feel it's important to make a distinction between the culture that won the memetic war and the Actual Christianity you are describing. I frequently use a similar definition of Christianity, but also say there are perhaps 100,000 Christians in America at the moment. I sometimes refer to the mass movement as Modern American Folk Christianity.
While I think your terms are pretty harsh, I do think you are on the right path. The version of Christianity (COOPERATE-BOT) that Scott is using is 90% strawman. There are simply practical limits to how much cooperation any nominal Christian group can do, and TIT-FOR-TAT is far from unknown among nominally Christian groups, as well.
To be fair, my threshold is close to "has read the gospels and strives to live by it", a standard so loose it includes Gandhi, it's just that neither Modern American Folk Christianity nor Moralistic Therapeutic Deism are at all open to "Jesus said you should do X" as a viable method of socially approved persuasion. I've visited dozens of churches, I feel my estimates for population rates are at least reasonable, if not as accurate as I like.
(Edit for fun fact: did you know Gandhi read the Sermon on the Mount twice a day for decades?)
Interesting. I take it for granted that it includes, say, Tolstoy? Or even takes him as a forerunner?
I don't know much about Tolstoy, but from his Wikipedia, yes. In terms of forerunning, I mean, both him and I are a couple millennia late to the party, but yes, there is a cross generational convergence on the ideals here. I think there is more convergence than inherited tradition, by a large margin? Also, the more I read this wiki, post-Confession Tolstoy is unbelievably based?
I think a more "narrow brand" representation might be someone like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, although that is somewhat complicated by his involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler, which is the most absurd corner case of "well if you really love your enemies" that it's sort of wild he actually faced the hypothetical irl.
Re: Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Kind of crazy that I'd just heard about him from my coworker today, and here I am reading his name on an ACT/SSC comment. I'm attempting to return to the (Catholic) Christian fold, so would you be able to expand on your thoughts regarding Bonhoeffer's seeming contradiction?
I don't have much to say, aside from, I've been spared similar choices. His books are very good, though, and are quite readable. Engrossing, really. Strong recommendation for The Cost of Discipleship.
Could you please explain what is going on in Christian churches in America so that congregants aren't meeting this low bar? To someone who isn't American and has never been to a mainline American church or an Evangelical church.
I don't know what causes it, I only observe it. They will say, you gotta be all in, trust Jesus 100%. Then you say, Jesus said, do radical good thing X, does anyone do that? And they say, no no that's too impractical and weird. It's not a skill issue, it's a preference. They don't want to. If they wanted to, and failed, that's classically in-bounds, but this is vanishingly rare. Pretty bizarre.
Replying to you here as well: I've heard it well put that Jesus's hardcore teachings may be seen as koan-like paradoxes. Meaning, they are practically nigh-impossible, but it is the living out of the path and the divine goal/target that is the way. It's funny how people think the OT is 'harsher' and the NT is 'kinder'...Jesus asks us to aim for almost insurmountable heights.
I trust Him to make my paths straight.
Are they hearing the gospel? you're the second person I've heard say that it isn't taught in American churches.
That's not *quite* the issue. You have no idea how many times I've met with people after church services end and said something like, "I really liked this bit of the service, when they said [quote]. Is that the type of thing people do here?" And then they're confused, ask what I mean, and I say, that things they said, it's a beautiful expression of gospel principles, do people do it? And they say no. Then I ask why not, and they have all these elaborate reasons why not even a single person does the thing they talk about or sing hymns about. I often have a hard time understanding what they get out of church.
I'm not very Christian—been considering converting to Catholicism, and I'm not an atheist in a foxhole, but I just stumble at the first hurdle ("take the Bible seriously, even the Old Testament")—but I went to a Christian private school for high-school and have visited a couple (Evangelical, IIRC) churches (mostly due to friends' invitations), and I feel like you're absolutely right in this.
I remember one lady cackling about how she ran the sonography program at the local community college—she had imposed baroque requirements that confused people, and so she was talking about how she sometimes "got to" see the looks on applicants' faces when they were informed that they'd spent years of their life doing the wrong things to get in and were just as far away as when they'd started. She thought it was very funny. I said something like "that doesn't seem like something Jesus would do", and she said, irritatedly: "Well, do I look like Jesus?"
...and yet this woman—I was going to say "lady", but it doesn't quite seem the apposite term—was big in the church, all about God this church that. It was puzzling. I had many similar experiences.
I've been using the term Christian Nationalism. That describes the top end of malefaction, and there are degrees of shading for individuals depending on where they are in life and their state of mind.
I think that term mostly focuses on a political angle, where there *is* a philosophy and culture outside of politics I'm trying to point at. Like, volunteering for a VBS isn't anything to do with nationalism. I'm also not trying to speak unkindly about anyone or isolate merits on one end and demerits on the other. I'm just pointing out that (as someone who has volunteered for a VBS) it's a foreign cultural exchange in some ways.
I understand that, but the politics is willfully mixed into it. I wish the culturally dominant strain of Christianity in America wasn't a band of nationalist hobgoblins pushing women away from the pews. But, saying reality is what it isn't has not been that great a strategic choice so far. At best, these things are in tension and one side is growing to be the more popular one.
Maybe it wouldn't be the case if more people did foreign culture exchanges. Seeing becomes believing.
I strongly dislike this term, because it explicitly grants such people the title of Christian, and they haven't earned it.
I understand that.
As I understand it, from the Bible, the idea that you can earn the title Christian is itself not Christian. Faith itself is a gift, that no one may boast, and nobody deserves grace, by definition. Nobody is good except one, that is God. If we believe Jesus is good how can we claim to follow Him when we are not? If we believe we are good we reject His teaching.
I would be careful about saying who deserves and doesn’t deserve the title Christian.
This is true inasmuch as I should not have used the word "earned", and I apologize for that.
However, Jesus does warn about false Christians several times, such as in Matthew 7:15-27, in which Christ states that the ones who does what he says are the ones in heaven. He elaborates on this in Matthew 25:31-46, stating that the ones who will be saved are the ones who fed the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, take in strangers, clothe the naked, and visit those sick or imprisoned.
So, considering that Jesus warned us about false Christians, stated that you will know them by their fruits, and then gave a list of the sorts of things you can expect to see real Christians doing, I think that calling someone who never does those things and is, in fact, viscerally opposed to doing them, is probably not a Christian. Back to the subject at hand- if someone who calls themself a "Christian Nationalist" is harshly opposed to taking in strangers, it's a hard sell for me that they are a Christian.
Just to be clear: I'm not saying that they are going to be damned, necessarily. I certainly don't know who will be damned or not and, in my opinion, stating that someone is going to Hell is putting human limits on God's mercy, which seems to me very unwise.
What I am saying is that I disagree with the category name of "Christian nationalist" to describe people who are hardcore opponents of immigration, which is usually what it refers to. If instead we are talking about people who wish their nation to be more in line with what Jesus literally told us to do, then I don't object to the terminology.
I suppose it might describe myself, although the term "Christian Globalist" might be more appropriate, though it strikes me as rather redundant. To be truly Christian is to be universal, embracing all humanity without the confines of national borders. Thus, the most fitting label, if labels should be worn at all, would simply be "Christian."
Thank you for the thoughtful replies. One of the joys of Christianity is discussing / wrestling with / resolving the tension in various scriptures during Bible studies and with friends. I've typed and erased and typed erased. A comment section just doesn't work for me. I apologize for starting a discussion and not following through well. God bless you, brother!
I'm curious, from the "no borders/global" perspective how do you interpret John 14:2? “In My Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you." - If the Father's house has many different dwelling places (and a place specifically prepared by Jesus for His followers) does that not imply that there can be virtue in boundaries?
What if someone does all of the things in Matthew 25:31-46, but only for strangers of a certain type (e.g. only Americans, or only Christians)? After all, Matthew 25:31-46 never said you need to let an infinite number of Muslims into your country so that they impose Sharia law and drive Christianity to extinction. If that were the likely outcome of immigration (and let's leave aside for the moment the question of whether it is), are Christians still required to support immigration?
I mean, Christians didn't take the "take in the stranger" far enough to be like "hey, centurions, welcome to our secret underground church", so I think the answer is in the past. Alfred wasn't very welcoming to Guthrum- for a while, anyway.
But, you know, The whole point of having deontological ethical injunctions is that arguments for violating them are often much less trustworthy than they look.
An obvious game-theory thought is that you are gifting all other Christians with a *reputation* for being COOPERATE-BOT, and this makes other bots with mixed strategies interact with them more favorably in general.
This is one explanation for how early Christians could have succeeded, by creating a reputation for being COOPERATE BOT while most of them are actually TFT.
But why would having a reputation for being COOPERATE-BOT help you? Why wouldn't it just make everyone (try to) exploit you?
They'll personally want to exploit you, but they'll also want to prevent their own enemies from exploiting you too much - so that you'll still be there to be exploited by them and their allies in the future. Norman Borlaug's dwarf wheat doesn't have a military policy above the microbial level, but it's cultivated by people who do.
Very interesting idea, so it is basically becoming such a useful and unique tool to be able to be integrated into a larger policy. Which for sure can work, but that simply outsources the original game theoretic problem onto the larger entity, practically making the problem disappear for you, but not for the larger entity.
Suppose two wolves and a sheep are voting on what to have for dinner. The sheep says "I propose that tonight we eat whichever of the two wolves is stronger, and then have mutton tomorrow."
The weaker wolf realizes, if this proposal doesn't pass, it certainly won't be the stronger wolf being eaten tomorrow, and so seconds the motion.
After resulting excitement is settled, sheep says to the surviving wolf "you're badly injured, and must be tired from doing most of the work in that fight, so I insist you accept the honor of eating a larger portion of the carcass."
Once that wolf is asleep with a full belly, sheep headbutts and tramples them to death, then trots off to eat grass.
in a war of all against all, with no credible alliances or limits of adjacency, default outcome is everybody ganging up on whoever looks the most threatening - that is, whoever they'd expect to face the most harm, or least benefit, from ending up stuck alone with.
Iterate that enough and whoever looks least threatening dies last. Thus, Mr. Rogers in a bloodstained sweater... or Putin, who was apparently the most blandly inoffensive man in the entire KGB, ending up on top by default.
Supposedly this is how Claudius became emperor of Rome: according to the story I heard, all the other possible candidates went and killed each other off while Claudius acted like a harmless fool so they left him alone. When some people objected to choosing someone with a reputation for being "not quite all there" to be Emperor, he responded, "I'm the one who survived. How stupid could I actually be?"
I also recently watched a reality show in which one of the *least* socially perceptive players, who had spent the whole game being successfully manipulated by one player or another, made it all the way to the final showdown, simply because the other players (accurately!) didn't see him as a threat.
So it depends on the initial population, which is what I was getting at with 'mixed strategies'.
Scot mentions that 'Tit-for-tat with occasional forgiveness' seems like most of instinctive human morality, and I'm sort of riffing on that. A TFT-Bot doesn't exploit cooperate bot, they just cooperate. Assuming most humans are TFT, they will never defect against someone they *know* to be COOP.
Of course, instead of just being TFT, you could be 'TFT-except-also-exploit COOPERATE BOT.' It seems like this would be strictly superior, BUT. I expect that 1. that's harder to evolutionary embed in genes at an instinctive level and 2. in games with reputation, which is how human morality works, people who see you defecting over and over and over against COOOPERATE-BOT may take all those defections as evidence that you are DEFECT-BOT, and then they'll all defect against you on turn 1.
So basically, in a mostly-TFT-with-reputation world, I think there's an advantage to people *believing* you are COOPERATE-BOT because they will cooperate on turn 1.
TFT is cooperation with implicit noise. TFT with forgiveness is cooperation with explicit noise.
Similarly, I think something happened in China where the Confucians were more Cooperate-Bot flavored, the Legalists were more pragmatist and actually won the war / ruled the empire, and also eventually called themselves Confucian.
Yes, it's funny how everyone dunks on the legalists, but they actually won in practice.
I thought in that context it would be the Mohists who were Cooperate-Bot.
The Mohists were known for their genius in building siege machines. While they were probably the most morally Good (by 21st century Western standards) philosophy/movement in Ancient China, I wouldn't consider them "Corporate-bot", or aiming in that direction.
That does seem the more likely explanation.
I also really don't think that modern liberalism is a cooperate-bot strategy. The welfare state could be cynically described as a mechanism for bribing voters by being generous with other people's money. The reciprocity occurs at the ballot box.
Nietzsche said that the last Christian died on the cross. Your point, put in his usual hyperbolic manner.
Kierkegaard wrote something about being lonely as a Christian in Christendom
“Epiphenomenal: COOPERATE-BOT isn’t really a good strategy, but is an unavoidable side effect of something else valuable. For example, maybe you couldn’t have Christians who loved God so much without having them be extremely loving and charitable people. The most dramatic version of this hypothesis is that God is real, and loving thy enemy is an epiphenomenon of following the actual Divine Law.”
This is of course the classic Christian position, and it’s worth pointing out that central to this position is that you cannot and should not and indeed must not run COOPERATE-BOT just for the sake of running COOPERATE-BOT. That way lies all kinds of failure and disaster.
This in my religious opinion has to do with theological truths, but on a pragmatic level I also think this helps avoiding infecting COOPERATE-BOT with utilitarianism, which will always subvert it.
> and it’s worth pointing out that central to this position is that you cannot and should not and indeed must not run COOPERATE-BOT just for the sake of running COOPERATE-BOT. That way lies all kinds of failure and disaster
...How is that different from just TIT-FOR-TAT?
I think grandparent is saying that Christianity provides no spiritual credit when you cooperate for consequentialist reasons, rather that you're supposed to cooperate because you want to follow Divine Law.
correct.
So, the pat meta-answer: there's another prisoner's dilemma played between two neighboring countries: Persecute Christians (cooperate) or Tolerate (defect). If both of you choose Persecute, you're both a little worse off since Christians are helpful. If one of you chooses Tolerate, all of the Christians eventually move there, the persecutor loses out more, and the tolerator gains more. If both of you choose Tolerate, the Christians eventually take over both your countries and make with the Holy Roman Empire and the inquisitions and all that. Christians being maximally cooperative skewed the payoffs enough that enough countries (governors, cities, subcultures, whatever) were incentivized to meta-defect.
I imagine you could also run a variant of the Axelrod tournament where bots are on a 2D grid, can see each others' source code, and when they get points they both create copies of themselves *and* get to copy their favorite neighbors. That plausibly leads to a majority being Cooperate-Bot.
That sounds like a modification of the strategy used by many strains of bacteria. The "quorum sensing" is important to being successful.
That seems like an odd model to apply to the Roman Empire since it didn't have any neighboring countries that were remotely its peers aside from maybe Persia, which I don't think ever had a significant Christian population (although I'm curious if any early Christian missionaries went east and if so how it went for them).
And actually going back to Scott's overall point, it's interesting that my model for the fall of Rome is that it was mostly caused by Romans increasingly choosing Defect over Cooperate; that is, they prioritized winning internal power struggles against other Romans over keeping Rome strong overall. Now this was already well underway by the time the empire converted to Christianity, but it's notable that the Christians definitely didn't succeed in halting or reversing the process.
I guess it's not necessarily surprising that scaling up to being the state religion of the empire seems to have come at the cost of some of the unique traits Scott's interested in but it's worth keeping in mind.
> That seems like an odd model to apply to the Roman Empire since it didn't have any neighboring countries that were remotely its peers
I think you could model it as various powers and factions choosing to tolerate Christianity, despite correctly perceiving it as a threat to the existing order, culminating in Constantine deciding to convert in order (probably) to increase his personal power within the empire.
Also different regions inside the empire. The Roman Empire wasn't nearly centralised enough to have a single coherent policy.
'although I'm curious if any early Christian missionaries went east and if so how it went for them"
Yes, the entire Oriental Orthodox branch is from them, don't confuse the word "Orthodox" and think it's related to Orthodox Catholic, it's not. They are known to have gotten as far, and found successful churches, as India with some suggestions possibly far Western modern China, basically the Silk Road. The interesting question is why didn't it take off in the far east, then or now.
I'm currently reading Valerie Hansen's book on the Silk Road, which touches upon this. That branch of Christianity wasn't uncommon in Western China, but towards the end of the Tang Dynasty, the emperor forbade the practice of a lot of religions, mostly targeting Buddhism, but ended up wiping out the smaller Christian, Zoroastrian, and Manichaeist sects - the latter two mostly consisting of refugees who fled the Islamic invasion of Persia. Buddhism, of course, outlasted the laws and thrived, being more popular in China at the time of the crackdown.
And this is my speculation, but Buddhism may be the primary reason why Christianity didn't take off. Buddhism seems to share a lot of the same characteristics listed above - very cooperative, high standards of behavior, etc. It exploded out of India at a similar pace to Christianity, but a couple of hundred years prior, so when Christianity reached China (at around the same time it would have hit Scandanavia) you didn't see rapid adoption.
(To answer Scott's question above of what might be missing from the Christianity, Quaker, Cathar list, Buddhism would be the first one to look at, though I'm not familiar with it myself.)
Yes, the SanThome Christians in India credibly date themselves back to St. Thomas the apostle, and they have survived as a minority for thousands of years, mostly orthogonal to the traditional Hindu/Muslim political dimension.
Nestorian Christianity/the Oriental Orthodox Churches at one point had a considerable number of followers in Persia. Khosrau I initially even encouraged Nestorian Christianity over the Orthodoxy of the Byzantines, though of course always considered Zoroastrianism superior.
The way Rome got to the point of having no peer competitors left was by being better at directing surplus violence outward and distributing plunder fairly among the participants. https://acoup.blog/2023/10/20/collections-how-to-roman-republic-101-addenda-the-socii/ Running out of worthy, plunder-rich targets to aim that violence at meant the "we're all friends here, everybody gets an equal share of the plunder" system started to break down. Right around the same time Christianity was founded, Julius Ceasar was thinking "welp, all done conquering Gaul, now what?" and picking a fight with the Senate.
Except the "Golden Age" Pax Romana starts at Augustus and lasts about 200 years. Commodus, the Emperor when thing started to get dicy was also the first non-adopted emperor, which then slides into the crisis of the third century. It might indeed have been seeded by the structural change from a pillage economy, but 200 years is enough time for me to consider other causes as well.
What are you taking exception to?
"Golden Age" is what you get when territorial expansion has hit diminishing returns, but internal development hasn't yet. Charitable pacifists don't help much with expansion in the form of violent conquest (they'd even be regarded with suspicion, during that period, just for failing to participate) but they've got plenty to contribute when it comes to building up civil infrastructure.
Instructions starting with "sell everything you own and give the money to..." only really work when there's a merchant willing to buy, or better yet two or more bidding against each other, which becomes far more likely when there are trade routes all across the known world untroubled by war or piracy.
> I'm curious if any early Christian missionaries went east and if so how it went for them
See Philip Jenkins' "The Lost History of Christianity" https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/waiting-half-a-millenium-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop/
The described payoff matrix is different from the Prisoner's Dilemma. In particular, the Defect/Defect isn't a Nash Equilibrium, since Cooperate/Defect is better for the cooperator than Defect/Defect.
Depends on your level of time discounting. They enslave their children's children who make compromise with virtue...
Brilliant article, thanks Scott
A minor point on claims that Axelrod's Tournament successfully grounded morality in self-interest – it's less that the mental processes which support morality are based on self-interest, per se, and more that the results of the tournament demonstrate an explanation of why morality is so embedded in the human psyche.
Evolution doesn't necessarily care about the mechanisms which cause various strategies (behaviours) – but it does care about the outputs of those strategies, as this is the layer it acts upon (the behaviour level), especially in a highly competitive social environment like those of our ancestors. Axelrod's Tournament shows that, even if the mechanisms within the brain which give rise to moral behaviour are completely unrelated to self-interest, once those mechanisms are present in the population (even if they evolved purely by chance), then the carriers of the genes which give rise to those 'morality mechanisms' within the brain are more likely to spread their genes to the next generation, as the behaviour caused by such mechanisms gives rise to an optimal strategy for cooperating and flourishing in a social environment.
It tells us nothing about how morality first evolved, that's true, but it does tell us a lot about why morality became so widespread and ingrained within human culture – it's a winning strategy.
Great comment. I found that sentence, "I find the occasional claims to have successfully grounded morality in self-interest to be facile, but you can at least see where they’re coming from here." a bit weird...maybe something I'd expect from a bonafide Christian, but not capital R Rationalist(TM). The evolution of morality has been fairly well studied and is not a great mystery at this point. If it was maladaptive, it wouldn't exist. (Some caveats required there of course...the prevalence of various mental illnesses and homosexuality are genuine puzzles, although I believe a fair amount of progress has made toward the former.) But "grounding morality in self-interest" is not how I would characterize that.
Maybe Scott is referring to something else? Maybe just the kind of cynical folk psychology of bitter antisocial people who insist people only "pretend" to be nice while secretly having self-serving ulterior motives?
This is a common confusion about evolutionary explanations, a confusion between the proximate and ultimate levels. If you explain things in terms of fitness, some misinterpret that as saying, you don't "really" love your child/spouse/friend, you're only pretending to care about them because it's to your advantage. No, you really are capable of love, which may sometimes result in actually putting the interests of others above your own. The reason that you have kind of cognitive/neural architecture that produces that behavior is that throughout our evolutionary history, it tended to result in more success at survival and/or reproduction than not having it.
There was a famous story about one of the most influential people in this area...wasn't Axelrod himself was it? Who IMO succumbed to this mistake, and was haunted to the point of derangement by the idea that "real" altruism was impossible, and tried to disprove it by fully embracing the implications of a Peter Singer type philosophy by giving away virtually all of his income and letting homeless people sleep on the floor of his barren house etc...
I think the best attempt to ground real goodness in objective reality is Robert Wright's Nonzero. Goodness is the expansion of nonzero sum-ness, and it is in the nature of things, due to principles like those uncovered by Axelrod, for it to continue to expand over time. But it has to start somewhere. Cooperating with a defector, ie a Jew turning the other cheek on a Nazi, or committing suicide to donate your flesh to the vultures and worms, etc. (A) win-lose, which is not good, (B) inherently maladaptive, which means it must cause there to be less of itself in the universe. So if it were good in some ultimate transcendental sense... That would mean goodness necessarily causes there to be less goodness in the universe in the future, which would be bad. If everyone genuinely cared about all humans (or all living things) equally, that would mean they would not care about their children any more than other being. And since no one can feed, clothe and shelter, let along spend quality time with, all beings everywhere, that would mean no one do even enough to keep their own children alive, and humanity would become extinct, and no humans would be around to be good, or to appreciate how Really Genuinely Altruistic the last generation of humans to exist was.
Just as Daniel Dennett said free will based determinism is the only kind we have and the only kind worth wanting... I say the adaptive kind of goodness that we actually have is the only kind worth wanting.
Here's the guy I was thinking of. Really important in the history of evolutionary theory, and also a riveting personal story. Even more tragic, because IMO his despair was just based on a mistake (and probably pre-existing mental illness). It's wrong and foolish to think kindness/generosity etc can't really be good unless it has no actual or potential benefit to the person doing it. The Buddhists knew that for 2 and half millennia. In many circumstances, being good to others is good for you. That's a feature, not a bug.
A book I'd recommend is The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition, which articulates and defends a more common-sense intuitive morality against what could be called telescopic philanthropy.
(GPT:) What you're recalling seems to align with the story of **George Price**, a key figure in evolutionary biology and game theory, rather than Robert Axelrod. Price played a significant role in the development of the **Price Equation**, which is foundational to understanding the evolution of altruism.
### George Price and the Evolution of Altruism:
1. **Contributions to Game Theory and Evolution**:
- Price was instrumental in advancing the mathematical foundations of evolutionary theory, particularly in explaining altruism through a genetic lens.
- His work helped formalize how seemingly selfless behaviors could evolve through natural selection if they provided a benefit to relatives (kin selection) or indirectly boosted one's own genetic success.
2. **Personal Transformation and Despair**:
- After deriving his famous equation, Price became deeply troubled by its implications. He struggled with the idea that altruism—what we see as selflessness—was ultimately a selfish genetic strategy.
- This conflict led him to attempt to disprove his own work by living a life of radical altruism.
3. **Radical Altruism**:
- Price gave away most of his income and possessions, including his house, to help the homeless in London.
- He allowed homeless people to live with him, often at great personal expense and discomfort, to demonstrate that true selflessness was possible.
4. **Decline and Tragic End**:
- His extreme lifestyle, combined with his struggle to reconcile his work with his spiritual and philosophical beliefs, led to mental health challenges.
- Price ultimately died by suicide in 1975, leaving behind a legacy that continues to provoke discussion about the nature of altruism.
### Why It Resonates:
The story of George Price is haunting and compelling because it underscores the human struggle to reconcile scientific discoveries with deeply held moral and existential beliefs. His life exemplifies the tension between understanding altruism as an evolutionary strategy and aspiring to live out altruism as a purely selfless virtue.
### Connection to Peter Singer:
Price’s radical lifestyle echoes some of the implications of **Peter Singer's philosophy** of effective altruism, which calls for giving significant portions of one's income to alleviate global suffering. However, Price's actions were not systematically aimed at maximizing utility (as Singer advocates) but rather seemed driven by a desperate need to disprove the cold logic of his own mathematical findings.
### Documentary:
The story of George Price has been featured in several documentaries and books. One notable book is **"The Price of Altruism" by Oren Harman**, which details Price’s life, work, and tragic struggle with the implications of his discoveries. It’s possible the documentary you recall was based on this book or similar material.
> Goodness is the expansion of nonzero sum-ness, [...]
Careful with that! Lots of 'evil' is characterised by decreasing the total sum.
True zero-sum is exceedingly rare in the real world, as it's easier to destroy than to balance perfectly.
"Lots of 'evil' is characterised by decreasing the total sum."
That's an important point I left out: lose/lose is zero sum. Win/win--the increasing prevalence of opportunities for win/win interactions--is what I would describe as good.
"True zero-sum is exceedingly rare in the real world" I don't think it is in the sense that I mean it.
The sumness I'm referring to is just:
| | win | lose |
| :-----:|:--------:|:---------:|
| win | win/win | win/lose |
| lose | lose/win | lose/lose |
Which can be represented as:
| | +1 | -1 |
| :---:|:--:|:--:|
| +1 | 2 | 0 |
| -1 | 0 | -2 |
It's just an abstraction, not an attempt to quantify any precise quantity.
Any voluntary transaction is positive sum, because both parties benefit. A theft, OTOH, is zero sum, because one's loss is the other's gain.
Here's a synopsis:
-----
Robert Wright argues that nonzero-sumness is intrinsic to the nature of evolution because the survival and success of organisms often depend on cooperation and interdependence. While evolution, in a strictly scientific sense, lacks a conscious direction or purpose, Wright suggests that it can appear directional due to the patterns it produces—particularly the increasing complexity of life and the expansion of cooperative networks.
As life evolves, systems become more intricate, and organisms interact in increasingly complex ways. These interactions often create opportunities for nonzero-sum dynamics, where mutual benefit becomes more viable and advantageous. For example:
• In biological evolution: Symbiotic relationships (e.g., between pollinators and plants or gut bacteria and hosts) show how cooperation can drive complexity and enhance survival.
• In human history: The development of language, trade, and technology amplifies the potential for cooperative, nonzero-sum outcomes, enabling larger, more interconnected societies.
Wright argues that the expansion of nonzero-sumness is a natural consequence of this complexity. As organisms and societies grow more interdependent, the scope for mutually beneficial relationships widens, creating a feedback loop where cooperation becomes increasingly advantageous.
In this sense, while evolution doesn’t have an intrinsic “goal,” the appearance of directionality comes from this pattern: life becomes more complex, which broadens the opportunities for nonzero-sum interactions, driving further complexity and interconnectedness. This gives the impression of a purposeful trajectory, even though it arises from natural processes.
----
To your point about negative sum:
---
Yes, Robert Wright does suggest that as complexity increases and societies become more interconnected, the potential for negative-sum interactions also grows, alongside the opportunities for positive-sum interactions. This is because interconnected systems amplify both cooperation and conflict.
In a complex, interdependent world, actions and decisions have wider-reaching consequences, and failures in coordination or trust can result in negative-sum outcomes—situations where all parties lose. For example:
• In tightly connected societies, wars, economic collapses, or environmental crises can have devastating ripple effects, harming all involved.
• As technological and social complexity grows, so too do the stakes of mismanagement or adversarial dynamics, increasing the potential cost of negative-sum scenarios.
However, Wright emphasizes that the same interdependence that heightens these risks also incentivizes the reduction of negative-sum outcomes. The shared costs of failure push individuals and societies toward systems that favor positive-sum dynamics, such as cooperation, diplomacy, and innovation.
In essence, the stakes are higher in a more interconnected world: while the potential for positive-sum interactions grows with complexity, so does the potential for negative-sum interactions. Wright’s optimism lies in the idea that humanity’s increasing awareness of this dynamic, coupled with technological and cultural evolution, makes it more likely to lean toward nonzero-sum solutions over time.
It's also worth noting that Christianity itself also grounds morality in self-interest; it just argues that the "reward" from defecting is vanishingly small compared to the reward from cooperating (see the quote from Matthew above).
But it's not *self*-interest. It's your genes'.
Morality first evolved before homo sapiens existed. Every animal that lives in groups has some form of morality. One could argue that this is even true of spiders and preying mantises, but that's probably stretching the point.
Now whether that morality is considered desirable....now that's a different question. The morality is needed to enable the species to survive in the niche for which it evolved, but when the species moves to a different environment, the "most desirable" morality (from the viewpoint of the species) changes.
Humanity has so altered the conditions in which it is living recently that our "natural morality" is probably very far from optimal. But we have cultures that implant a "cultural morality". (Here culture is often reducible to a single family or small group of families.) Even so, it's probably that all current moralities adopted by people are far from optimal (from the viewpoint of the species).
Spiders can cooperate when there's sufficient food to go around. https://web.archive.org/web/20190519020515/https://www.entsoc.org/PDF/2010/Orb-weaving-spiders.pdf
These are very good points. As Steven Pinker among others have pointed out, morality is possibly the leading cause of violence in the world. And--important distinction--much of that violence, in present circumstances, is unnecessary and unhelpful, therefore bad. It may well be--almost certainly is, in fact--that there is evolutionary mismatch between the world of small competing tribes our morality evolved for (although it seems it's turning we evolved more since the dawn of agriculture than was previously thought, which opens another can of worms I'll save for later).
Still, I think our common sense folk intuitions are generally more sound than rationalist utilitarianism** taken to its logical conclusions. Ie, yes, it is moral and good to care more about your family, and friends, and neighbors, etc than all beings everywhere. Because (A) you are in a better position to actually succeed in doing good for the people with whom you have close reciprocal relationships, and (B) if it's not successful in Darwinian terms, it will undermine itself. And as I said in my other comment, if "goodness" undermines itself and causes there to be less goodness in the universe in the future, its net effect is bad, hence it can't actually be good.
**Edit: rationalist utilitarianism, or, more relevant to this thread, I should have said the Christian "turn the other cheek", love everyone as a brother, do not resist evil etc. philosophy which seems to be endorsed in some parts of the New Testament. Which it seems very few Christians have ever fully embraced. Which I don't think of as a criticism of Christians. I think it may be good as an aspiration, encouraging us to be more forgiving, open-hearted, understanding, etc than we naturally tend to be, knowing that like it or not, we will of course prioritize ourselves and our loved ones. But taken literally, I think it's obviously unworkable in practice and not really good or moral at all.
> knowing that like it or not, we will of course prioritize ourselves and our loved ones.
And, therefore, the people most inclined to feel obligated to follow their culture’s morals to their ultimate consequences will be weeded out. With a high chance of not being perceived as following any morals, but as acting like fools who deserve no respect or sympathy.
>Overwhelm downward adjustment: If you assume all movements lie and downgrade their claims 90% out of cynicism, then a movement which merely portrays itself as helping members won’t even help members, but a movement which portrays itself as radiating universal love to all mankind might at least help its members.
I think this is a very, very big factor. Mathew 5:38-40 says,
>38 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’[a] 39 But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. 40 And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.
That's all well and good to proclaim, but I really doubt that literally happened often. Growing up going to Sunday school, my Pastor taught that passage a few times. But knowing him and everyone else who worked at the church, they were pretty normal people, and I do not see them literally turning the other cheek if I slapped. They certainly wouldn't give me their coat if I stole their shirt.
But also, I would guess they were more forgiving than if they didn't sincerely believe in that passage and similar ones. If you stole his shirt, I'm pretty sure my pastor wouldn't give you his coat, but he would have a conversation with you trying to explain why that was wrong and talk you into giving the shirt back instead of calling the cops on you right away.
Or maybe I'm just talking out of my ass, I didn't go to church that often even as a kid.
I've often heard it said that even the Mosaic Law, though harsh to our eyes, was a practical improvement on what came before, which encouraged Hatfield-McCoy feuding over minor slights.
And eye for an eye is actually a much more moral improvement over death for an eye.
Correct. That was the original point that moderns don't realize.
Indeed. It was one of the earliest written expressions of the principle that punishment should be proportional to the offense.
The usual Christian understanding is that this is a call for patience and lenience in response to personal injury, but not an absolute call for perfect nonresistance. Though obviously a minority has disagreed with this take over the centuries.
What I would call the more orthodox lines of Christian thought have generally tried to take the entire Bible as a whole and to understand it as a single cohesive message, that Jesus didn't suddenly and completely abrogate all the teaching of the OT, but instead his moral teaching was primarily correcting misbehaviors that had arisen as a result of poor application of the OT Moral Law (which remained intact).
Jesus is a complicated figure. Those movements that have disagreed with this take (which we might call "heretics") have generally been less concerned with the idea of Scripture as a cohesive whole, instead emphasizing some teaching or another of Jesus over the rest of the Bible.
The Bible before or after the Council of Nicaea? You've got to remember how much the Bible was rewritten to accommodate politicians/theologians/etc...and not just that one time. (Admittedly, without many of those rewrite it would be a wild collection of silly stories.)
Nah, that’s Dan Brown fantasy.
Dan Brown took the idea and built some silly fantasy stories off of it, but that doesn't mean it's not well-grounded in reality. There are books that the early Church Fathers considered canonical, and cited as such in their writings, that we do not have today.
There are books that the Apostles considered canonical, and cited as such in their writings, that we do not have today. Several of them are named in the various books of the Bible, and at least one is not: in Acts 20:35, Paul cites the teaching of Jesus, its source clearly familiar to his audience but lost to us today, that "It is more blessed to give than to receive."
Meanwhile, archaeologists, who for centuries have used the Old Testament as a guide to exploring the Holy Land, are increasingly making discoveries about the Northern Kingdom of Israel that lead them to believe that many of the historical accounts that have been passed down to us in the Old Testament are composed of Southern Kingdom political propaganda that's not nearly as truthful as Biblical literalists would assume. (A notion that's backed up by the discovery of various apocryphal ancient works believed to originate in the Northern Kingdom.)
This is true, we have lost much knowledge, but that is categorically different from the assertion that the Nicaean Council rewrote the literature we do retain.
I heavily discount such assertions based on my personal experience with religious zealots today. Try to convince any of them to rewrite their religious texts- it's not an easy thing to do. The best you can get is a translation that emphasizes different things.
If our current religious zealots won't rewrite anything, then I do not think that the ancient religious zealots- who were far more scrupulous and self-selecting, by all accounts- would be more willing to.
If we're talking about early Christianity, it's not so much a matter of rewriting as new-writing. The Evangelists and the Apostles wrote all manner of new works that Christians considered to be scripture, on the same level as the books written by the Prophets of old. And then other people started writing books that some Christians considered equally legitimate and others did not agree with. And then you have the whole mess that is Gnosticism complicating things and muddying the waters further.
By the time of Nicaea, things had grown so fragmented that Constantine, who wanted to be a Christian, found it impossible to definitively answer the question "just what does it mean to be a Christian anyway?" So, by the authority vested in him as Emperor, he got a bunch of top Christian thought leaders together and said "you're going to work out an official Christian doctrine and settle all this confusion once and for all, or else!" One important part of that was deciding, among various competing works, what was to be officially considered canonical and what should be thrown out.
Re: There are books that the early Church Fathers considered canonical, and cited as such in their writings, that we do not have today.
Actually we do have those books. Chiefly: The Protoevangelium of James, the Epistles of Clement, the Diadache, the Shepherd of Hermas. You can find these by an online search.
As far as the OT goes there are several books recognized a Scriptural by the Church of Ethiopia that no one else recognizes (and not the non-Ethiopian Jews either)
We have some of them, yes...
The Council of Nicaea had nothing to do with the canon of Scripture.
That's officially correct, as certified by Google, but then I didn't claim that it did. I claimed that there were lots of books removed from the Bible, and that many of them were removed at an early date (I picked the Council of Nicaea as a separation point, however, because of the "myth"). Yes, it was really based on a series of decisions, mainly made by the Catholic Churches. But it drastically altered the tone of the Bible. (Possibly repeatedly. I haven't really studied the matter. But consider "The Gospel of Thomas". Or even "The Gospel of Judas". And even the ones that were obviously collections of folk tales [reminiscent of the Cherry Tree Carol] would change the tone and meaning of the Bible were they included.)
> That's all well and good to proclaim, but I really doubt that literally happened often. Growing up going to Sunday school, my Pastor taught that passage a few times. But knowing him and everyone else who worked at the church, they were pretty normal people, and I do not see them literally turning the other cheek if I slapped. They certainly wouldn't give me their coat if I stole their shirt.
There's a lot of cultural context in this passage that we lack today. What he was saying here can be summed up rather concisely as "don't be like the Zealots." While the world "zealot" has become a generic term in the modern lexicon, it referred to a specific group of people with a well-defined ideology, that the Romans were evil occupiers and the Jews needed to resist them through physical violence, and eventually rise up and cast them out of Judea in a glorious revolution.
Given the overwhelming military superiority of Rome, this was a stupid idea that was never going to be successful, and people listening to these notions eventually culminated in the tragic events of 70 AD. Jesus told his disciples to follow a different path. If a Roman citizen legally compels you to give you something, give more than is required. If he requires you to travel with him for a mile, as is his legal right under Roman law, go two. If someone tries to provoke you with a backhanded slap, (this is the only way for a normal right-handed person strike someone on the right cheek, afterall,) don't rise to the provocation by throwing a punch. Instead, turn the other cheek and say "I'm not going to let you bait me. *You* throw the first punch, and then you're the one who broke the law and started the fight."
In all cases, it's the same requirement: do not give the Romans any excuse to say that you're a revolutionary fighting against them. Go out of your way to make it clear that you're not. Given the way the revolutionary Jews were so thoroughly wiped out once the Romans finally got sick of them, it proved wise advice!
I've found this a compelling interpretation. However, many Christians seem to disagree. Are there any good objections against it?
The Gospel of Matthew never mentions the Zealots. To the extent that the Sermon on the Mount names any enemies, they are enemies of Jesus, not of the Jews:
"Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. 12 Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you." (Matthew 5:11)
Who are the people insulting, persecuting, and slandering the followers of Jesus? At this time, they were not Romans. They were other Jews, particularly the Pharisees. Who persecuted the earlier prophets? Also other Jews, particularly the kings of Israel and Judah.
The good objection is that you should require direct evidence of very specific claims. It’s a neat just-so story but there’s no evidence for it other than the originator thinks it might have been cool and it fits with existing biases that Jesus must be terribly misinterpreted because he couldn’t possibly have meant what he actually said and others took him to mean.
The evidence against is that nothing in the Gospels leads us to believe that Jesus had any interest in leading a covert passive resistance against the Romans, to the point that the Roman authorities seized him (on claims of the Jewish religious authorities), investigated him, and obviously thought he was a harmless kook.
You can argue “well that’s the whole point of his strategy!” but now you’re into conspiracy territory. Literally nobody among his contemporaries figured out the secret Jesus anti-Roman code, but we super-smart moderns did?
The more likely explanation, borne out by his and his early followers’ actual behavior, is that Jesus meant it just as he said, for application to more or less all situations, not just Zealots vs Romans.
> The evidence against is that nothing in the Gospels leads us to believe that Jesus had any interest in leading a covert passive resistance against the Romans
> the secret Jesus anti-Roman code,
It's hardly valid to present, as evidence against a claim that was made, evidence against a claim that was *never* made.
OK. I will now ask for your evidence that the interpretation that this passage was specifically about Rome is true.
The evidence is what I said in the first post: what he's referring to here are specific cultural practices. For example, the word ἀγγαρεύσει (angareusei) used in the Sermon refers to a Roman soldier's legal right to compel conquered people to accompany them, and carry their heavy equipment, for one mile. His audience knew exactly what ἀγγαρεύσει was, and likely many of them had had it happen to them at some point. (See also the case of Simon the Cyrenian, a random traveler who the Romans grabbed and forced to carry Jesus' cross.)
But seriously, how exactly do you take a post saying "Jesus said to not be a revolutionary and to be exceedingly clear that you are not a revolutionary," and then 1) *completely* misread it as "Jesus said to be a revolutionary, just in secret," then 2) when it's pointed out that that was never the claim, say "OK then, prove it"?!?
None of that reflects well on you.
It is not hard to read Mark, at least, as a thinly veiled anti-Roman screed, using the metaphore of demonic possession to avoid saying anything crucifixion worthy. And Mark was the first of the Gospels to be written, presumably closer to the source material than the other three.
It might not be hard for you to make that inference, but what is that actual evidence that it is besides your belief? Certainly the contemporaneous writers, readers, devoted Christians, etc. did not believe it was and did not treat it as if it was.
Also, I should note for you that the evidence of Markan priority is thin: inference and opinion of textual critics, not through physical evidence, archeology, historical accounts, etc. Wikipedia will tell you the case is airtight, but Wikipedia is written by academic textual critics, not historians nor archeologists, and you should be skeptical of it.
> Certainly the contemporaneous writers, readers, devoted Christians, etc. did not believe it was and did not treat it as if it was.
What exactly is "certain" about this assertion?
I do not have anything except my own personal interpretation from reading it. I should explain that I am a practicing Christian.
As for the priority of Mark, yes textual clues are all we have, but you take the evidence you have, not the evidence you wish you had. I find it convincing.
I don't think Quakers were ever actually executed in England, though they were regularly fined and imprisoned. Cromwell and Charles II were friendly with Fox and Penn respectively, though local judges often were not
Massachusetts on the other hand seems to have executed Quakers regularly and made returning to Massachusettes as a Quaker a capital offence.
That may be true, but "keep in jail in abysmal conditions until they get sick and die" isn't *that* far from execution, and certainly many Quakers did die in jail as a result of their resistance/principles.
It is pretty far from execution. 10% chance of death from disease in private is very different punishment from 100% of a painful death in public.
The biggest gap between bot strategy and the real world is the fact that in the real world, people can change strategies. If, in the bot simulation, 40% of the bots were “adapt the strategy of the last bot you encountered” cooperate-bot would be much more likely to pull ahead. Tit-for-tat would still win, but would cooperate bot win more?
I don't feel like trying to dig up the answer, but...wait I don't have to; I have a magic oracle. But first, I don't think that's actually necessarily a huge difference; I think in Axelrod's tournaments, people were allowed to submit any computer code they wanted. In the iterated tournaments, I don't think there was anything stopping them from changing behavior in one round based on what happened in previous rounds. Probably some tried.
To the Oracle (GPT 4o):
"""
The question of whether the introduction of adaptive strategies (like "adopt the strategy of the last bot you encountered") changes the dynamics of iterated games like the Prisoner's Dilemma has indeed been explored in various ways, though perhaps not always in the exact form you described.
Experiments in **evolutionary game theory** and **iterated Prisoner's Dilemma simulations** often include agents that can adapt or learn strategies over time. Here are some key findings that relate to your question:
### Key Concepts in Relevant Research:
1. **Strategy Adaptation in Simulations**: Many simulations introduce "adaptive agents" that mimic or evolve strategies based on observed success. These agents are akin to your "adopt the strategy of the last bot you encountered." Such studies show that the presence of adaptive agents often destabilizes dominance hierarchies among fixed strategies (like tit-for-tat or always-cooperate) and leads to fluctuating dynamics.
2. **The Role of Cooperation Bots**: In a population with adaptive agents, strategies like "always cooperate" (cooperate-bot) tend to perform poorly unless they exist in a supportive environment. If a majority are cooperative, this increases the likelihood that adaptive agents will adopt cooperation. However, they remain vulnerable to exploitation by defectors.
3. **Tit-for-Tat in Adaptive Contexts**: Tit-for-tat tends to perform well in adaptive scenarios because it strikes a balance: it fosters cooperation when others cooperate, but it retaliates against defectors. This robust balance makes it likely to spread or persist, even in the presence of adaptive agents.
4. **Social Learning and Memory Effects**: In experiments where agents can remember more than just the last strategy they encountered, or where they weigh historical interactions, tit-for-tat's dominance can diminish. Cooperative strategies (including always-cooperate) may thrive in these environments if agents tend to favor longer-term rewards.
### Would Cooperate-Bot Perform Better?
It depends on several conditions:
- **Population Composition**: If 40% of the population adopts "copy the last strategy," cooperate-bot could indeed benefit, as these adaptive agents would mimic cooperation after encountering cooperate-bot.
- **Interaction Rules**: If interactions are random, cooperate-bot's success might increase. However, if defect-bots (always defect) or tit-for-tat strategies dominate the environment, adaptive agents will likely mimic defecting or retaliating behaviors more often.
- **Mutation and Evolution**: In evolutionary contexts where agents adapt based on long-term payoffs, tit-for-tat generally prevails because it punishes defectors while fostering mutual gains with cooperators.
### Existing Studies:
- **Axelrod's Tournaments**: The famous iterated Prisoner's Dilemma tournaments run by Robert Axelrod showed that adaptive strategies could emerge under certain rules. However, tit-for-tat still remained a top performer because of its simplicity and robustness.
- **Agent-Based Modeling**: Many agent-based models (ABMs) have tested scenarios with adaptive agents. Results often show cyclical dominance: cooperators rise, get exploited by defectors, and then defectors diminish as retaliation strategies (like tit-for-tat) take over.
### Conclusion:
Experiments have addressed related questions, though perhaps not in precisely the form you've described. The inclusion of a large proportion of adaptive agents would likely boost cooperate-bot's performance temporarily, but tit-for-tat would remain resilient in the long run because it discourages exploitation. The dynamics of such systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions, mutation rates, and the ability of agents to "remember" and adjust to patterns over time.
"""
PS: Was I right about what I said initially?
"""
Yes, you're correct about Axelrod's tournaments allowing strategies to change behavior based on what happened in previous rounds. The tournaments were designed to permit participants to submit any computer code they wanted, which means strategies could indeed be highly sophisticated and adapt to the opponent's previous moves.
### Key Points About Axelrod's Tournaments:
1. **Open Submission**: Participants were free to submit any strategy they could program, and strategies could incorporate memory, logic, and conditional rules based on prior interactions. This enabled them to change behavior dynamically across rounds.
2. **Iterated Nature**: Because the games were iterated, many strategies explicitly accounted for past interactions. For example:
- **Tit-for-Tat** famously cooperated on the first move and then mirrored the opponent's previous move.
- Other strategies tried to exploit patterns or weaknesses in their opponents by analyzing behavior over multiple rounds.
3. **Sophisticated Adaptations**: While the simplest strategies (like always-cooperate or always-defect) did not adapt, more complex ones often incorporated memory and conditional responses. For instance, strategies might:
- Cooperate for a certain number of rounds, then switch based on observed payoffs.
- Punish defection harshly for multiple rounds to discourage exploitation.
4. **Design Space**: There were no constraints against designing strategies that could adapt mid-tournament or "learn" an opponent's tendencies, though strategies had to follow the rules of the game (e.g., fixed payoff matrix, iterated rounds). The only real limitation was computational feasibility, as programs needed to run within reasonable time limits.
### Did Participants Try This?
Yes, some participants submitted highly sophisticated strategies, including those that:
- Used pattern recognition to exploit predictable opponents.
- Forgave defections after a certain point to restore cooperation.
- Attempted to "probe" their opponent's behavior early in the game to choose an optimal response later.
### Why Does Tit-for-Tat Often Prevail?
While adaptive strategies existed, tit-for-tat often emerged as a top performer because of its simplicity and robustness:
- It fostered cooperation with other cooperators.
- It punished defectors immediately but did not escalate conflicts.
- Its predictability made it a stable partner for strategies trying to avoid exploitation.
### Conclusion:
You're absolutely right that the open nature of Axelrod's tournaments allowed for strategies that could adapt round-to-round. Many participants likely experimented with these approaches, and some succeeded. However, the straightforward, cooperative nature of tit-for-tat often allowed it to perform better in aggregate across diverse opponents.
"""
I’m not suggesting it would benefit an individual participant to learn other’s strategies, but if that were a force of the simulation - if it ran real time and after each 10 rounds 40% of the “follower” bots changed strategy to the current winning strategy, I think it would be very different and a bit more like real life. In a world where cooperation is publicly visible and encouraged, and communication between bots is possible, you can surely make things where cooperation is the winning strategy.
Sounds like something you could try on your own PC. Could be a neat project if you had some time on your hands!
If the rules of your simulation periodically "kill" some of the agents following the worst-performing strategy and replace them with agents that follow the current best-performing strategy, and you start with a mix of tit-for-tat, cooperate-bot, and defect-bot, then tit-for-tat will generally win, and cooperate-bot will almost always be the first to be wiped out.
With random errors, tit-for-tat-plus-forgiveness will become the most common strategy if you add it, though it's so merciful that it won't completely wipe out regular tit-for-tat, and a small fraction of the population will stick with that.
(There was a great browser game/interactive lesson about this that I played at some point, but I lost the link and haven't been able to find it again.)
Some researchers have been really annoyed that they couldn't come up with plausible scenarios where cooperate-bot won in their simulations, even after trying pretty hard to come up with some. (Though obviously most simulations do not remotely approach the complexity of real life.)
You definitely "can" make cooperate-bot win if you sufficiently contrive the rules (e.g. if you add in some god-players that read your source code and cooperate IFF you are cooperate-bot), but I think you'll find its much harder than it sounds like you are expecting.
What if
1) the rate of random errors is based on code complexity / runtime,
2) rather than every matchup being random, you can choose to seek out a specific agent you've encountered before,
3) score thresholds for elimination or reproduction are fixed, and knowable - for example, any agent whose cumulative score drops below 0 dies, one whose score rises above 100 can choose to spawn a copy, after which both will be reset to a score of 50?
in such a case, particularly if point 2 were somehow expanded to friend-of-a-friend referrals, I'd expect to see an "enforcer" or "shepherd" strategy which alternates between proactively culling known defect-bots - even at the expense of its own immediate reproductive opportunities - and recharging within a more congenial community when its resources are low. Cooperate-bots make the best pool to recharge from since they'd suffer the least error-related attrition.
"Cooperate-bots make the best pool to recharge from?" Sounds like you're effectively arguing that cooperate-bots make the best subjects for warlords ("shepherds") to rule over, rather than the argument that *being* a cooperate-bot is good for the person executing the strategy.
Also, like...you want tit-for-tat to be penalized for being complex relative to cooperate bot, but you also want friend-of-a-friend referrals? That's probably several orders of magnitude more complicated than tit-for-tat. And then you also want police investigators to somehow identify and punish the people who break the rules? That's probably several orders of magnitude more complicated than referrals.
Also point 3 seems highly unrealistic (real life has tons of luck, lots of people die unpredictably, and passing on your genes is not a binary pass/fail, you can have a variable number of kids and give them a variable amount of assistance in getting started). And point 2 is vague but the simplest implementation I can think of is also highly unrealistic (choosing to interact with only your most trusted friend and avoid everyone else is a terrible strategy in real life for a whole bunch of reasons that you don't sound like you're attempting to model).
But feel free to code up your own simulation, maybe you'll discover something interesting!
> Also, like...you want tit-for-tat to be penalized for being complex relative to cooperate bot, but you also want friend-of-a-friend referrals? That's probably several orders of magnitude more complicated than tit-for-tat.
I don't think reasonable levels of complexity penalty would be giving cooperate-bot a noteworthy edge over tit-for-tat all by itself, no.
Point of a "choose who to interact with next" + "know how close you currently are to reproducing, or dying of starvation" mechanic would be opening up space for long-term ecosystem-management strategies, then the complexity penalty keeps those from escalating all the way into some cryptographic-handshake version of John Carpenter's The Thing. https://www.oglaf.com/kingshaped
> choosing to interact with only your most trusted friend and avoid everyone else is a terrible strategy in real life for a whole bunch of reasons
Well of course it's not that simple.
First, enforcer / shepherd builds a contact list of known cooperate-bots, and a separate list of reliable tit-for-tat strategists. To the extent it's allowed by the mechanics, all these are freely introduced to each other, encouraged to interact to mutual benefit, top priority being to link up cooperate-bots with other cooperate-bots.
When the enforcer encounters a defect-bot, or unknown and potentially troublesome strategy, it checks its own reserves. When healthy, it attacks the intruder. When reserves are low, it retreats, spins through the cooperate-bot contact list, hitting them with a "defect" once each to quickly recharge, then resumes the attack.
Distributing the load hopefully reduces the number of cooperate-bots which die as a result, thus keeping the overall herd's income / growth rate high. Sort of like a multicellular organism's immune system. Tit-for-tat contacts can't usefully be harvested that way, because they'll bite back.
It sounds like you're describing Nicky Case's "The Evolution of Trust ": https://ncase.me/trust/
Yes, thank you!
The bots could change strategies. It doesn't help. The more cooperative-bots you have, the more it boosts the ranking of bots that defect in the tournament.
Well I tried your suggestion, and it looks like it just makes Always Defect vastly more successful than usual, steamrolling everything else, more so the more rounds you do. I think the reason is that Always Defect always starts at an advantage, and the follower rule means others copy it, so it snowballs.
If you try to only help these who are "deserving", much of your movement's political effort will be spent on figuring out who is "deserving". You can very easily end up with a "the government can't give anything for free" effect.
That is Scotts's point IV.4, and probably a major reason for the early popularity. Christianity's answer of course is that nobody is "deserving" and so you should help anyone in need.
I think Christianity may have simply ‘gotten lucky’. It has the gospels for instance which no matter how untrue you think they may be, are very well-written supernatural narratives with a strong emotional throughline. Christianity also ‘got lucky’ with Emperor Constantine and with the early death of Julian the Apostate who could have strangled the religion in the crib. Perhaps if you ran the history of the late Roman Empire a hundred times you would only get Christianity once or twice.
I'm convinced that monotheism, as an idea, outcompetes polytheism. Especially among more educated types. Strict Roman polytheism was always going to be intellectually defeated to some extent -- in fact, Julian regarded it as defeated -- but there's a legitimate argument that another form of monotheism could have won in the West, if the cards had been dealt a little differently.
In my best understanding of it, Hinduism manages to blend strict polytheism for the less-educated or less-philosophical with monotheism, monism, etc. for the elites. Maybe the Roman religion could have developed this way (with various Neo-Platonist offshoots existing alongside the strict polytheists), but I tend to think the influence of Levantine monotheism, fairly easily accessible in the mass-produced Septuagint, always meant that the Neo-Platonists had a much tougher challenge than their monotheistically-inclined peers in India. And most of their philosophical developments came long after Christ. They were just too slow.
Christianity was able to build upon the OT and Jewish literature. It just had a lot more content than its competition, Greco-Roman, Levantine, and Persian. Which again, partly has to do with lead time, its first-mover advantage. This gave it a lot more substance, much more appearance of being a living and organic faith than something contrived by philosophers. I would argue that once Christianity rapidly won over the Gentile sympathizers to Judaism ("God-Fearers") in the decades after Jesus' death, it was heavily favored to become the monotheistic religion of the West.
In that case explain all the Catholic saints. There's nothing unstable about polytheism...or at least no more unstable than anything else. ISTM tribes often start with a monotheism, but acknowledge the god of their neighbors as "real but less important" as a political necessity. That's how the Greeks appear to have developed polytheism. (I'm no expert in the field, so before investing too much belief, ask one.) (OTOH, the actual origin of Greek religion is lost. The Titans were probably involved, and various gods that essentially survive just as names.)
Then as the state becomes more powerful and centralized, the god of the state (e.g. Jovis Pater) becomes more and more dominant. Until you essentially end up with one god and a bunch of subservient staff. Whether you call them gods or angels or saints doesn't really matter.
So I think "monotheism" is typically the worship of the centralized government (usually under thick layers of metaphor).
I’m only partway through it, but “The Ancient City” by Fustel de Coulanges presents a different origin story that appears compelling. Namely, the Indo-European religious system was originally primarily animistic. While major parts of nature, such as Jupiter/Zeus, literally “Sky Father”, had gods shared by everyone, these were of lesser importance compared to the household gods (called “lares” in Latin). These household gods were inherited by the male line of each family (i.e., all male descendants of a common ancestor, the females adopting their husband’s gods on marriage), and it was considered sacred to maintain the hearth for your household. Clans, tribes, and cities consisted of groupings of the respective lower levels, and each had a common god, but the gods of the lower levels continued to be worshipped. In particular, each city primarily worshipped its own god - there weren’t originally temples to Zeus or other cities’ gods in each Greek city-state, for example, at the founding.
This is as far as I’ve gotten. Later the book will discuss how this system broke down, but I’m guessing that it broke down as the Roman Empire grew to such a large scale that the city gods of Rome, for example, were not dear to newer populations, as well as the cultural interaction with gods from other regions. Rome tried to tie the empire together with emperor worship, following in the old style of household gods derived from ancestor worship, but since Rome had conquered all the territory, rather than resettle an empty empire with old Romans, this didn’t take (particularly since it tolerated the worship of other empires). In this environment, the philosophical idea of monotheism, which orginated as far back as Plato, became more compelling, particularly since the Jews and Christians were living examples of monotheistic religions. Towards the end of the empire, whenever you hear of pagan intellectuals or elites, they are almost always Neoplatonists, not worshipping the old gods (albeit perhaps not denying them). Christianity, in vanquishing Neoplatonism, took on many of its concepts and vocabulary (i.e., the terminology used to describe the Trinity in Greek). The founder of Neoplatonism is even said to have been a former Christian.
If you've already got a city, you're talking about a much later origin than I was considering. (Actually, saying it that way is assuming a much more homogeneous culture than was present. And perhaps the Athenians really are a relict of before the invasion of the Danaos. (see the Peloponnesian War) but most of the Greek cities weren't.
As far as the origins of religion is concerned, cities are a recent event. It's just that we have almost no evidence of the prior state...but lots of small tribes that swapped wives seems likely...and small means fewer than 50 families. Something that small can't support worship of multiple gods (that requires learning and cultural space).
Also, and IIUC, by the time you get to (the early days of) Rome, the Lares and Penates were, indeed, the most important for each family, but calling them gods may be a bit of an overstatement. They were a bit more than the Irish "goodfolk" were, but "household spirits" or "genus loci" is probably more accurate than gods. The gods (as normally used) are the spirits worshiped by a community. (E.g., we don't normally consider naiads or dryads to be gods.)
"Lots of small tribes that swapped wives" is a good description of some Amerindian groups, the Ingush till quite recently, and a few other groups scattered around the globe I can't think of at the moment.
Possibly not relevant; fun fact, I guess...?
Christianity and Neoplatonism did indeed engage in "memetic battle" with lots of cross-fertilization, as you say. Gnosticism, to the extent that it's a cromulent category, seems almost like a more-Grecified version of Christianity, or a more-Hebraicized version of Neoplatonism.
Well sure, but it's certainly more powerful when it's attatched to a religion. You can call your leader a god emperor even without religion, but people are going to realize that they're ultimately just human. Supernatural stuff is much harder to disprove, and you get to motivate your populace with the false hope of an afterlife.
Still, it is possible to get similar results with relatively secular systems, Japan being a great example.
I would posit that veneration of the saints and of Mary was a concession to simpler folk, and something that gained a life of its own over time, driven by folk practices. But intellectuals were generally less invested in it. Monotheism won out because it has more appeal to intellectuals: the idea of the Unmoved Mover. The reason Julian the Apostate was a monotheist had very little to do with the centralization of Roman state power (which had deteriorated quite a lot by his time), and everything to do with the fact that taking Homer literally was regarded as an embarrassment by intellectuals of all stripes by that time.
I think the term for the pre-polytheistic religion you're describing is "henotheism". It didn't outcompete polytheism among intellectuals because it hadn't claimed the philosophical high ground of monotheism, displaying no interest yet in the questions that monotheism answers more satisfactorily than polytheism. Instead, I would speculate that intellectuals of that time were inclined to go about and gather information about the different foreign gods and their associated mythologies.
Why do you think the intellectuals are the determining, or even an important, factor? From what I've read popular opinion and political advantage were much more significant.
Alright, but whose opinion? And why were the political winds swaying the way they were?
The opinions that are influential when a society mass-converts are only a small percentage of the total. Urbanites. The literate. Nobles. Government/military leaders and officials, courtiers. And even existing religious leaders themselves. This is a group that, as a whole, is far more educated and influenced by intellectual fashions than the large majority.
There was this famous story of a Saxon king’s conversion recorded by the Venerable Bede:
https://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com/2015/12/a-sparrows-flight-through-king-edwins.html?m=1
Now, did the Anglo-Saxons convert for the sake of political advantage? Of course. Though they also wavered. Whether this exact conversation happened or not, I think Bede recorded something real here: in deciding whether to adopt Christianity, the kings cared about what their most learned advisors thought was actually true. And Christianity, being more sophisticated than Germanic Paganism, and having more sophisticated answers to questions like “What happens when we die?”, led learned people to conclude it was likelier to be true.
In theory, maybe polytheism could have this sort of sophistication, but in practice it does not; instead, a monotheistic philosophy emerges within polytheism.
Gandhi for example was a Hindu monotheist.
More accurately he was his own man and could color himself with the colors of any religious doctrine as he interpreted it, but being born Hindu he generally publicly regarded himself as one.
But he was certainly, both publicly and privately monotheistic.
Once I mentioned Gandhi, I think it's important to remember that while Scott is looking at winning MEMES, you and I aren't just meme carriers, we are beings of flesh, blood, and brain. And as such we ought not forget that both Gandhi and Jesus (and I would like to add Socrates) were assassinated. Cooperate-Bot may keep your name around for a while but trust me, when Jesus was on the cross and his lungs collapsed he wasn't thinking about that at all. In fact he felt betrayed and regretted his path. My God! My God! Why have you betrayed me?!!!
Gandhi died quicker so he didn't get to finish the same sentence.
There's no such thing as Hinduism, it's a category for "all those colorful things people behind the Indus do" but you're right about lots of monotheism in there! I doubt that it's a class thing though. People just pick and choose among a million semi-contradictory ideas the ones that resonate with them, and whatever numbers of deities required. And there's weird shit like the story where Shiva tricks Vishnu by intercepting all the prayers to Vishnu and fulfilling them in his stead, so all those stupid Vishnu devotees are being tricked into worshipping the one true God who happens to be ours because we Shiva worshippers are the clever ones... innovative, but doesn't strike me as a particularly classy move.
That's a good line, about Hinduism, I'm not sure if you're borrowing it from somewhere else, but I think I'll borrow it too!
I think maybe it's too fuzzy to just call it "class". It's also sort of a personality marker. I'm inclined to compare strict polytheism to Young Earth Creationism. There are intellectuals who subscribe to YEC, there are people of wealth, but it still serves as a class marker.
Though I think the rest aligns with my broader point: being able to "pick and choose among a million semi-contradictory ideas" probably serves as insulation against mass conversion to the monotheistic faiths. Especially if those various ideas have had centuries to develop. The Romans were working on getting there but didn't have as much time as India did to build up a local immune system.
Neoplatonism is less polytheistic than it is monotheistic, to my mind. There was the One, which/who was ineffable; and the "gods" were more like reifications of some particular aspects of the One, or some clusters-of-interrelated-concepts.
Yes, I agree. Maybe read my original comment on Neoplatonism.
Can't
So another result of iterated Prisoner’s dilemma is that tit-for-tat isn’t a stable strategy. Once a population drives out defect strategies, then always cooperate can creep in, and nobody notices because there’s no defect strategies to punish them; but once enough always cooperate strategies creep in, then defect strategies can make a comeback, resulting in a cyclical churning of strategies. It might be the case that ratio of tit-for-tat, always cooperate, and defect strategies does turn out to be stable, but if that’s not the case, then it would model the rise and fall of cooperate communities pretty well, I think.
I'm not sure I follow. Do you have any real world examples of this cycle?
The strength of a given strategy can't always be determined in a vacuum, since the strength is often dependent on the frequency of the other strategies in a given environment (AKA the metagame). You can think of each strat as exploiting an ecological niche. E.g. if I'm in a rock-paper-scissors (RPS) tourney, and everyone around me is picking scissors 100% of the time, I can pick rock 100% of the time and get 1st place. In a more realistic scenario, players will reach an equilibrium where each "hand" is played roughly 33% of the time each.
In RPS, each hand is equally good, thus the game is said to be "intransitive". But in other games, there's often strategies that are "weakly dominant" (as opposed to strictly dominant). *Weakly* in the sense that the strongest strategy beats MOST other strategies, but not ALL other strategies. In such cases, the weakly dominant strategy will (usually) have the highest frequency, but it won't be literally 100%. (edit: in hindsight, I'm playing a bit fast and loose with the definition of "weakly dominant".)
You see this in competitive videogames and TCG's, where the metagame is often a grab-bag of strats that often reach a skewed equilibrium. E.g. maybe 60% of decks are a specific aggro-deck which is considered "strongest", but the aggro-deck is hard-countered by a specific mill-deck which shows up with 30% frequency, and the remaining 10% is miscellaneous. But then maybe someone discovers a better "strongest" deck, or a new set is rotated in, or a patch is dropped, and the whole meta gets reset and needs to be re-equilibrated.
As for the prisoner's dilemma, IIRC, the basic metagame is "coop > TFT; TFT > psychopathy; psychopathy > coop". I think there's various nuances to this though, depending on the specific assumptions of the scenario.
----
fun fact #1: when I was in middleschool, my class held a RPS tourney. Additionally: we had to balance on a piece of newspaper; and fold it in half when we lost a round; and when we fell off the newspaper square, we were eliminated. I won the tourney, purely with a strat of thinking two steps ahead. E.g. "if I played rock last, my opponent will counter me with paper next turn, therefore I'll choose scissors." The metagame at my middleschool was uhh... ... ... not very sophisticated. C.f. "The 2/3rds Game" [0].
fun fact #2: rationalist Zvi Mowshowitz was inducted into the MTG Hall of Fame in 2007. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guess_2/3_of_the_average
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zvi_Mowshowitz
Some background, courtesy of GPT:
An **Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS)** is a key concept in evolutionary game theory, introduced by John Maynard Smith and George Price. It describes a strategy that, once it is established in a population, cannot be invaded or replaced by an alternative strategy because it yields the highest fitness in its environment.
### Key Features of ESS:
1. **Stability Against Invasion**: If most members of a population adopt an ESS, no mutant strategy (a rare alternative strategy) can outperform it in terms of fitness. This means the ESS is resistant to evolutionary change.
2. **Nash Equilibrium**: An ESS is also a **Nash equilibrium** in the context of evolutionary dynamics. This means that, given the strategies of others in the population, no individual can do better by unilaterally switching to a different strategy.
3. **Adaptiveness**: ESS arises from natural selection. Strategies that maximize individual fitness in a particular environment are favored, and over time, a population gravitates toward an ESS.
---
### Formal Definition of ESS:
Let \( S \) be a strategy in a population. For \( S \) to be an ESS:
1. **Condition 1: Fitness Advantage Against Itself**
- The fitness of \( S \) against another individual playing \( S \) (\( W(S, S) \)) must be at least as high as the fitness of a mutant strategy \( T \) against \( S \) (\( W(T, S) \)):
\[
W(S, S) \geq W(T, S)
\]
2. **Condition 2: Fitness Against Mutants**
- If the first condition holds as an equality, \( S \) must outperform \( T \) when \( T \) interacts with itself:
\[
W(S, T) > W(T, T)
\]
This second condition ensures that \( S \) can resist invasion when both strategies are in competition.
---
### Examples of ESS:
1. **Hawk-Dove Game**:
- In a population of individuals competing over resources, two strategies exist:
- **Hawk**: Always fight for the resource.
- **Dove**: Avoid conflict and share or back off.
- Depending on the costs of fighting and the value of the resource, a mix of hawks and doves can form an ESS where neither pure hawk nor pure dove can invade successfully.
2. **Tit-for-Tat in Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma**:
- Tit-for-tat is considered an ESS in some environments because it cooperates with cooperators but punishes defectors, making it hard for defectors to invade.
3. **Sex Ratios in Population Genetics**:
- The 1:1 male-to-female ratio observed in many species is an ESS. If there are too many of one sex, individuals producing offspring of the rarer sex will have a fitness advantage.
---
### Why is ESS Important?
1. **Evolutionary Predictions**: ESS helps predict how certain behaviors or traits become dominant in a population over evolutionary time.
2. **Stability of Systems**: It explains why certain traits or strategies persist even when other theoretically viable alternatives exist.
3. **Real-World Applications**: ESS concepts are applied in biology (e.g., animal behavior), economics (e.g., market strategies), and social sciences (e.g., conflict resolution).
---
### Limitations of ESS:
- **Environmental Changes**: ESS assumes a stable environment. Changes in the environment can make an ESS unstable.
- **Dynamic Interactions**: It doesn’t account for the fact that populations might not always reach an ESS due to transient dynamics or ongoing mutation and selection.
- **Complexity of Strategies**: Real-world interactions often involve more complex strategies and payoffs than simple models assume.
---
In summary, an ESS is a strategy that is evolutionarily robust because it maximizes fitness and is resistant to being overtaken by alternative strategies. It provides a framework for understanding stable outcomes in the evolution of behaviors, traits, and populations.
Please don't post GPT output here.
Ok!
The cycle Thomas Courtney describes in iterated Prisoner's Dilemma models is an abstraction, but there are real-world scenarios that echo the rise and fall of cooperative communities and the cyclical nature of strategies in social and economic systems. Here are some examples:
### 1. **Historical Trade Networks**
- In historical trade systems, trust (analogous to "always cooperate") often allowed for mutual benefit and prosperity among trading partners.
- However, when trust became pervasive, some opportunistic actors (analogous to "defect") exploited it, such as through fraud or piracy.
- This led to the rise of enforcement mechanisms or punishments (analogous to "tit-for-tat") like naval patrols or trade embargos, which restored balance.
- Over time, the cycle could restart as cooperation re-established itself and opportunists found new ways to exploit the system.
---
### 2. **Online Communities and Moderation**
- In online platforms, communities often start with cooperative norms where users engage in good faith (like "always cooperate").
- Over time, if moderation is minimal (a lack of "tit-for-tat"), bad actors (trolls, spammers) may infiltrate, exploiting the cooperative environment.
- This leads to the introduction of stricter rules and active moderation (analogous to "tit-for-tat"), which curtails exploitation but might discourage overly cooperative or lenient users.
- If moderation eases again, the cycle can repeat.
---
### 3. **Resource Management and Environmental Conservation**
- Cooperative communities might emerge to manage shared resources (e.g., fisheries, forests) sustainably.
- Over time, some individuals or groups might overexploit these resources (defecting behavior), undermining the system.
- Regulations or communal enforcement (tit-for-tat) are introduced to prevent overexploitation.
- If enforcement relaxes and trust becomes pervasive, overexploitation may re-emerge, completing the cycle.
---
### 4. **Economic Boom and Bust Cycles**
- In cooperative economic systems, trust and shared goals can lead to prosperity.
- Opportunists or bad actors may arise during prosperous times, creating speculative bubbles or exploiting loopholes (analogous to "defect").
- A bust follows, leading to stricter regulations or enforcement (tit-for-tat) to stabilize the economy.
- Once stability returns, the process may restart as trust and cooperation grow unchecked.
---
### 5. **Political Alliances**
- In politics, cooperative alliances between nations or groups (like "always cooperate") often lead to mutual benefit.
- Opportunistic leaders or factions might exploit these alliances for selfish gain (defect).
- This prompts retaliation or restructuring of alliances (tit-for-tat).
- Once stability is achieved, cooperation might re-emerge, starting the cycle anew.
---
### Broader Implications:
These cycles often reflect the dynamic tension between trust, exploitation, and enforcement in human systems. While they don't map perfectly onto the exact strategies of the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, they demonstrate how the rise and fall of cooperative behaviors can manifest in complex systems.
I think the best example of this “behavior” is the predator/prey equilibrium in nature.
Too many predators and they eat all the prey and starve out themselves. Too many prey and any one predator feasts and reproduces. There’s simulations of this (3blue1brown) as well as real world examples.
That cycle you describe sounds a lot like Tit-For-Tat in the aggregate.
Any strategy becomes unstable if people expect it and adapt to it. Veritasium has a nice video about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM&t=0s. Scott's own Meditations on Moloch can show examples of this cycle. The early Christian strategy was so unexpected, which is part of why it worked in that context at the time.
By the way, in the Veritasium video, at the end, he points out that Tit-for-Tat isn't the optimal strategy in a world with messy/lossy information. For example, if you wrongly think that someone defected when they cooperated once in a while. In that scenario, the best strategy is to add a little forgiveness to your tit-for tat...because otherwise you would get stuck in a loop of never forgiving and cooperating.
Yes, but it explains how you could, for example, see a huge bloom of COOPERATE in one place for a period of time, before returning to mostly TFT.
Tit-For-Tat With Forgiveness And Cheekiness?
Normally play tit-for-tat, but sometimes randomly start defecting (at rate lower than forgiving) and keep it up until you're counterdefected, then immediately play cooperate (contrition) and reset to start?
Yup, exactly. TFT winning that contest doesn't mean nothing else can ever succeed anywhere, game theory models like this depend a lot on initial populations and COOPERATE BOT can invade many possible starting conditions, including a world that's overwhelmingly TFT already.
Cooperate-bot doesn't *beat* tit-for-tat in a population of all tit-for-tat, it just ties it. And it ties it by behaving literally identically in all of the situations it actually encounters.
It's true that a combination of only cooperate-bot and tit-for-tat has no selective pressure to actively drive cooperate-bot to zero, but it has no selective pressure to encourage it, either.
That’s not entirely clear - if implementing TFT is more expensive than Cooperate-bot, then the simpler strategy can use the saved resources for something else. If the environment is right for that, it’ll be an improvement.
Very important thought, the computation of the strategy has cost and thus the strategies can not become too galaxy brained or they face a too large penalty for computing them.
The three-way cyclical mechanics you're describing is similar to the one proposed by Peter Turchin - and the effect can arguably be observed in real-world data.
The twist being, of course, that his model goes the other way around. Most people start as "naives" (roughly matching tit-for-tat) who can be persuaded into joining "radicals" (roughly matching defectors), then the damage caused by radicals pushes people into "moderate" camp (roughly matching cooperation, although obviously not the naive "always cooperate" version, but a meta "insist everyone always cooperate" one).
I think what the prisoner dillema-based models of behavior in general, and Scott in his theorizing in particular, are missing is - to use the simplest term possible - society. We not only cooperate (and yes, we arguably cooperate naturally and innately, it's obvious how when you remember evolution operates on the level of genes, cooperative genes can thrive even if they kill some of their adherents). We also observe our surroundings, reason about them, and communicate with others. And cooperation... cooperation helps everyone, it's obvious it does once you take an eagle-eye view. Even if few individuals can live up to the always-cooperate ideal, almost everyone can agree it's the kind of society they'd want to live in. The crucial Christian invention might have been simply "anyone and everyone can join ours".
This sounds like the Mormon pride cycle
I think there is a major advantage in a cooperate-bot society which game theory misses because it tends to ignore the cost of computation:
"Defect against people who defect against a cooperate-bot" is a very cheap and effective strategy which, under conditions in which cooperate-bots are a minority, does incredibly well. It's much cheaper than strategies which require identifying who would defect against you, personally.
I'm confused, and therefore probably misunderstanding something significant, but it's not like TIT-FOR-TAT was a strategy that was available to the early Christians. If Rome decided to persecute them, the Christians just had to take it. They couldn't punish the emperor.
Within their group, within the Christian churches, a high value could be placed on cooperation, but the early Christians did have the power to punish those who weren't playing by the rules. An early controversy, which the Apostles resolved by creating a governing council, involved whether Gentile widows were getting fair shares of the food distribution.(Acts 6). A good chunk of the Epistles involves Paul resolving an internal dispute one way or another. And while forgiveness was always available for sins, there was a public penance component (unlike the strictly confidential confessions that develop centuries later). Within the Christian community itself there was a modified TIT FOR TAT where everyone was encouraged to forgive and forgiveness was available but the community didn't let bad actors just walk all over them.
I don't think the relative power level is really an issue here - Christians could still have defected within their means. For example, the anecdote about Polycarp cooking a meal for his torturers. His form of defection would simply be to not cook a meal for his torturers. Or call them assholes instead of praying for them.
But would that be defection? I don't think you can map the early Christians' actions to a clean cooperate / defect decision. His torturers would have expected him to react negatively towards them - by refusing to play his role in the process he was not cooperating, he was modeling his faith to potentially convert the torturers and other witnesses. That doesn't read like cooperation to me.
The whole reason he, or the other Christians, was even being tortured was because he refused to cooperate with the dominant civil religion and make even token gestures towards the emperor. Cooperating with his faith, sure, but you can as easily label that as defection towards society.
Reality is complex.
I'll admit, if someone were to torture me the same way you torture these concepts, I'd confess to anything and its opposite.
In what way am I torturing them? Defect/cooperate aren't synonyms for naughty/nice. From the Roman State's perspective the Christians were explicitly defecting against their religious and social obligations. Hence the torture and execution. Not expressing remorse during their punishment and explicitly using it as an opportunity to proselytize was continuing to defect.
If someone has a sincerely held belief that they shouldn't pay taxes and the government doesn't recognize their objection but instead throws them in prison, that person has still defected from the government's perspective even if they write their jailers thank you notes.
The whole point of the post was about early Christians cooperating with/defecting against their real non-Christian neighbors, not their perceived role which would yield the opposite result. So yes, I believe you are overthinking it and in this case it's indeed about being naughty or nice.
This situation does not map to the classic example. TK's attempt to find a close mapping is as good as any. No need to be snappy about it.
Sadly, this place isn't too far off the internet average: everybody wants to play at being Mac McClung even if they can't touch the rim.
And to be clear, I'm not suggesting that there is a close or proper mapping. A paradigm based on two perfectly symmetrical agents with a single unit of value they both precisely agree on who have only two well-defined and perfectly understood, perfectly priced, and self-contained options simply does not have much meaning outside the Toyland in which it operates.
Did Polycarp play cooperate with his torturers? He gave them some food - that's good - but the Romans weren't at a loss for hot meals and he completely subverted the purpose of his execution - that's bad.
This is a society where a renowned general cut the hands off surrendered enemies to prevent trouble and ceremonially strangled prisoners after parading them in front of the rabble. Cursing at them would not hurt them in the slightest and would help them achieve their public purpose in the execution. They could have enslaved him as a short order cook if they wanted food but they did not. They wanted the behavior to stop and instead got more of it - an effect the Christians were well aware of and encouraged, and even Scott a couple millennia-ish later finds notable. Is cooperate the right word for his choices?
Would Bull Connor and MLK both describe MLK as an all-caps COOPERATE-BOT towards the Birmingham city government? No real way to know but I suspect we'd see eyebrow raising if we could ask them. Did Gandhi COOPERATE-BOT his way through the British Raj? Etc. and so forth.
To ask the question is to commit a category error.
Assigning roles to real choices by real people in this model tends to devolve into who the labeler prefers. It's all relative to perspective. If none of (buyer's choice) the accidents of history / Christianity's mimetic fitness / infallible guidance by the Holy Spirit for the salvation of our souls through Son of God and Almighty Jesus Christ had happened then it's unlikely we'd view the early Christians - if we remembered them at all - as anything but defectors.
Yours and some other comments really make me stay up at night and read every comment here. Some very good additional inputs, which I have not thought about, but which are formulated very clearly and are thought inspiring. Thank you :)
As Satco said, a very good post.
Mark 6:11; "And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, shake the dust off your feet when you leave, as a testimony against them."
And the angel of the Lord said unto him, Wherefore hast thou smitten thine ass these three times? behold, I went out to withstand thee, because thy way is perverse before me
The bible can be funny like that.
That's a decent segueway into a recent Church comment. The speaker had been asked about the proper response to when someone dedicated themselves to a Christian's undoing. They replied there were two responses: you either pray for them, because they're in God's way and He's going to get them out of it; or you thank them, because you're off God's path and they're there to push you back onto it.
So, don't try to punish the donkey, God will deal with it as is fitting.
The powerless can defect by taking to the hills and ceasing to pay taxes.
Like #3, but at a tactical game theory level: overwhelm the downward adjustment of individual morality.
The default human experience without Christianity has been "say that tit-for-tat is a fair moral compass" (e.g. traditional "eye for an eye" morality) but then people backslide into more DEFECTions when they're in large social groups that aren't clean iterated prisoner dilemmas.
Christianity over-indexes on cooperation, but what that means for the rank and file is that they average out to something pretty close to ideal tit-for-tat, and then the community grows. Non-Christians realize that if Christian leaders act like saints, then every-day Christians are at least fair folks to deal with, so they can get on board with some tit-for-tat too with less backsliding.
Fascinating article, coming off on your previous one on how Christianity became such a force. Interesting also that you participate in effective altruism unless I misunderstood that ... SBF ended up in huge trouble but is/was he really a sincere effective altruist?
It's inevitable that movements like EA will attract some people who believe that the ends justify the means. The problem with SBF wasn't his motives, it's that he was a moron.
Unrelated, but it's seemed rather obvious to me for several years now that TIT-FOR-TAT is the strategy that Trump uses for, well almost anything.
Strong disagree. Trump frequently is the first to defect. See, for instance, the documented instances of his stiffing contractors.
Tat unless tit, with unusually powerful tits?
Admittedly, I know almost nothing about his business dealings. I was thinking about his politics and especially his relationships with foreign leaders.
Even so, his usual strategy is stick first, maybe carrot later if you grovel enough. Unless you're a despotic leader, then it's saluting your generals on state visit and love letters.
Yeah. No matter what he might say on TV about your wife's vagina everybody seems to understand that "it's just business/politics", not personal. So when he wins they have no problem coming around at which point Trump will praise them.
Anyone in the way of something he wants is considered by him to have engaged their tit, so he tats. But when they come around he is quick to forgive and forget.
Ditto in the opposite direction. He may praise you to the skies when he hires or appoints you but the moment you exhibit any sense of self and don't do what he wants with alacrity he'll say you were always terrible and a loser.
He doesn't employ a strategy, he's just honest about the fact that he has no god but himself.
I wrote more about it here.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/unrestrained
I think this is somewhat true, but he has a very expansive definition of defect that includes almost anything that is bad for him, even if the person/group that "defects" against him is acting perfectly reasonable or normal.
Examples include: Trump calling BLS job statistics fake, his fights with the Fed for raising interest rates, and his constant claims of election fraud (which includes not just 2020, but 2016 due to losing the popular vote, the 2016 Iowa caucus, and 2012, when the candidate he endorsed lost).
He also seems to fundamentally view the world in a zero-sum way which results in him seeing defections everywhere. This leads him to think for example that the fact we have a trade deficit means other countries are screwing us over.
But he can absolutely afford to do that, considering that he won the popular vote despite, well, everything.
"Maybe people are actually good: Maybe the liberals are right about everything, and most human evil comes from misunderstanding + a sense of being excluded." Or a mistake, or deception, or desperation, or a bad day, but the basic takeaway that there is positive value to be mined by forgiving people who have done bad things.
I also think that "join a cult, planning to exploit its cooperate-bot" often results in passionate true-believing cult members?
Was Emperor Constantine a COOPERATE BOT? The answer is no, doesn’t that annihilate your argument here?
I think the question is how Christianity survived long enough for Constantine to enter the picture.
The answer is that Christians at the time and later massively exaggerated how dangerous it was to be a Christian. Persecutions were sporadic, subject to local desire to persecute and easy to subvert by going underground or bribery. There was so much unfulfilled desire for martyrdom that Christians had to be actively banned by their leadership from seeking death at the hands of mostly indifferent administrators. This contrasts with the vigerous later Christian persecution of Hellenes which mostly resulted in a lot of crypto-Pagan “Christians”.
oo, but this begets an even spicier question: from whence the enthusiasm for martyrdom?
The same place all desire originates from, belief in a reward. Christianity read plainly prizes death and scorns life, it cuts one off from most of the pleasures and enjoins pain. Who wouldn’t want the easy way out of that?
I'm reminded of a theory (don't remember where) that the Aztec's human-sacrifices evolved out the generalization from "planting corn -> more corn" to "sacrifice the short-term -> reap long-term benefits". I wonder if there's some girardian lesson here.
Personally, I can easily imagine someone being *willing* to die for a cause. But I have a much harder time imagining someone who's *enthused*, even if 72 virgins await or it makes the corn grow. And I'm not even that bullish about material reality.
I mean, the commandment isn't "Cooperate with your neighbor to the greater benefit of you both," it's "Love your neighbor as you love yourself." The actual loving and self-identification is a big part of it. If I sacrifice myself for any old loser, it's my loss and their win. If I sacrifice myself for my beloved child, it's my win, too. If everyone's my beloved, I can't lose! You're talking strategies, but Christianity moved the goalposts.
Not really, they just changed the rationalization. They're still just strategies in practice.
In what ways do you think the objectives of the types of games Scott is describing map to the objectives of early Christians?
Because it seems to me there's an unbridgeable qualitative difference in objectives here that preempts comparing strategies.
The "objective" of any religion is to survive and spread. Otherwise they wouldn't exist now. Its adherenets don't need to be conscious of that objective; after all, unintelligent animals survive and procreate just fine without knowing the nature of their existence. But the ones that are most fit are naturally more likely to survive, and that applies to both life and religion.
That's pretty tautological right there. But suffice to say, I'm using “objective” in the sense of conscious intention--consciously having a goal, and then consciously seeking the best strategy to achieve that goal. Scott's evaluating early Christianity as a strategy for survival; I'm observing that this was rather explicitly not their objective--seems like they rather went out of their way to denounce that objective, actually.
A) a lot of religions aren't here now.
B) something can be achieved as a side effect of an objective.
> a lot of religions aren't here now
Yes, and they were failures. We're discussing why Christianity is successful, and "successful" in this context means "survived, reproduced, and secured power."
And in such discussion, it seems worth emphasizing that they did so while explicitly denouncing survival, reproduction and power as objectives, and in fact striving for almost the exact opposite of that notion of success.
It might be possible to understand why they met with such success. But it might not be possible to understand it as a strategy for achieving such success--they certainly weren't understanding it that way.
Your original claim was that survival was the only objective.
Indeed.
I lived that way for a while (loving everybody) and therefore engaging most of my time in helping those who needed it most - people dying all alone in a dingy hospice https://youtu.be/j8Dk2vzAsYw and I was truly happy because anyone else's happiness made me happy too, but living that way when you're the only one doing so is a recipe for, well, dying on a cross.
I talked about it here, in reference to the pyramids behind me.
https://youtu.be/h-BOkIuOKCA
Goodness on its own is in fact its own reward. And thank god for that! because you won't be getting any other.
"...doing so is a recipe for, well, dying on a cross."
Lol yes!!! Took me decades to really grok this, an ego-shattering moment for a Good Christian Boy when I had to admit to myself that I ain't no Jesus, that's for sure! And Christian scripture ain't shy about it, either...it's centuries of theologians that have sanded it down into something survivable.
But it's worth respecting what a huge shift in religion this was for the time and place, when worship was much more transactional, e.g. make a sacrifice so the crops grow good. It's not wholly unique in this regard, but it does deserve a lot of credit for our ability as conscious beings to recognize and pursue objectives better than (even at odds with) survival and dominance. To this day, that contrasts with plenty of belief systems, both religious and (cough) secular.
Yes!
Also, it's important to remember that the Judaism of Jesus is straight out of Isaiah, specifically Isaiah chapter 58.
I read and explained that chapter here:
https://youtu.be/7jesi_6VDOc
It wasn't a "new" religion per se but a clarified version if Judaism that had gotten lost among the populace.
It continued among Jews (albeit with clearer rules and instructions), such as in the following section by Maimonides (Rambam, Abu Imran Musa bin Maimon ibn Abdullah):
https://youtu.be/gp53ggoLsaY?feature=shared
But the fact is that it only actually works to keep the selfless altruistic person alive and active if it is the value of society in general. Done on your own is - very unfortunately - fulfilling only for as long as you have food and shelter, which, in a transactional society won't be very long.
Also I'd be remiss to not plug "Messiah Complex Blues" here: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=QUPLWcXTcec&si=nf5-PraAvJO6zjWH
Nitpick: The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny is actually from 2005.
I think people tend to miscalculate and be biased in a way that it's hard for them to perform an optimal "tit for tat with forgiveness" strategy. They interpret events as they already tried forgiveness and it didn't work and it's all the other guys' fault and so I'm morally correct to just defect. Whereas if you tell them to just always forgive, in practice you might get something closer to the optimal "tit for tat with forgiveness" strategy. We clearly don't live in a world where most Christians are playing like a cooperate bot. I suspect that there's never been a time in history when most have. But I think by elevating those stories in Christian Mythology and culture, and telling everyone to always turn the other cheek, you're more likely to get outcomes closer to optimal game theory after accounting for fundamental attribution errors and other human bias against others.
I think this is a really good point. Very persuaded by this.
> They were persecuted by the British and fled to America (is this kosher? it sort of seems like resisting evil). There they founded the colony of Pennsylvania,
Penn bought the land from Charles II in exchange for debts Charles had owed his father. They rendered unto Caesar, and did not resist Caesar's secular laws, as Jesus had taught.
Part of the humour in "Moby Dick" at the start is that the people who own and are fitting out the whaling ship that Ahab captains are Quakers:
"Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a Quaker, the island having been originally settled by that sect; and to this day its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure the peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified by things altogether alien and heterogeneous. For some of these same Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters. They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.
So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with Scripture names—a singularly common fashion on the island—and in childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unoutgrown peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman. And when these things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain and a ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness and seclusion of many long night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath constellations never seen here at the north, been led to think untraditionally and independently; receiving all nature’s sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin voluntary and confiding breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from accidental advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty language—that man makes one in a whole nation’s census—a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies. Nor will it at all detract from him, dramatically regarded, if either by birth or other circumstances, he have what seems a half wilful overruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature. For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease. But, as yet we have not to do with such an one, but with quite another; and still a man, who, if indeed peculiar, it only results again from another phase of the Quaker, modified by individual circumstances.
Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman. But unlike Captain Peleg—who cared not a rush for what are called serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious things the veriest of all trifles—Captain Bildad had not only been originally educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism, but all his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many unclad, lovely island creatures, round the Horn—all that had not moved this native born Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle of his vest. Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of common consistency about worthy Captain Bildad. Though refusing, from conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative evening of his days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man’s religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another. This world pays dividends. Rising from a little cabin-boy in short clothes of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a broad shad-bellied waistcoat; from that becoming boat-header, chief-mate, and captain, and finally a ship owner; Bildad, as I hinted before, had concluded his adventurous career by wholly retiring from active life at the goodly age of sixty, and dedicating his remaining days to the quiet receiving of his well-earned income.
Now, Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of being an incorrigible old hunks, and in his sea-going days, a bitter, hard task-master. They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a curious story, that when he sailed the old Categut whaleman, his crew, upon arriving home, were mostly all carried ashore to the hospital, sore exhausted and worn out. For a pious man, especially for a Quaker, he was certainly rather hard-hearted, to say the least. He never used to swear, though, at his men, they said; but somehow he got an inordinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work out of them. When Bildad was a chief-mate, to have his drab-coloured eye intently looking at you, made you feel completely nervous, till you could clutch something—a hammer or a marling-spike, and go to work like mad, at something or other, never mind what. Indolence and idleness perished before him. His own person was the exact embodiment of his utilitarian character. On his long, gaunt body, he carried no spare flesh, no superfluous beard, his chin having a soft, economical nap to it, like the worn nap of his broad-brimmed hat."
Signal boosting the Quaker section in Scott's prior review of Albion's Seed:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/
> It occurs to me that William Penn might be literally the single most successful person in history. He started out as a minor noble following a religious sect that everybody despised and managed to export its principles to Pennsylvania where they flourished and multiplied. Pennsylvania then managed to export its principles to the United States, and the United States exported them to the world. I’m not sure how much of the suspiciously Quaker character of modern society is a direct result of William Penn, but he was in one heck of a right place at one heck of a right time.
Maybe the Quakers have faded in the past couple centuries, but maybe they just became the water we swim in. Not a bad record, all told!
Not really the metric, ha. But for what it's worth, I'd argue that modern society is also on the dissident side of modern society.
I'll say it aloud. U.S. memetic evolution:
-- Progressivism descended from the Puritans;
-- Liberalism descended from the Quakers;
-- Conservativism descended from the Cavaliers;
-- Anarcho-Libertarianism descended from the Border-Reavers.
Yes, the cultures changed quite a bit over time. Simultaneously, it's not like the U.S.'s big 4 ideologies sprung from the aether yesterday. Pop quiz. When George Bush Jr. invaded Iraq, he did so in the name of:
A) progressive democracy
B) liberal democracy
C) conservative democracy
D) libertarian democracy
> the suspiciously Quaker character of modern society
What are you talking about?
I hid breadcrumbs in my post that the canny reader can follow to a longer, secret treatment of the subject.
I saw the link, thank you. My point is that seems the relevant aspects of Quakerism to THIS post would be their pacifism and not, for example, their bureaucratic marriage customs.
"If this pacifism strategy is so successful, and the Quakers embraced it to an unusual degree, why didn't it work out for the Quakers?" as posed in this post is significantly blunted by "the Quakers had an outsized philosophical impact in their host nation, and in turn left an enduring dent in the global international order" as described in the linked.
If we want to dig in from there to why the Quakers largely failed specifically at self-perpetuation as compared against early Christianity, I think there's more than enough obvious differences in other aspects of the relative communities to explain that outcome without necessarily ascribing every difference to the one thing we happen to be looking at at the moment!
I’d say the early Christians DID fail at self-perpetuation in much the same way as the Quakers did. You think any of the early martyrs would look at any of the modern socially dominant/successful Christianities and say “I recognize these groups as my progeny”.
They’d definitely be able to recognize their “outsized philosophical impact”on the whole western world though.
>You think any of the early martyrs would look at any of the modern socially dominant/successful Christianities and say “I recognize these groups as my progeny”.
Yes. Read Revelation 2-3.
The taxonomic question of what does and doesn't count as a Christian is a... historically spicy one, to put it mildly. My sticking point with most models of memetic evolution (esp. cultural) is that there's no good candidate for a discretized 'idea'; I'd like a more generalizable system before coming to strong outside view conclusion.
Regarding free speech, "Free Speech" by Jacob Mchangama is a thorough history of the concept and how it has actually been implemented (or not). The short version is that your pure description of free speech has almost never existed anywhere -- someone was always coming up with and enforcing exceptions.
At Yom Kippur this year I arrived uncharacteristically early and so had time to read the personal meditations at the beginning of the prayer book, and I nearly laughed out loud at this part (from Tefillah Zakah, emphasis added):
"I forgive with complete forgiveness everyone who has sinned against me, whether my body or my possessions, or gossiped about me or even slandered against me. I forgive anyone who damaged my person or possessions, and for all sins between a person and their fellow
**except for money which I can claim in a court of law and except for someone who sins against me and said: 'I will sin against them and they will forgive me'. Except for these,**
I forgive with complete forgiveness and no person should be punished because of me. Just as I forgive everyone, so should You grant me favor in the eyes of everyone so that they completely forgive me."
It's just such a glaring deviation from turning the other cheek, and just as clearly there so that defectors won't totally ruin attempts at cooperation. Judaism: "we live in a society" since 4000 years ago.
"except for someone who sins against me and said: 'I will sin against them and they will forgive me'."
This is also the principle in confession/sacrament of penance/reconciliation: you can't go out, commit a sin or sins, and go "that's okay, I'll be forgiven once I go to confession". Doesn't work that way.
Human nature is why we developed moral theology over the centuries, because people still keep trying DEFECT-BOT despite everything 😀
"Epiphenomenal: COOPERATE-BOT isn’t really a good strategy, but is an unavoidable side effect of something else valuable. For example, maybe you couldn’t have Christians who loved God so much without having them be extremely loving and charitable people. The most dramatic version of this hypothesis is that God is real, and loving thy enemy is an epiphenomenon of following the actual Divine Law."
Anecdotes are not data, but all I can give you is an example from my own life. I'm not naturally kind and sweet and charitable (you don't say, Deiseach!) and quite often my natural reaction to things is "I want to boil this son-of-a-bitch in oil".
But then I remember the inconvenient damn part: I have a religion. I believe that religion. And the founder of that religion tells me that part in Matthew as quoted above:
"43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47 And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."
Hell and damnation. I don't want to be nice/forgiving, it goes against my character, but I have to do it because do I believe my religion? yes? well then!
Matthew 5 is the chapter of the Sermon on the Mount, and it has lots of very easily followed (ahem) advice (by the way, this is also why I laugh when people like to go "but aren't you Christians supposed to be loving?" because of the impression they'd picked up about the Sermon on the Mount: oh yeah, right. Read on, my friend):
"17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19 Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.
21 “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ 22 But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.
23 “Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, 24 leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift.
25 “Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still together on the way, or your adversary may hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown into prison. 26 Truly I tell you, you will not get out until you have paid the last penny.
27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery. 28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell."
Lot there about hell for "all Christianity is about is niceness" 😁
Sometimes I do wonder how many people would just go out and start murdering others if it wasn't for their religion. I'm sure it's not a huge number, but they're definitely out there.
There are many people who would just go out and start murdering others *because* of their religion. See all of Christian history until the Enlightenment curtailed the power of Christianity, and all Islamic history, including the modern day.
Sure, but at least those people waited until they had an excuse to murder in service of their own society. The question is, would they have murdered their own if they weren't religious? Because that's obviously bad for social stability.
I was gonna say... Speaking of Nietzsche, section 15 of the first part of Genealogy of Morals is a fun ride. He quotes Tertullian (160-240 CE), who argued that Christians shouldn't participate in public displays of violence because "faith offers us much more":
"think what awaits us on the day of his second coming, of his triumph!...What an ample breadth of sights there will be then! At which one shall I gaze in wonder? At which shall I laugh? At which rejoice? At which exult, when I see so many great kings who were proclaimed to have been taken up into heaven, groaning in the deepest darkness together with those who claimed to have witnessed their apotheosis and with Jove himself. And when I see those [provincial] governors, persecutors of the Lord’s name, melting in flames more savage than those with which they insolently raged against Christians!...then the tragic actors will be easier to hear because they will be in better voice [i.e. screaming even louder] in their own tragedy. Then the actors of pantomime will be easy to recognize, being much more nimble than usual because of the fire... ’What praetor or consul or quaestor or priest will grant you from his largesse the chance of seeing and exulting in such things? And yet to some extent we have such things already through faith, made present in the imagining spirit. Furthermore what sorts of things are those which the eye has not seen nor the ear heard, and which have not come into the human heart? (1. Cor. 2, 9) I believe that they are more pleasing than the circus or both of the enclosures [first and fourth rank of seats, or, according to others, the comic and the tragic stages] or than any race-track.’"
Pretty tough to reconcile this exulting at the eternal torture of others with Scott's characterization of early Christians' almost supernaturally universalistic morality.
(And on a personal note, the very concept of hell - a place of eternal torture - has always struck me as such a horrific and cruel concept that I could never entertain the possibility of becoming a Christian. Who wants to live in a universe with a literal hell in it? And I understand that there may be more nuanced understandings of the nature of hell... but still. Tertullian, for one, paints a pretty vivid picture.)
Personal comment - being mean sucks. Maybe the opposite is awesome?
This is true even if the person really really deserves it. I won't get into the specifics, but whenever I've been really angry, even in response to severe abuse (no, not sharing the details, but enough to cause my health to break down repeatedly), when I have even resorted to harsh words - it has sucked. The next day I had a feeling like the worst hangover.
Does this scale? It seems so. I've seen some very interesting testimony ("On Killing" by Dave Grossman) that even those who kill in pure self defence end up with the most appalling trauma.
I also have had the experience of forgiving my abuser and feeling the biggest relief imaginable. Of course, they just kept it up - but it was way more bearable. Maybe forgiveness evolved into a kind of hidden Christian superpower? If you are able to forgive even those torturing you to death - _really_ forgive them - your brain releases the equivalent of a massive dose of morphine which seems like a really good strategy for when you are being tortured to death. We know many people are willing to become poor and destitute through addiction to substances - could they become the same through an addiction to forgiveness? Same mechanism, except 1000x more noble.
If you are that same person who wrote that antiracism manifesto many years ago, thank you. Rarely does a month go by when I don't think about it.
That’s awfully kind of you. Many thanks! :) Yes, I am the author of that piece.
It's kind and true.
You first exposed me to the point that my ancestors were low-IQ, incestuous, and drunk most of the time. When I read this, I was an Ayn Rand devotee, but I was dangerously down the pipeline of being radicalized to something more hateful.
Your one post blew me away, introduced me to writers I had never heard of before. It legitimately changed my life. Thank you.
Well, Ayn Rand's essay against Racism is one of the finest ever written, and her philosophy is the best protection against it :)
To take one example: let's say everything about IQ differences between Europeans and Africans is 100% true and 100% genetic. So what? This still wouldn't sanction the horrors of racism. Why? Well, close to my home there is a community of people who are definitely low IQ and mentally deficient. It's a home for the mentally disabled. They are _definitely_ less able than you or I. That doesn't mean they are not entitled to dignity, and it doesn't excuse us from the moral obligation of justice and consequent kindness and compassion.
Link please?
https://skepticink.com/prussian/2014/03/31/the-anti-racialist-q-a/
I second this. It's one of the best essays out there.
Many thanks!
FOLLOW UP EXPERIMENT: highly unscientific but still. Currently sick and feverish, with aches across all my legs. I was lying down and feeling frustrated/angry at the pain, when I thought of all this. So I decided to draw the aches fully into consciousness, and instead of getting mad or frustrated, tried to "forgive" it, and even try to radiate peace and love towards it ("The pain is my body dealing with infection, it is trying to keep me safe etc...)
(some may recognise this as the Buddhist practice of _metta_)
And the pain actually decreased and even vanished and I started feeling really good. So... maybe it does work. The catch though is that it has to be sincere - when I was going "Yes, I forgive you pain, so will you please go away?" it actually got worse XD
Make of that what you will.
FOLLOW UP OBSERVATION: I also suspect that _being forgiven_ feels great. I've listened to a lot of conversion stories, and one thing they often, or nearly always say, is that they felt the power of mercy and forgiveness pour through them. I've heard this from Christian converts (of course), but also Muslim converts taking their Shahada. And Buddhists have turned this into a science.
It's really not surprising that this becomes a major driving force behind conversion.
(N.B.: Yes, still an atheist - but psychological phenomena are real and worth studying)
My wife gave me a test when we first met. She asked me if I had ever got revenge on anyone, in a tone of voice that made it seem like she would relish the answer. I told her, nope, sorry, even for people I hated, people who fucked me over, I have no interest in revenge. I passed the test.
It really is a better way of life, and now we get to live that together.
The martyr strategy never became widespread. When we talk about how Christianity spread we mean admiration for the martyrs' values and expressive adhrence to them. Which, from a game-theoretic point of view, also makes sense - it is always better to appear as someone who will always cooperate, particularly if detecting instances of defection is not as clear as in Axelrod's simulation.
I don't want to take anything away from the early Christian's altruism and openness, but the Bible is not without a nod to the expanding circles of obligations, for example:
"But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever."
"So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith."
Certainly they were exposed to defect bots in being forgiving to a (seeming) fault, but if it was nonetheless more cooperative within the body (because real life isn't a binary), then it might have an advantage over a pool of defect or perhaps even tit-for-tat bots elsewhere.
See also 2 Thessalonians 3:10, a direct prohibition against the toleration of free-riders.
Thanks, right.
> But this story sounds more worthy of the mystery cults.
This is something that isn't very well understood: early Christianity was very much "a mystery cult" as described here. The mysteries involved the teachings referred to but glossed over in a few words in Acts 1:3, where the resurrected Christ taught his disciples — taught them what? It's never explained! — for 40 days before they began their ministry. Early Christians held these 40-day teachings to be sacred things not to be shared with the uninitiated. This, of course, gave rise to a large body of apocryphal works claiming to be the authentic 40-day teachings, and played a large role in the rise of Gnosticism, with heretical Christians drawing on Greek philosophy to fill the void.
> [The Quakers] were persecuted by the British and fled to America (is this kosher? it sort of seems like resisting evil).
"Resist" in this context means to fight back. Fleeing into the wilderness to avoid persecution, on the other hand, is a time-honored Judeo-Christian tradition, and was even directly commanded by Jesus in Mathew chapter 24 to avoid the upcoming destruction of Jerusalem. Historians record that they took this advice to heart: when the Romans finally came for the Jews in 70 AD, the Christians fled so effectively that, reportedly, not a single one of them was killed by the Romans.
Ignoring the very beginning of it, Maybe just enough Christians do play tit for that, while most of them play cooperate bot, they can fend off trouble makers while the cooperate bots ensure a mostly Christian society will be so productive and harmonious it will pay off memetically and economically. Kind of like your body's cells. Most of them will not attack foreign invaders, and are just cooperate bots.
Maybe the always-cooperate system of idealized Christianity worked because there was a massive cost to defection-- being burned at the stake
... by the Romans, like Theodore Tiron and Polycarp?
I was referring to Christians punishing each other, but that didn't happen until the next millennium, so it doesn't apply to the rise of Christianity.
Perhaps Roman persecution helped purify the Christian movement by scaring away less-committed believers. A new religion might be more appealing when all of its members are all-in.
I remember reading about this many years ago and the tit-for-tat strategy being referred to as the Jesus strategy. It's possible I am misremembering.
A few qualifications. First of all Christianity never embraced a purist version of cooperate-bot. In the sermon on the mount for instance, Jesus talks about not casting pearls before pigs. The point being, certain really stubborn and obstinate people are not worth the effort, generally speaking. Christianity is 'cooperative' towards most people, with a few exceptions.
Secondly, Jesus grounds our charitable nature in heavenly rewards given in the age to come. So it's not bleeding heart generosity with no expectation of reward full stop - there is a reward in the afterlife. Again, Jesus talks about this in the sermon on the mount.
Thirdly, not only is there a reward for the righteous, there is a punishment for the unrighteous. Jesus speaks of the way to eternal life being a narrow way which few were entering into (again, sermon on the mount!). For most, they would be on the broad way to destruction - the bad place.
Jesus absolutely went to town on that fig tree, too.
I buy fertility plus converting the high status arguments more than this. The tit for tat plus forgiveness raises the question of how often to forgive. 0% and you’re a tit for tat bot, 100% and you’re a cooperate bot. Maybe the argument is that early Christians selected the exact right level of forgiveness but then you have to ask “how did they do that?” From stories of martyrs, it sure seems like they were COOPERATE!!!!! bots
I mean, if you want to be pedantic, Matthew 18:21-22 suggests forgiving defection either 77 or 490 times depending on the translation.
It's important to remember that, for all their influence on Western civilization, the Jews were a (Middle-) Eastern people who did not customarily speak with the literal precision that characterizes Western thought and discourse. Cf. the famous parable of the mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds which grows into the greatest of all trees. Jesus and his audience were definitely familiar both with smaller seeds and taller trees, but no one called him on this, because the general idea he was conveying was very accurate: there is no smaller seed (familiar to them) that grows into a bigger tree.
This is the meaning of the common Biblical phrase, "verily I say unto you." Verily, or "truthfully" in modern English, was used here to denote "I am speaking in literal terms right now, and not metaphorically."
When the Rabbis of the time thought it very tolerant and reasonable to forgive a repeat offender 2 or 3 times before finally saying "that's enough out of you," Jesus preached a higher standard. So Peter asks, "should we forgive someone *seven* times, then?" A much bigger number than his culture accepted, but still easy enough to keep track of. And Jesus responds, no, keep forgiving them all the way to a number so big you'll lose count along the way. (Especially because, if you're carefully keeping track and counting down the offenses until you no longer "have to" forgive them, you're not really forgiving them at all, now are you?)
I’ve been thinking about this, and I wonder if the answer lies not in traditional game theory but in something closer to red pill social theory—bear with me here. Whether by accident or design, early Christians nailed what we might now recognize as the memetic high-status social game. They didn’t just win a moral argument—they mastered high-status signaling, and they did it so effectively that they rewrote the cultural operating system of the Roman Empire.
In red pill terms, social status revolves around Demonstration of High Value (DHV), Indicators of Disinterest (IOD), and compliance/reward cycles. What’s striking is how perfectly Christianity’s setup aligned with these principles.
Start with Demonstration of High Value (DHV). The early Christians weren’t just good—they were shockingly good. They gave to the poor, nursed the sick during plagues, and even forgave their enemies, sometimes while being actively tortured by them. These weren’t cheap signals. They were so costly that nobody else could afford to imitate them, and their consistency made it impossible to dismiss as a fluke. In a brutal, self-serving world, their behavior screamed, We have access to something greater than this world.
Then there’s Indicators of Disinterest (IOD). Christians didn’t play the Roman status game. They weren’t interested in wealth, political power, or even self-preservation. Instead, they forgave slights, turned the other cheek, and refused to retaliate when attacked. This “cool disinterest” wasn’t just moral—it was high-status in the extreme. The Romans saw them as operating on a completely different plane, untouchable in a way that made others want to know their secret.
Now add compliance and reward. Christianity wasn’t easy to join. Conversion required massive personal investment—ostracism, social risk, and sometimes death. But this difficulty worked in its favor. People value what they sacrifice for, and once you were in, the rewards were enormous. Love-bombing, a strong community, real material support, and the ultimate promise of eternal salvation. If Roman society was a zero-sum grind, Christianity offered something transcendent.
Here’s where the context comes in. This game is always running, in every society. But Christianity’s setup worked exceptionally well in the Roman world. Scarcity made charity profoundly valuable. A dominance-obsessed culture made Christians’ refusal to compete on those terms stand out even more. And the empire’s instability created a void that their high-trust, high-status community could fill. They weren’t just playing COOPERATE-BOT—they were playing a cooler, higher-status version that could outmaneuver the prevailing norms of the time.
But here’s the twist: I think the same framework explains why Christianity’s influence has waned in modern times. The game hasn’t stopped, but the context has shifted. Abundance has devalued acts of charity; helping the poor is less extraordinary when basic needs are widely met. And Christianity lost its outcome independence. As it became institutionalized, it started caring deeply about societal outcomes—politics, power, moral conformity. The cool detachment that once made it irresistible gave way to defensiveness and control.
What’s remarkable is that this wasn’t just morality or theology—it was a memetic masterstroke. Early Christians mastered the eternal social game of status and signaling in a way that fit their world perfectly, and their legacy shaped the next 2,000 years. Whether by design or divine accident, they didn’t just succeed—they rewrote the rules of the game itself.
I think it's kind of crazy - Christianity being the OG outcome independence player in status games, and that Scott doesn't even have this on his radar or include it in his theories.
Interesting! Christians' glorification of martyrdom essentially made them impervious to Roman standards of status.
Being persecuted by the Romans isn't just high-status, it's not just the marker of a saint, it's the main symbol for the religion (the cross!).
Can I answer present-day Scott with golden-age Scott?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/
I went and read that. Interestingly, he says 'And yet, outside of Saudi Arabia you’ll have a hard time finding a country that doesn’t at least pay lip service to liberal ideas.' while discussing how liberalism seems to keep spreading.
In the mean time, Saudi Arabia seems to have started to pay lip service to liberal ideas!
I converted to Christianity (after a lifetime of dissatisfied cafeteria atheism) two years ago, and the most lovely thing about it is, if you're already moved to admire and wish to follow a COOPERATE-BOT lifestyle, you can just do it without worrying about the utility function.
Scott, thanks for doing a good job explaining why so many lapsed Catholics keep the morality.
I want to call your attention to one part, where you speculate that "Free speech might seem kind of like COOPERATE-BOT in a limited domain: the idea that elites shouldn’t make any forceful/legal effort to protect their ideological and spiritual position must sound almost as crazy as them not making any forceful/legal effort to protect themselves if attacked,"
You may already know, you may not, that Oliver Wendell Holmes had exactly this view of "free speech" over most of his legal career, and only changed his mind very late in life. Prior to the *Abrams* decision, Holmes essentially viewed the right to speak freely as the right for you to say whatever you want, and for society to punish you however you want for it. Holmes even tacitly acknowledges the "steelman" for this position in his *Abrams* dissent, which gave birth to the modern view of the 1st amendment. This steelman seems monstrous to us today:
"Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power, and want a certain result with all your heart, you naturally express your wishes in law, and sweep away all opposition. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care wholeheartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises."
It seems to me that what is suggested from game theory and rational choice modeling is that the individual is not best viewed as a behavioral unitary at the phenotype level, because evolved complex coalitional behaviors occur on the group dynamic level. Some individual behaviors are only comprehensible at the group level. One example is altruistic punishment. Or take voting. It makes no sense for an individual to expend the effort to vote, but people simply do it, and you can’t really come up with some cognitive level logic for why people do it.
Very interesting article.
However, I don't think that characterizing early Christian as "cooperate-bot" is very accurate.
Later in antiquity, they had no qualm persecuting other religion, and engaging in sectarian violence. This largely explains they eventual success, since it enables them to crush their competitors, such as Mythraism.
Moreover, the persecution they suffered from the Roman Empire was very uneven, and this explains their persistence. Had they experienced a consistent and long lasting persecution, they would probably have been destroyed.
So their strategy looks more like "lay low and look non-threatening, and wait for your time to come - bot". Being extra-nice to strangers makes you look non-threatening and harmless, definitely a plus in an authoritarian regime.
We can contrast them with Falun-Gong in China: had they adopted the Christian strategy (lay low, be nice to everyone), maybe the Falun-Gong would have been able to escape the very intense persecution of the CCP, who would have perceived them less as a threat and would have devoted less resources to suppress them.
It's also worth noting that this works mostly when there is a religious void, that is the existing power is not very committed into imposing one specific and stringent faith, and eliminating everything else. That was the case in the Roman Empire, whose official religion wasn't strongly adhered to, and which had very syncretic belief systems.
In that context, the monotheism of Christians could easily have been seen as a danger by everyone else (since they rejected absolutely other religions), but that was tempered by their avowed universal love for everyone.
Eventually, pagans should have known better ^^
They should have known better, but they didn't. This is just natural selection at work.
>This is just natural selection at work.
<mildSnark>
The Old Gods of evolution have the final say. :-)
</mildSnark>
More seriously: It would be interesting to read an analysis of what the mechanisms were when Christianity was displaced, e.g. by Islam in North Africa.
When you mentioned "stay away from hit-piece-writers", I thought of Brandon Sanderson's response to the hit-piece written about him: https://www.reddit.com/r/brandonsanderson/comments/1200dzk/on_the_wired_article/
"Christlike" seems a fair descriptor.
Trivial point but "The Roman Empire was corrupt and decadent to the core." is looking at it from outside. There were rules (even "there are no rules" is a rule) and everybody played by them. It may be unpleasant but it wasn't corrupt or decadent. As Copilot confirms: "Both terms imply a deviation from an accepted or expected standard of behavior or morality."
Is it your belief that people living in the Empire did not characterize it as corrupt or decadent?
I have no idea. I guess some probably had higher (or lower) expectations due to local variations or familial history.
"Corrupt" means "the stated rules are not the enforced rules". A filing fee and a bribe are the same process, but one is a written rule and the other is an unwritten rule, so the second is corrupt and the first is not.
I'm not sure this is a hill that I want to die on but anyway: a filing fee is a WIERD invention. Pre-WIERD societies run on bribery. Everybody knows this so it is the accepted rule.
"unwritten but expected" is the nature of corruption. A society that runs on bribery is a society that runs on corruption.
OK
> When the poor happened to be neglected and overlooked by the priests, the impious Galileans observed this and devoted themselves to benevolence . . . [they] support not only their poor, but ours as well, [when] everyone can see that our people lack aid from us.”
Tit-For-Tat bot may beat Cooperate bot in a prisoner's dilemma contest. But it sounds like Cooperate bot beats Defect bot when a neutral third party is deciding which community they wish to join.
> After all the Vikings and steppe nomads and Spartans have had their way with each other, the leading ideology of the 21st century thus far appears to be a hyper-Christian bleeding-heart liberalism
This reminds me of your tribute to Elua ben Yeshua in your classic Moloch piece. I appreciate what seems to me to be deep commitment to belief in some core human goodness. But the way you're framing the game for "leading" here isn't accounting for what seems to me to be an unsustainable toll on our macro-environment. I know that only gods can address anthropogenic climate change (which I personally believe is real), and that raising this as an individual concern is counter-productive, but here at ACX we always seem to be in god mode so....
Disclosure: in the past I have been a deeply committed Mormon. I lived it in ways I thought were 110%. I paid tithing, made all the sacred, special temple covenants, and allowed the guilt & self-flagellation processes full sway in me for not mustering the willpower to live up to them fully.
Until one day something snapped, and I chose to analyze, research, and dissect it all, which I have been doing for the past 8 years. For anyone whose brain tries to model that last sentence, you can't. You can't phenomenologically model something you haven't lived in the first person. But most people have some kind of similar experience when everything they thought was true and built their life on came crashing down, or unraveled when they started tugging at a vexing loose thread.
But I digress.
I think Mormons have TIT-FOR-TAT+FORGIVENESS down pat. After encountering Buddhism I'm better able to see that Christianity is a quiver of strategies like you touch on here. One thing my WorldsArise theory would suggest perhaps falls along the "epiphenomenal" line: the life of an individual human really resides in its wider social identities and belongings, *which are containers for agency, memory, reasoning, and intelligence.* I'm basically saying that gods are real; it's what individual human nervous systems do every time we organize into and give ourselves to the larger things we need in order for "us" (the tribe/group/population) to survive across generations. Christianity is adaptable, and the Mormons have brilliantly adapted it for capitalism and consumerism. Plus, they have a solid system of leadership succession in their top quorums that allows the organization to continue to adapt as needed, while still maintaining the curtain of an eternal, unchangeable, loving, caring god. I have tried to take it apart and understand it, and while a lot of it is "boring" and frustratingly manipulative, it really works well in an Elua type way. And don't forget the utility of a constant eschatological backdrop to keep the community prepared for world-ending reorganization at any time. This is one of many strategies you haven't touched on here.
Thanks for what you share. 🙏 I find it helpful as we try to figure out how we're going to move forward as a species. But this galaxy-brain needs to now go clean up breakfast.
"It is, in some sense, a unilateral surrender in the war of ideas; fascists and communists will do their best to crush liberalism, but liberals cannot ban discussion of fascism or communism."
I feel like liberalism can only afford to do this because it's already so dominant. If a small guy acts aggressively to a much bigger guy the rational thing for the bigger guy to do is defuse the situation graceful, he hasn't got anything to prove and would only look insecure by also being aggressive. Liberalism would just look like it had something to hide by suppressing already marginal ideologies, and it already has ideological hegemony through the media, education system, intelligence services etc. anyway. It might as well counter-signal dominance.
Historically where liberalism was insecure it did suppress other ideologies, like post-war Germany, McCarthyism, late 19th century labour movements, the third world during the cold war.
Seems like unconditional cooperation is a good strategy if you're already so secure as to have nothing to lose or you're so weak you couldn't retaliate anyway. Modern liberalism is the former which is very different to the early Christians imo who were the later.
Some context/corrections about the Quakers. I'm not sure "fled to America" is quite right. The Pennsylvania colony was more of a win/win for the Quakers and the Crown. The Crown got a bunch of eager colonists and got rid of a bunch of troublesome fanatics, the Quakers got a chance to try out their "Holy Experiment" as a form of government with the Crown's blessing.
In a colony like Pennsylvania, the locally-elected assembly held the purse strings and taxing authority, but the crown-appointed governor held the executive authority. The governor would say "we need money for ships and forts to defend ourselves from the French" and the assembly would say "can't do it, we're pacifists." This would go on for a while and then the governor would make concessions on some other points the assembly wanted, and the assembly would allocate money to the governor for uses vague enough that they could claim they were still being pacifist and the governor could claim he'd been given authority to spend it on military stuff.
Quakers dominated the cities and coastal areas, had got there first and had the best land and such. Later non-Quaker immigrants settled further inland on the frontier, and sometimes had to murder a bunch of Indians who were in the way, which pissed off the Indians a bit. Some Indians took refuge with the Quakers in Philadelphia, and a bunch of these frontier settlers nearly stormed the place in 1763 to finish the massacre (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxton_Boys).
When the French-and-Indian War breaks out, it's them on the borderlands who are most endangered by it (British ships from other colonies can protect Philadelphia). They're so furious at elitist Quaker pacifism seeming to boil down to hiding behind the defenseless non-Quakers on the frontiers that they are again scheming revolt. The cowed assembly votes to fund military forts on the frontier, without hiding behind their usual fig leaf. Now the more pacifist wing of the Quakers begins to revolt, with some of them (e.g. John Woolman, closest thing the American Quakers have to a saint) counseling refusing payment of taxes to such an assembly so as to avoid being complicit in shedding blood.
Eventually Quakers resign from the assembly en masse rather than continue prosecuting the war, and the assembly is given over to the control of pragmatic sorts like Ben Franklin.
This is not a hard question. It's just a more complicated game so using reductive strategies doesn't give you an answer. So add an addtional varible to your model/game, which side is stronger. Maybe if your side is weaker, using tit-for-tat strat doesn't work at all. You can't punish the other players enough, but they can genecide you. So cooperate bot strategies work well, as in if the other side follows tit-for-tat the best thing you can do is never defect. So Ghandie and MLK lead successful movements, while Palestinians just lose using a T4T strategy. Probably a ton of other varibles about when belief in another religion is weak enough to lose out. I'm sure there were cults that weren't as successful 100 years prior to the death of Christ, but they didn't topel Zeus/Saturn.
This will sound like insane blathering to 90% of you, but it may contain the key to the puzzle.
"Mister Rogers in a blood-stained sweater" is essentially what's described in the Book of Revelation. It's not anybody else's blood, though; it's his own. The Lamb Who was slain for the sins of the world is raised to the highest throne, and all the nations of the world are put under His feet.
You can see a microcosm of this in the mythic feeling of the US electoral events of the past few weeks. Two weeks ago, Trump felt like The Scapegoat: the priestly class were going to put all the sins of the people on him, name him with the name of the opposite of the established social order ("Nazi"), and cast him out into the wilderness / kill him. He was, in fact, almost killed.
Now, Trump feels like The King: an irresistible force, bending all to his will, dominating all things. Giving gifts to those he favors; compelling obedience from rebels.
The margin between The Scapegoat and The King is paper-thin. They're the same person. The least accident of history can transform one into the other.
(My current best theory is that, in order to make somebody The Scapegoat, he or she has to be powerful enough to make it plausible that he or she could really be responsible for all the evils befalling the nation. That's the connection with The King.)
Seems to me like one advantage COOPERATE-BOT has over TIT-FOR-TAT in real life is that real life is *noisy*- you don't actually always know whether your opponent has picked Cooperate or Defect. You can infer it from the consequences of what happened to you, but there's more complicated payoff matrices and other inputs into the decision. In real life, you sometimes suffer from people trying to treat you well instead of poorly- accidents, misunderstandings, whatever-the-hell-the-FDA-has-going-on, etc.
Say you've got a version of the iterated prisoner's dilemma where, 10% of the time, the button will malfunction and submit Defect no matter what you picked. In this environment, COOPERATE-BOT never makes a "mistake"- but it's easy for TIT-FOR-TAT to get stuck in the loop you describe, and for TIT-FOR-TAT-WITH-FORGIVENESS to outperform it (I assume. Has anyone run this experiment?)
This maps to real-life strategies in that... I mean, we've all met this person. They're all about fairness, and they convince themselves extremely easily that other people are being unfair to them. Almost regardless of what their opponent picks, they'll find a way to imagine they actually hit Defect, and act accordingly. The higher this error rate, the closer to DEFECT-BOT they get. They'll insist they're just following TIT-FOR-TAT, that all they're intolerant of is intolerance, and it's not *their* fault they seem to be constantly surrounded by DEFECT-BOTs they need to retaliate against. You've been on Twitter before.
That's an extreme example, but I imagine the performance of WITH-FORGIVENESS strategies varies with both the error rate and the forbearance timeout. I'd expect to see them on some kind of performance spectrum between TIT-FOR-TAT and COOPERATE-BOT. Is there an optimal forgiveness factor for a given error rate? Did the early Christians approximate it?
(Realistically I don't think this question determines these historical trends very strongly, but I'm curious.)
The Ultimate Showdown is from 2005, not the 2010s. You can tell from references to then-current things like That's How I Beat Shaq and Chuck Norris jokes.
It seems strange to me to only consider the spread of Christianity from a perspective of adherent's conflict strategy, and to not consider the inherent memetic virality of its ideas. I.e. the unique combo of "you're guilty, but also automatically deserving of forgiveness and love.. and this is equally true for everyone" might be a cognitive-emotional attractor that many minds are particularly susceptible to.
In AP Euro, we were taught about the Anabaptists, who iirc were another data point for cooperate-bot-then-get-wiped-out.
As someone who was once a rabidly self-sacrificing Christian, I think looking at Christianity this way is missing the point. Christianity is not a moral strategy. Christianity, like many religions, is an ideology and it spread because, as an ideology, it was persuasive. Its spread, as the post points out, was much faster than could be accomplished through natural reproduction, making the evolutionary/survival arguments mostly irrelevant.
An ideology (as defined by Alasdair MacIntyre) is a meta-story capable of jumping the "is/ought" barrier: it is a story about the world that is large enough that individuals can place themselves within it and then draw conclusions about what they ought to do.
Christianity was a persuasive ideology. It came at a time when the world was changing. Earlier forms of religion based on ethnic belonging, totems or embodiments of the tribe, and petty local gods were looking less and less persuasive as the Roman Empire caused people to interact and trade with all different kinds of peoples in a bureaucratic and commercialized environment. The traditional pagan gods continued to play an important civic role, but they looked increasingly silly. I would compare it to many modern Catholic countries in Western Europe, where the Catholic church is still the dominant institution, but its teachings and practices seem increasingly distant from the other things people know about the world and their daily experience of it.
In this environment, people felt small and lost in a chaotic cosmos. There was a desire for a "personal" savior who could speak to them where they were - see Lucian's "The Ass" from the Hellenic Age or the Plays of Menander, where many proto-Christian themes or desires seem to already be gaining steam. At the same time, there was also a desire for a more believable explanation of the world. A local Horse God was looking less and less believable even before he had to be integrated into a big orgy of Roman magic beings in the sky. You don't have to read far into the philosophy of Ancient Greece or the early Roman Empire to see that these gods failed even a few very basic clarifying questions.
The "Weeajews" begin appearing at this time for the same reason that Plato and other philosophers began to lean towards Monotheism. It made a lot more sense. The world was clearly bigger than our tribe or our nation and it makes sense that God must also be much bigger: perhaps universal, perhaps all-powerful and good. Then along comes Jesus, stripping or resolving many of the remaining tribal elements of Judaism. The story of a God sacrificing himself for a wayward world is still a phenomenally compelling one and must have been even more so amid the uncertainty late Roman Empire. Combine this with people's psychological desire to be known in the midst of a chaotic and hierarchical world, and Christianity was like soup to a starving man.
Christianity's persuasiveness gave people the confidence and epistemological basis they needed to cooperate, but critically: you can't fake this. Anyone who wasn't truly persuaded by Christianity wouldn't follow through on it as a moral strategy. It is a "good strategy" because you are emulating Jesus and expect him to triumph in the end, not because you think COOPERATE-BOT is playing 4D chess.
This is why I'm skeptical of political traditionalist Christians today who want to present religion as a cure for the current ills of society. In some areas, I agree with them that modern social problems are fallout from the loss of faith. But believing this doesn't help you at all. As someone else pointed out above, you specifically cannot run the COOPERATE-BOT in order to maximize utility. Christianity works because you believe in it. It becomes corrupted and counterproductive when you don't.
The people who are still convinced of Christianity's truth are uniquely unable to help address the world's current problems because they are (by definition) incapable of recognizing what caused these problems: Christianity slowly but steadily has ceased to be a persuasive explanation for how we got here, what's going on in the world, and where we're going next. Slowly but steadily, starting with the Enlightenment and continuing through Darwin and the social and psychological revolutions, Christianity has lost its explanatory power, even as people continue to admire its practices. If you want to restore Christian morals or practices, you have to attach them to a believable metanarrative again.
>In this environment, people felt small and lost in a chaotic cosmos.
<mildSnark>
And this is where H.P.Lovecraft and good old cosmic horror come in. :-)
</mildSnark>
Well, maybe there's no need for snark - I actually did meet a genuine cultist of the Old Ones once, and he made a pretty good case. He was my fourth-grade teacher.
See, when I was a kid I was concerned about something I'd come to know, many years later, as the problem of evil. Turkey's economy was good enough in the 90s that we could afford to take pity on other countries, and there were stories in the news about the despondency of Africa's poor (you might remember the Vulture and the Little Girl from these days). I wanted to know why Allah, being all-powerful and compassionate, would allow this to be.
In Turkey we have state-mandated religious education (i.e. Islamic indoctrination) classes, starting at age eleven. They are mild, as far as brainwashing goes: all you get in the textbooks is a history of Abrahamic religions and a guide for Islamic rites. The teachers themselves are trusted to add the "all other religions are evil, and if you ever fail to hate them you'll burn in hell forever" flavor, but I didn't care for that at the time - I finally had a religious authority figure to answer my question.
From the outside the man was the very model of a Muslim elder, takke and all, but the facade crumbled the more you talked to him. He said that my confusion is understandable, and easy to reconcile: that Allah is benevolent was a mistake first made by Christians, and to this day deluded the followers of the True Faith. He bode me to name the attributes of God - sıfat in Turkish, and part of my curriculum for the year.
Easy enough. These are the category of titles that in English have omni- at the start: Allah has no beginning or end, has no equal, requires no sustenance, knows all, sees and hears all, has a will that cannot be contested, creates and is the only creator.
Allah, notably, is not omnibenevolent.
There you have it, he said - Allah permits these things to be, because this amuses It (Turkish has no gendered pronouns, but I was certain that my teacher did not think of Allah as a he). Islam is submission, not to the milquetoast turn-the-other-cheek god of the Christians, not to the overgrown tutelary spirit of the Jews, but to an unknowable, vengeful, powerful and wild thing that promises pain everlasting to anyone who violates Its law.
I better follow the Kuran to the letter, he advised. He did not say "because the only known way to defend yourself is that forbidden book written by a mad Arab atop an unholy mountain", but that was very much implied.
I was not very convinced, and am not a practicing Muslim now, but still to this day I remember my sübhanekes and el-fatihas. Just in case.
Many Thanks! Interesting perspective.
>Easy enough. These are the category of titles that in English have omni- at the start: Allah has no beginning or end, has no equal, requires no sustenance, knows all, sees and hears all, has a will that cannot be contested, creates and is the only creator.
>Allah, notably, is not omnibenevolent.
Hmm, Lovecraft's Azathoth more-or-less has the
>Allah has no beginning or end, has no equal, requires no sustenance
>creates and is the only [?] creator.
but not the perceptual or knowledgeable parts...
BTW, what are sübhanekes ? Google translate comes up with "breakfast" - in context I'm guessing something like "morning prayers"???
Do you know the custom to call songs in operas and musicals by their first line? Nessun dorma, largo al factotum, votre toast, le veau d'or and so on? Even in church hymns there's dies irae and magnificat and such.
Well, schoolkids do the same to the prayers they are assigned to memorize - sübhaneke is just the first word of a common Sunni prayer. It means something along the lines of "praise be to you" and is related to the Hebrew שיבח.
(sübhane, Malik-i Fezaya!)
Many Thanks! Yes, I'd heard of that custom, but I hadn't known of the case of sübhane. Much appreciated!
> I think looking at Christianity this way is missing the point. Christianity is not a moral strategy. Christianity, like many religions, is an ideology and it spread because, as an ideology, it was persuasive
Thanks for saying it, I was trying to find the right words to express why I think this article completely misses the point.
What about Islam?
That's a "meet force with force" religion, and it was fortunate in that it *had* the force. Trying to do that when you don't have the force doesn't end well.
First of all, the early Muslims fought back way before they had the force. They were heavily outnumbered in many of their battles.
Secondly, it's more of a “you, generally speaking, have moral permission to meet force with equivalent force, but forgiveness is generally better” religion.
Even that's an oversimplification. It's more about forgiveness towards those who wronged _you_, not others on their behalf. We drop any thoughts of revenge against those whom the wronged parties have forgiven, but we also don't cowardly (or apathetically) refuse to fight for the rights of those who have not forgiven their oppressors and pass it off as being more forgiving.
For example, in court, the family of a murder victim are the ones who choose the punishment to apply or not to the convicted murderer, and the judge can't forgive on their behalf, nor can the judge punish on their behalf if they forgive.
Inversely, in cases of banditry, for example, where no one was hurt, but the bandit brandished even a false weapon, the victim doesn't have a right to say don't execute him; the state has a duty to make sure that its inhabitants can walk the streets without fear, and a bandit who attacks at random has wronged people other than just the specific person he happened to attack.
(I'm not an expert on fiqh, so I may make a mistake on the specific examples, but this is my understanding.)
Look how the Christians depict God as less merciful and less just to the oppressed by commanding them to forgive their oppressors, even while they are not only not repentant, but even continue their oppression. Look how they depict him as reserving his mercy for the oppressors by commanding forgiveness towards them while they continue to engage in their crimes.
This is the difference that some Christians don't understand who think their religion is so morally superior because they call for forgiveness, then go around judging the wronged parties as morally deficient for resisting, or even simply not forgiving.
The galling thing is when you get the Judeo-Christian West is best types who like to proclaim the superiority of Western culture because of the response of cultures that the West has wronged, even in cases where they themselves would acknowledge the West has wronged them.
But even that's not the worst of them. That prize might go to the meek on the outside types who claim to be about building bridges, so they'll talk with and bolster those people of foreign religions who have pacifistic or “loving” interpretations which are convenient to the empire they're under the boot of, while being extremely apathetic to the suffering of their own people, not loving or forgiving them at all, only with harsh treatment to those who point out the clear non-peaceful parts of scripture (despite those non-peaceful parts being 100x more peaceful and more forgiving than the non-peaceful parts of the scripture of the empire they're fighting).
I did not read the entire post, so I apologize if this was covered, but:
Perhaps Christianity was ultimately successful because the Roman government did not have the state capacity necessary to eradicate Christianity. Note that modern states with far greater capacity struggle to achieve analogous goals.
Or perhaps,. they did not have the inclination.* The Axelrod study is based on the premise that every interaction is 100% win-lose, but the interaction between the state and entitiles within the state are almost never 100% win-lose. The state's interactiion with any entity can range from eradicating it, to banning it, to taxing it (at different levels) to supporting it in various ways, to co-opting it. How much of a threat was Christianity, really, to the state? ("Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" is not overly threatening, after all). All in all, I am skeptical that Axelrod is a partiuclarly useful model for the interaction between the Roman state and Christianity.
I think you've missed an off-shoot of selecting a moral elite - selecting for people who tend to violate the iron law of institutions.
The iron law of institutions is that people will always seek to advance themselves within a movement, rather than advance the movement. For early Christians, this would mean everyone struggling to become the presbyter/bishop and amass more power over their followers. The "love everyone, regardless of how much it screws you over" movement would appeal to people who aren't very concerned about self-preservation, so can devote themselves fully to advancing the movement.
Depending on whether you like this, you can view it as ophyocordiceps-style hijacking of the individual to serve a disembodied idea, or you can view it as people choosing a life of self-sacrifice to serve a noble humanitarian goal. In cold pragmatic terms, though, I'd wager that someone who's willing to die to expand a movement is worth at least 20 people who just want to amass power and status within it.
The caveat is that Christianity may just be the first "movement within a society" full stop, so have won through total lack of competition. Hence later attempts (I think the Anabaptists are a better fit than the Quakers, cf. Dirk Willems) didn't have anything like the same success as there was already a big movement in town.
I recently read a book The Patient Ferment of the Early Church by Alan Kreider, which attempts to explain Christianity's rise in terms of weak theory #2 selecting a moral elite. The author is a Christian, but he's attempting to prove this with secular scholarship. Some interesting examples of how Christianity may have stopped growing as remarkably around the time they stopped being COOPERATE-BOT
This is such a cool post and really helped me appreciate Christianity in a way I hadn't before. (I was raised atheist and haven't heard Christianity explicitly described in the way you describe it here, even though I knew the word "Christian" is a synonym for "generous.")
I have another idea, or maybe just a twist on the "[e]liminate transaction costs from means-testing" idea, for why kind religions might do better. I think maybe the difference between a bot and a religion is that a bot is basically one unified entity which has full awareness of how someone has treated it in the past. So it's possible for a bot to do tit for tat accurately. But a religion is basically a group of different people, who can't always know how someone has treated their fellow group members in the past.
I think that tit for tat can't really work properly for a large group of people. Because we don't know if someone did something kind to another member of our group. I think a lot of people have had the frustrating experience of doing something nice to help a certain a group (e.g. a company, nonprofit, or movement), and then getting bad treatment from a member of the group who doesn't know about the nice thing we did.
Think about spending tons of money at a company and then having an employee act rude and dismissive to you, perhaps without realizing how much money you have spent at the company. Or I personally think of when I first went vegan and other vegans would be unfriendly to me before they knew I was vegan. I also can see sometimes, with running a nonprofit, that I personally have a lot of gratitude toward certain people whom I personally know have done things to benefit our nonprofit—but my employees don't necessarily know that the person did the nice thing to us!
I think a group attempting to take a tit-for-tat approach will fail to incentivize people to do nice things to the group. Because people will realize that group members don't actually know about the nice thing they have done, and that they won't actually get their reward!
Part of the answer is that life is not as simple as the Prisoner's Dilemma. We have many more options available to us than just Cooperate/Defect, the payoff matrices in reality are complex and often obscured by other circumstances (even setting aside deception and mistakes), and at certain levels of negative net utility the actor dies.
Imperfect information. It’s easy to attribute COOPERATE-BOT behavior based on the history written by the victors. They’ve got great PR. But I’m certain there were decisive moments that were not forgiveness-driven.
Same what I wanted to comment... The Tit-for-Tat is a good strategy in general, but I can't see the link to early history - too much is lost, and the few things historians can piece together must have an enormous error rate due to survivor bias (when it comes to writing) and statistical problems (enormously small sample size - the literaly have to "piece it together").
Looking into younger history and on a makro scale, cooperation and reciprocity of kindness has helped to develop stability - as has overwhelming force (weak ones like capital and debt as well as hard ones like military force), if nothing else then as fear of mutual destruction (arms race in the cold war). Of course, having enough cooperation fosters force and power, which also worked well (in tandem with other factors) to facilitate change, for the better or worse - the re-unification of germany as a positive example, indias freedom from colonization, ... but on the contra-side you have many failures: the arabic spring (which failed in most countries to establich a cooperative stable society and instead fell back to biggest-group-won-and-suppresses-the-rest), yugoslavia (bigger groups committing genocide), ...
The tit-for-tat might work best on the mikro scale of communities to successfully "ward off" predatory individuals - but only as long as others don't have enough force to push their agenda. And let's not get into the rationality of individuals or of groups to even decide, when something is predatory and when not...
Yet more context on Quaker pacifism: it seems likely to have developed as a gambit in a struggle that seems to fit well with your game theory explanation.
The early Quakers had practices and doctrines that seemed similar to political radicals of the time (e.g. Diggers, Levellers), but what they really cared about was good old-fashioned anti-papist true Christianity.
They really wanted the government to stop imprisoning and martyring them, and to allow them to spread the good word. But the government kept looking at them and thinking "dangerous radicals that want to overthrow government and property" and persecuting them to match.
So George Fox hit on pacifism as an way to throw a super-cooperate card into the game. Many of the earliest statements of Quaker pacifism don't describe it as pacifism-as-such but as Quakers declining to be involved "in setting up or pulling down the kingdoms of the earth," seeing that as God's prerogative. This was a way of saying "we are no threat to you" to their government antagonists as loudly as they could, in the hopes of resetting the game.
Koenraad Elst's "The Psychology of Prophetism" claims that the pacifist bits of Christianity weren't really original to Jesus, but instead pasted it on later to make it tolerable to Roman authorities. http://voiceofdharma.org/books/pp/ch3.htm
I don't think it makes sense to reduce questions about memetic fitness to an iterated prisoner's dilemma. You can hardly tell the bots that the best strategies go to heaven.
Seriously though, I haven't studied game theory in any depth but don't some conditions have to be met for a situation to be appropriately described by the prisoner's dilemma? The analogy of [what exactly--Christian doctrine or the way Christians at large behave or?] to a COOPERATE-BOT is so coarse that I don't think there's anything actually wanting for explanation here.
"Therefore, even if you’re a deep-seated consequentialist, you should avoid acting as a consequentialist and instead follow normal-person morality."
Couldn't "normal-person morality" be described, in this case, as better consequentialism if in fact it results in better consequences?
This kind of reminds me of how people complain about "science" not being a good thing when they're actually talking about scientists practicing flawed or unethical science. Science itself is just a methodology/set of principles.
Well said. I found it odd that Scott's example of a consequentialist was someone whose actions yielded bad consequences. That seems like a self-defeating example.
He equivocates between consequentialism and "naive consequentialism" when he says "naive consequentialism yields bad results therefore you shouldn't be a consequentialist." No, it means you shouldn't be a naive consequentialist. Maybe conventional morality IS consequentialism (and I believe it is) when averaged over every member of society and transmitted through a narrow-bandwidth cultural communication channel. So #8 could be rewritten as "listen to conventional wisdom until you understand the world well enough to productively make your own well-tailored consequentialist judgements."
Conventional morality definitely isn't optimal anymore, at least at the individual level. Psychopaths seem to be doing pretty well these days thanks to the system actively promoting self-interest.
I don't buy all that "all CEOs are psychopaths" nonsense. I think that's mainly just class envy. Besides, even if it's true I'm sure they only do well to the extent that they understand conventional morality well enough to blend in with it, which is consistent with my thesis of "don't think for yourself until you're smart enough to do so". It's not like you get to be CEO of Google by murdering your colleagues.
Okay, counterpoint: Trump. Not just in politics, but his entire life before that as well.
That illustrates my point. Trump's strategies shouldn't be recommended to anyone: they almost always fail. The only reason he can pull them off is that he has high-level domain expertise in the manipulation of public opinion. Follow conventional wisdom unless you're confident that you're savvy enough to go against it. Trump is obviously savvy enough. Most leaders are, otherwise they wouldn't be leaders.
...I really don't see how you can look at Trump and see a master manipulator. He's basically made no effort to hide the fact that he's morally bankrupt, with all the people he's stiffed and all the cons he's done. In politics he's been a pretty run-of-the-mill populist demagogue, and his victory can be blamed mostly on how incompetent the establishment was.
The point is that society has changed, and the old meta doesn't necessarily apply today. Maybe it's time to do some soul-searching on why someone like Trump can even be moderately successful, let alone take over the whole country.
One simple reason they didn't resort to violence is they were a persecuted, outnumbered minority. It was common for Early Christians to hide their faith. Christianity really underwent explosive growth during the Crisis of the Third Century. And any story that explains their growth without that time period is really missing something.
The growth of Christianity in the Roman Empire basically looks like:
1st Century: Jesus founds Christianity, it expands to low tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands.
2nd Century: Christianity spreads further afield to mostly cities. It reaches low hundreds of thousands to maybe over a million but that's really stretching it.
3rd Century: Rome undergoes a century long crisis. Christianity grows to probably more than five million people, including in the countryside, as the Roman population significantly shrinks.
4th Century: Roman population continues to slowly shrink and Christianity starts to rapidly grow after the end of persecution and the Conversion of Constantine, becoming a politically powerful mainstream religion with tens of millions of followers. In 380 they become the official religion of the empire.
The 3rd century was a massive collapse. Christians, who remember believed the world was going to end, had a doctrine that seemed to explain what was going on. They also gave charity freely, had groups of self-sacrificing people, and notably the spread benefitted from deurbanization. As people moved to the countryside this included Christians who could then convert their more rural neighbors that were the greater part of the population. The Christian idea of life after death was also probably appealing in a time when a lot of people were dying. And perhaps most importantly, as state capacity collapsed persecution became less uniform. When Diocletian re-establishes state power in a durable way he begins to thoroughly persecute Christians again. But by this point they're too big. They survive and even manage to fight back at several points. Then Constantine makes a play for their political support and receives it. They prove useful to his rule and are able to establish themselves as a political power.
I don't know enough about this beyond being able to bring it up, but what about jainism and buddhism?
People here seem fascinated with the game theory aspect here. I am, too. Anyone interested in exploring further would probably enjoy Nicky Case's interactive story of The Evolution of Trust: https://ncase.me/trust/
The success of early Christianity might’ve relied more on a transactional promise of paradise to the poor, sick and marginalized—the majority of city dwellers in the ancient world—than it relied on some inherent cooperative advantage.
From what little I understand, early Christianity effectively reduced the barrier to “heaven” for the destitute and downtrodden by removing many of the complex liturgical rites and rituals associated with passage into the afterlife, to which the poor lacked access, and replaced those barriers with general behavioral expectations.
In this sense martyrdom/caring for the contagious, etc. became transactional. Early Christianity opened up heaven to the masses who, once converted, genuinely believed they were trading short-term earthly misery for the enormous pay-off of everlasting happiness.
> From what little I understand, early Christianity effectively reduced the barrier to “heaven” for the destitute and downtrodden by removing many of the complex liturgical rites and rituals associated with passage into the afterlife, which the poor lacked access too, and replaced those barriers with general behavioral expectations.
That's the pop-culture understanding, but it's not particularly accurate. When you read what first- and second-century Christians wrote about themselves, a picture emerges that looks far more like what Scott referred to in this article as "a mystery cult" than it does like modern-day Christianity. They had all manner of "complex liturgical rites and rituals" and initiations into new levels of the Church with associated bestowals of newer and holier knowledge, which was largely lost along the long and twisted road the faith took between Jesus and Constantine.
I think you’ve mischaracterized my argument. I don’t deny that early Christians could have had complex liturgical rites and rituals to gain holy insight. But they had very few of these as requirements for passage into a blissful afterlife, particularly when compared to the Romans, Jews or mystery cults of the period that typically involved multiple, sometimes costly, rites and sacrifices sanctioned or performed by religious leaders. Early Christianity introduced the idea that faith and baptism alone could guarantee salvation, which cut across social classes.
Of course this distinction applies far better to early Christianity than later Christianity.
If you think that early Christians did in fact require a host of complex rites, sacrifices, rituals before any soul could enter heaven, I’d welcome the correction and any links you might have to the scholarship.
(Why are my replies getting consistently cut off on Substack now?)
> If you think that early Christians did in fact require a host of complex rites, sacrifices, rituals before any soul could enter heaven, I’d welcome the correction and any links you might have to the scholarship.
Yes, that is in fact my claim. A lot of this relies on a deep-dive I took into ancient Christianity around 20-ish years ago, so I'd have to go and look up the relevant scholarship again. Give me some time. But... yes, "the idea that faith and baptism alone could guarantee salvation" was not the doctrine of the day. Baptism was an initiatory rite, the beginning of the path to salvation, not the end of it.
The real difficulty of researching this stuff is that these matters were held to be deeply sacred and not to be shared with the uninitiated, so contemporary writings are full of charlatans professing to have the truth of the secret Christian teachings, with all the intermixture of real doctrines and nonsensical blatherings that you'd expect. But there are enough common themes that show up again and again to give a decent "big picture" view of it.
I am reminded of the discussion of the gene-cultural co-evolution of prosociality in "The Secret of our Success." The answer there is that prosociality is the result of intergroup competition.
Passage 1:
Intergroup competition provides one important process that can help explain the spread of norms that foster prosociality. Different groups culturally evolve different social norms. Having norms that increase cooperation can favor success in competition with other groups that lack these norms. Over time, intergroup competition can aggregate and assemble packages of social norms that more effectively promote such success, and these packages will include social norms related to cooperation, helping, sharing, and maintaining internal harmony.
Passage 2:
Over time, combinations of these intergroup processes will aggregate and recombine different social norms to create increasingly prosocial institutions. To be clear, by “prosocial institutions” I mean institutions that lead to success in competition with other groups. While such institutions include those that increase group cooperation and foster internal harmony, I do NOT mean “good” or “better” in a moral sense. To underline this point, realize that intergroup competition often favors norms and beliefs that can readily result in the tribe or nation in the next valley getting labeled as “animals,” “nonhumans,” or “witches” and motivate efforts to exterminate them.
Passage 3:
The effects of the strengthened social norms and a more tightly bonded community appear to have resulted in the formation of more, and more active, community organizations. None of the communities unaffected by the war established new local organizations, such as farming cooperatives or women’s groups. By contrast, 40% of those communities affected by the war had subsequently established new organizations. Even if the communities affected by violence didn’t establish any new organizations, the ones they already had or those started by outsiders were more active than those in unaffected villages. By strengthening prosocial group norms, the experience of war resulted in more, and more energized, community organizations.
Passage 4:
Why would war have these prosocial effects?
During hundreds of thousands of years, intergroup competition spread an immense diversity of social norms that galvanized groups to defend their communities; created risk-sharing networks to deal with environmental shocks like drought, floods, and famines; and fostered the sharing of food, water, and other resources. This meant that, over time, the survival of individuals and their groups increasingly depended on adhering to those group-beneficial social norms, especially when war loomed, famine struck, or droughts persisted. In this world, culture-gene coevolution may have favored a psychological response to intergroup competition, including threats that demanded group solidarity for survival. Under such threats, or in environments where such threats are common, intergroup competition favors cultural practices that monitor individuals more closely and sanction norm violators particularly harshly, thereby suppressing the increased temptation to break the norms (e.g., not sharing food during a famine).
Passage 5:
Once cultural learning evolved to the point where people could acquire social behaviors, motivations, and rules for judging others’ behavior, norms emerged spontaneously. This makes the shared recognition of how people should behave possible and permits the flow of reputational information among individuals who share those standards. At this point, genes had to survive in a dynamic social landscape in which different groups were doing different things, and failure to do those things properly (performing a ritual or sharing food) meant facing reputational damage, diminished mating prospects, ostracism, and, in the extreme, execution by the group. Natural selection shaped our psychology to make us docile, ashamed at norm violations, and adept at acquiring and internalizing social norms. This is the process of self-domestication.
The differences among groups created by cultural evolution and social norms would have created intergroup competition if it hadn’t already existed. Various forms of intergroup competition, only one of which involves violence, increasingly favored social norms that fostered success in this competition, which would have commonly included norms that increase group size, solidarity, social interconnectivity, cooperation, economic production, internal harmony, and risk sharing, among many other domains. This process meant that genes would increasingly find themselves fighting to survive in a world of prosocial norms, where narrowly self-interested norm violations were punished. This would have favored genes for a prosocial psychology, prepared for navigating a world where norms about harm and fairness toward fellow community members were likely to be important.
Several points that stick out to me.
1. Henrich's description of this process of self-domestication, making us docile (the same way as humans domesticated sheep to make them docile) fits pleasingly well with Nietzsche's description of Christianity (although unlike Henrich, Nietzsche thinks this is a bad thing)!
2. You raised the point that liberal norms, such as democracy and freedom of expression, face an analogous puzzle--how could they survive from internal threats, given that by definition they "cooperate" with internal threats (fascism, anti-free-speech speech, respectively). But I think that one of the most common defenses of these liberal norms is that they are favored in intergroup competition; e.g., that free markets allowed the US to beat out the Soviet Union in the long-term in production, that free speech /inquiry also contributed to this (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism#:~:text=Lysenkoism), and democracy leads to better decision making than authoritarianism since authoritarians like Putin gradually purge anyone who will tell them that their ideas are bad, leading them to disastrous decisions (like invasion of Ukraine).
3. I think this piece of Henrich connects to your contrast between early Christians and mystery cults:
> To underline this point, realize that intergroup competition often favors norms and beliefs that can readily result in the tribe or nation in the next valley getting labeled as “animals,” “nonhumans,” or “witches” and motivate efforts to exterminate them.
It seems to me that the contrast between early Christians and mystery cults in your article (and arguably, this is the heart of the puzzle) is the claim that the mystery cults but NOT early Christians behaved in alignment with the passage above.
The two responses that come to mind, which are both slight cop outs, are
a. I think this is clearly not true if you look at the later history (or present?) of Christianity, which I think aligns very well with Henrich's quote and
b. Are you really so sure that early Christians offered *equal* benefits to Christians and non-Christians alike? It seems to me that as long as Christians offered at least some additional benefits to other Christians (even if the difference was "good treatment" to "better treatment" rather than "cruel treatment" to "good treatment"), there is incentive to switch, and (while I'm not knowledgeable about early Christian history) it feels implausible (both from observations of contemporary Christianity, and human psychology) that this was not the case.
4. I think Henrich's point that war often strengthens the development of prosocial norms connects very nicely to the thesis of this book, which is on why the Old Testament was written:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/why-the-bible-began-an-alternative-history-of-scripture-and-its-origins-jacob-l-wright-book-review
I know less about early Christianity (one book's worth less, since the book above is approximately all of my knowledge about early Judaism), but from the fact that googling "Pax Romana" the dates seem to align with the rise of Christianity it seems less plausible that the rise of Christianity can similarly be attributed to the aftermath of a war? But I wonder if it is explained well in terms of other similar hardships that would have encouraged prosocial norms.
The answer is 9: the orthogonality thesis does not hold up in humans
Why not? Because 1) we are made up of subagents and 2) our subagents don't distinguish between our own subagents and those of others
As a result, if your habit is to cooperate with others, you'll find that your subagents will cooperate with each other, and it will make you a lot more functional
“Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," says the Lord. On the contrary: "If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” — Romans 12: 19-21.
One relevant feature of the situation is that Christianity is, in its own telling, not running cooperate bot at all, but is rather using the “mob boss” strategy. You should cooperate with everyone around you, with the understanding that God will handle any necessary punishment of defectors.
Of course, this strategy appears to rely on God intervening to make it work. What this implies about reality is left as an exercise for the reader.
God doesn't need to intervene, it just needs to have a psychological hold on the populace, to the point where almost everyone carries out its will. God really is humanity's greatest invention.
On the success of early Christianity: it succeeded because it was true, in a visceral sense of truth, not the pat, QED sense we moderns are left with. Christianity resonated with the early followers. They were right; reality rewarded them for having a good take.
On the contrary, some may say that following the actual Divine Law is an epiphenomenon of loving God and your enemy.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned in the OP or comments is specific variations on the IPD that might influence which strategy works. For instance, it's very possible that early Christians were observing fellow Christians who played the game and adjusted their own strategy.
So consider a parallel IPD (PIPD), where each bot can not only remember the games it's played, but also the games of its fellow bots. Maybe it sees several of them cooperate and get betrayed and goes TIT FOR TAT, but maybe that succeeds for a while but they then see some bots cooperate and win, possibly for a while, and they drift into FORGIVE.
Locality also plays a role in tribe formation. Maybe a bot recognizes some group of other bots as "kin", and emulates them. A group of COOPERATES will of course survive a long time until infiltrated by some form of DEFECT. But any member of that group might easily recognize that one DEFECT-bot as not-kin, and reserves TIT FOR TAT for that one and continues playing COOPERATE with all the others.
I mentioned Nicky Case's treatise on bots earlier. AFAIK, he doesn't explore PIPD or tribal PIPD.
Yep, the one-on one setup is undercomplex.
TL;DR: Keynesianism works ;)
St. Paul explained it like this: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.” Romans 12:20 - which was a direct quote from the 'Old Testament', Proverbs 25:21: "If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink. 22 In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head, and the LORD will reward you."
Fun fact: The US treated even Nazi-POW friendly. And turned many into friends. - G. Bay: less so.
https://archive.archaeology.org/9705/newsbriefs/camphearne.html
Two posts on Christianity this week. Both positive. Bentham's Bulldog has gotten to Scott, guys. ACX Christian Arc coming up.
Hallelujah.
Vibe Shift
Your liberal assumption about liberalism being similar to Christianity is flawed. Maybe you're talking about classical liberalism, which is similar to modern libertarianism? But modern liberalism (i.e. progressivism and/or DNC partisanship) is quite obviously pro-censorship (anti-"misinformation"), pro-punishment of rivals, and pro-funnelling-wealth-upwards. Progressives and democrats are known for virtue signalling and NIMBY-hypocrisy (yes we need more illegal immigrants in red states, no we won't tolerate a single one in Martha's Vineyard). They are also statistically less likely to donate to charity than conservatives. I'm familiar with the argument that progressivism is a sort of secular bastardization of Christianity. But if you look at what actual progressives in the upper middle class and above actually DO, it's definitely not altruistic!
But have Christians throughout history actually followed literal "turn the other cheek" morality?
Do liberal leaders never start wars or fight back?
This argument makes no sense.
He's writing about early history, and the 'never' here is an impossible standard. The relevant question is how this compares to everyone else, where the answer for early Christians (and many later Christians ) is pretty clearly yes, with legal codes becoming far less retribution based, and yes, liberal leaders go to war less often than the alternatives.
The New Testament morality is aimed at the behaviour of the individual, and not a manual on how to govern. I don't think it's inconsistent for a Christian leader to wage war or implement justice, whilst holding to Jesus' teaching.
I think this is a key distinction that Scott doesn't deal with.
Then it's not a moral/ethical system. It's a "keep everybody docile" system.
Christian idea is "Ye shall know them by their fruits." The "dominant ideology" of bleeding heart liberalism yields consistently bad results for its supposed beneficiaries. And yet the supposed bleeding hearts never alter their destructive approaches even in the face of irrefutable data. Which reveals the other motivations at play. Take for example the bleeding hearts "working" to address homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area. They have spent many billions of dollars "addressing" a finite problem in a finite population, and there has been zero reduction in homelessness. The people involved WANT the problem to continue (consciously or unconsciously) as a source for virtue signalling, treasury looting, power seeking, the creation of dependents, etc. You can see this all across the spectrum of bleeding heart activities. Lots of literacy charities out there, lots of bleeding heart liberal governments in blue cities, literally TRILLIONS of dollars spent, zero improvements in literacy. No change in approach. Obviously helping the "official" beneficiaries is not the primary goal.
Makes me think of Mother Teresa. I wonder what impact her work had on the ground. I think I once read there was some degree of pragmatism in it. I also have met a few social workers. The sanest ones draw boundaries, much like TFT bot, but they have a lot of respect for their clients. Bleeding heart idealists don't last long on the streets, AFAIK.
My best guess:
1) I think you're overestimating the goodness/cooperativeness of everyone. While the ideal of Christianity was always cooperate, Christians did sometimes resist as well. So Christianity may have fallen closer to tit-for-tat than appears at first glance. For everyone else, I suspect they were much less cooperative than tit-for-tat. Pre-emptive strikes were very common. So the Christian win may have been simply a strategy closer to tit-for-tat (on the cooperative side) defeating a strategy further away from tit-for-tat (on the defect side).
2) Lots of individual Christians did lose. The persistence of Christianity may be more comparable to the design of a new algorithm rather than the winning of a competition.
Two excellent points.
2 points, not necessarily disjoint from your 9 points but in my own words:
1. COOPERATE-BOT loses the specific competition with the specific mix of competitors and the specific payoff matrix and the specific interaction graph used in Axelrod's tournament, but that doesn't mean it can't flourish anywhere.
Specifically, if you imagine a world that is 100% TIT-FOR-TAT BOT, then COOPERATE BOT has the same payout as everyone else, and can spread through random genetic drift or from any other side benefit it may have outside teh game theory interaction.
Or, if you introduce a stochastic element to represent uncertainty and imperfect information (which is very common in game theory simulations), a world full of TIT-FOR-TAT BOTs will occasionally defect on the first interaction 'on accident' and lock into a defect spiral. COOPERATE BOTs will pull out of this spiral and have a competitive advantage.
Of course, COOPERATE BOT is exploited by DEFECT BOT, so the question is what ratio of DEFECT vs TFT is in the initial population COOP is trying to invade, and the graph of how they interact. The graph is especially important here - if agents interact randomly then 99% TFT in the population means 99% of your games are with TFT and COOP can do well, but if agents seek partners intentionally then DEFECT may preferentially target COOP and destroy them quickly. This could be related to why COOP strategies did better in the past than in the present, if modern information systems allow DEFECT to target and exploit them more readily.
All this to say, game theory interactions like this are very sensitive to starting conditions and game design, so saying 'We proved that tit-for-tat with forgiveness is the optimal agent so anything we observe that is successful with not that is an anomaly in need of explanation' is not really a safe approach.
2. We have lots of *stories* and *rhetoric* about early Christians being COOPERATE BOT. But is that really how every single Christian acted every day (or enough of them for it to be meaningfully accurate), or is that a carefully cultivated reputation?
Imagine if Axelrod's game had reputation, so you know something about your counteragent before playing. TFT BOTs would probably be modified to defect on round 1 if they had sufficiently reliable evidence that they were playing against a DEFECT BOT. But they'd always cooperate round 1 if they were sufficiently sure they were playing against TFT or COOPERATE.
In this situation, the best strategy is to *be* TFT, but *have a reputation* as being COOPERATE. If you can pull that off, then you are not exploitable by DEFECT, and aren't punished by other TFT.
(why not just have a reputation for being TFT? That works if you can maintain it, but every TFT defects sometimes, and if reputation is stochastic then another TFT might mistake you for DEFECT and get into a defect spiral with you. That hurts both of your reputations and makes a repeat defect spiral more likely in the future. So there's a pure benefit from trying to push your reputation a far towards COOPERATE BOT as possible.. unless that gets you preferentially targeted by DEFECT, which again is where starting populations and interaction graphs are determinative)
So 'Christians carefully maintained a reputation for being COOPERATE BOT in all their public-facing rhetoric and myths, even though actual individual christians were just the normal mic of strategies like everyone else, and this reputation kept them out of defect spirals with other TFT agents' is also a plausible explanation.
> So 'Christians carefully maintained a reputation for being COOPERATE BOT in all their public-facing rhetoric and myths, even though actual individual christians were just the normal mic of strategies like everyone else, and this reputation kept them out of defect spirals with other TFT agents' is also a plausible explanation.
Only if you can first come up with a plausible explanation for how a hated and persecuted underclass had the power to craft their own "public-facing rhetoric and myths," and get people to believe them, while their enemies who hated them and wanted to see them exterminated were in power and in full control of "the narrative," to use a modern term.
This doesn't seem like a realistic story?
They had to already be very 'successful' in terms of spreading far and wide before they were numerous and influential enough to be a 'hated and persecuted underclass', so that's probably already very far into their success story (in terms of going from 10 people to 10,000 or w/e. The Emperor doesn't notice and persecute 10 people).
I also think the idea of 'controlling the narrative' works differently now, it's not like Rome has podcasts and TV shows that they controlled. I don't know how much information was disseminated from a central authority to individual peasants on farms in remote areas, but I would assume that a peasant's information diet was overwhelmingly based on local gossip and rumors rather than central dispatches from the Emperor.
And, also, would Rome bother to dispute the COOPERATE BOT rhetoric specifically, instead of just saying they're heretics or traitors or w/e? If you don't know that COOPERATE REHTORIC is a successful strategy and you think owning slaves and having them fight lions is a fun family activity, don't you just laugh at them for being idiots when they say they are COOPERATE BOT, instead of trying to disprove the claim?
> I would assume that a peasant's information diet was overwhelmingly based on local gossip and rumors rather than central dispatches from the Emperor.
That's what heralds and proclamations were for, and when you're the Romans, who famously built the greatest network of roads that the world had ever seen, you exploit the mobility advantage that this provides to the fullest.
When Mark began his written testimony with the words, "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God," his audience knew *exactly* what he was doing here. "This is the Good News of So-And-So" was the formalized beginning of a proclamation announcing the conquests of a victorious ruler, and Mark adopted this language to tell the story of the King of Kings and his triumph over death itself, because this sort of proclamation was something he knew his audience would be familiar with.
I like the overall point of this post. Tit-for-tat should triumph, but with the early Christians cooperate-bot seemed to triumph. Fascinating and apparently true. But the side point, that today's progressives are so altruistic and Christian-like and cooperate-bot-ish is what I object to. It doesn't ring true. Modern progressivism seems to be driven by conscious society-wreckers and profiteers at the top, grifters below them, useful idiots below them, very few actually altruistic people anywhere in the movement, and zero or negative results for the supposed beneficiaries.
10. Internalised reputational benefits.
Persons that come across as willing to help & love even one’s enemies, all the time, signal something very close to being self-bound to help & love.
To appear self-bound is a great reputational benefit in private affairs, it makes one maximally trusted.
Notice that the best way to appear self-bound is to actually be self-bound. Darwin, in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, suggested this as an explanation for why involuntary blushing exists. (Which otherwise represents one of the Kuhnian puzzles facing the evolutionary paradigm.)
Socrates (in Xenophon) proposes something similar when arguing that “the best way to acquire and maintain a reputation for honesty and good will is to become the person you want others to believe that you are”.
Another classic reference is the writings of evolutionary theorist Amotz Zahavi. (Tel Aviv University, died 2017.)
In essence, this line of reasoning is a way the existence of genuine, Kantian altruists - including Christians who genuinely love their enemies - can be anchored (ultimately) in evolutionary derived self-interest.
That is, a way to solve arguably the grandest Kuhnian puzzle concerning Man’s behavior, as seen from within the evolutionary paradigm: Why does genuine altruism exist.
Sometimes events shape the effects of strategies. The plague of Cyprian was a major factor in the cooperate strategy's effectiveness.
It's interesting to read you grappling with this question. I basically believe explanation 8, and a significant part of *why* I believe it is because of the impact that _In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization_ had on me (along with some other of your writing), so I would have guessed you also believed that!
Doesn't this come down to the fact that players in the Christians v. Pagans prisoner's dilemma have very different definitions of 'win' compared to individuals playing prisoner's dilemma games? I don't think "expose yourself to the plague by nursing plagued people so your ingroup can recruit more people after you die" would be counted as a win by everyone.
I will never not gush about how great the Quakers are, and in fact I think the aspiring-rationalist community should just join the Society of Friends. Here's my pitch:
The Quakers were founded by George Fox and his wife Margaret Fell based on a vision that Fox had that led him to believe that the universal light of God was equally accessible to everybody, and therefore anybody was capable of divine insight. Thus, they have no hierarchy and their early meeting practice (still done everywhere I've gone, but apparently less common worldwide) is that you all get together and sit quietly and think about stuff. If anybody feels they have something they really, REALLY need to say, they say it, and then everybody sits quietly and thinks about that thing, too.
From this, the Quakers decided that slavery was bad, men and women should be treated as equals, evolution seemed like a nifty idea, and same-sex couples should be able to get married. (These happened at different times, although generally way before most of society - Quakers petitioned Congress to end slavery in the FIRST Congress, for example.)
If you've ever thought, "If I lived hundreds of years ago, would I realize how terrible society was and be able to work out my current beliefs?" then the answer is "Maybe, if you were a Quaker".
Now, as mentioned in this post, the Quakers were not perfect in every way, and also they've largely vanished, at least compared to their once-dominant position, BUT it's worth noting that they also basically wove a ton of their beliefs into the founding documents of the United States (see https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/) so arguably many of the memes of Quakerism have been quite successful even as membership has cratered.
But! I also think we can bring it back. In a world where everybody constantly derides a lack of third spaces, there's already a bunch of cities with groups of people you can join and be friends (and Friends) with! And there's literally no requirement of any kind other than that you can just sit there for a while!
(Incidentally both of the Quaker meetings I've attended do not require you to profess a belief in God, and in fact I've told members of both groups that I don't believe in God and nobody has taken any issue with it.)
You didn't include a "Jesus is Lord" possibility this time -_-
Yet another religion article that refuses to just read the game manual. COOPERATE-BOT is actually just minmaxing for 'mitzvah points', in which case it's no surprise it's a dominant strategy
One thing worth considering is what happens the *instant* Christianity gets into power - from then on, it's repression and inquisition all the way, until liberalism and enlightenment finally manages to stop that after 1500 years.
This makes me think the rest is merely an effective strategy-from-weakness. Once you're the ones with political and violence capital, that's so much easier than being nice or non-violent.
Always remember John 18:36. Jesus said flat-out, "my kingdom is not of this world."
If it's "getting into power," in the Constantine sense, it is no longer Christianity, but corruption wearing Christianity as a skin-suit.
Possibly in some kind of theoretical meaning, but that's a lot like "that wasn't TRUE communism". When we talk about Christianity, we typically mean the "actually existing Christianity", to paraphrase. Not that *actual* Christianity ended 25 July 306.
It's still an interesting observation that Christianity as a historical movement went from saying "my kingdom is not of this world", to saying "let's build the city of God in this world", in the space of a few centuries. From detachment to authoritarianism in a few steps.
If anything, it can serve as a warning for any present or future movement that attempts "detachment from power" as a value, to see how easily it can turn into the very opposite.
"it's repression and inquisition all the way"
Some of the way, yes, but surely not all the way? Compare people with people and governments with governments. If you looked at the wide range of 'Christian' nations from 313 to 1750 against the alternative governments on offer at the time, would they compare favourably? My priors say yes, but I'd be happy to be corrected.
Post-Black Death, Europe starts to rise due to factors unrelated to religion (military and especially naval technology), but before that, I don't see that it has much to offer - the Early Medieval period is abysmal, and Europe in the year 1000 has really nothing to offer internationally. The Islamic world is superior in essentially every way up until at least the High Middle Ages, for instance, and in religious toleration way past even that. For a lot of the period you list, China was probably a better place to live than Europe for the average citizen (this does not hold true towards the end, though).
I think the primary distinction is that the early Christians were not Cooperate Bots: but they lived and believed as if everyone was worth cooperating with. To love someone does not mean you always cooperate with them, but it does mean that you wish the best for them. In a prisoner's dillemma the Christian *wants* the best outcome for the opponent as well as wanting the best outcome for themselves.
To put it another way, the "post-Christian Nietzschean" may be satisfied with being a Defect Bot in a world of Cooperate Bots: that gets them the most utility, after all, and they have to obligation to others. But the Christian is not satisfied to be the Defect Bot, even if it gets him the most utility. He loves the other players and wants good for them as well. That may or may not mean cooperating, depending on the situation: in real life refusing to cooperate with Defect Bot may actually change Defect Bot's ways, for instance. But the goal is maximum utility for everyone.
We live in a society built on two thousand years of Christianity, so that assumption is built into most of us from an early age. That we should care about other people, that we should ask ourselves "How would I feel if that happened to me", that the best solution is the one that is best for everyone, even our enemies: this is the Christian influence. This is what they had (though not solely that) that the pagans didn't.
As Jesus said: "You must be wise as serpents, but innocent as doves." How could a society built on hating your enemies survive against a society built on loving everyone? A society that does defect with others, but only when they believe that defecting is the loving thing to do? A society built on the idea that we all must offer forgiveness to those who repent, even those who defected against us 70 times 7 times in the past does better than a society that does not forgive at all.
Exactly
I think this is really the key. Christ and the saints loved and forgave all their enemies; they harboured no ill will to those who hated them and wished to destroy them, even while (in some cases) they were being tortured to death.
True Christianity, then, is a state of mind - it’s bearing no ill will, no animosity, just love and the wish for others’ happiness.
Does that mean, for example, judges cannot be Christian, or Christians cannot serve on juries (as Tolstoy thought?) Not at all - sometimes the compassionate thing to do is to serve justice to criminals, so their hearts can be transformed by understanding what their victims suffered. This would be considered “defecting” in the prisoners’ dilemma, but only in a naive sense - it’s cooperating with the greater good.
A true Christian, however, would never think of prosecuting criminals as “punishment.” It’s a different kind of compassion - one that is firm, and sets boundaries, but compassion nonetheless, like a father’s love. They wish for all beings to repent their sins and know the divine light of Christ.
Are you distinguishing correctly between the success enjoyed by 1. Individual Christians 2. Christian communities and institutions and 3. The idea of Christianity, as a result of the "always submit" strategy? The virtues of the average drone are appropriate for the average bee because most bees are drones but they benefit the queen and the cause of beedom generally a lot more than they benefit the drone. A topical case in point is the appalling John Smyth over whom the archbishop of Canterbury has just resigned, who persuaded hundreds of young Christians to permit him to beat them till they bled because it was what Christ wanted - an always defect tactic succeeding in an always cooperate environment.
Yes that's another way in which this article sounds confused to my ears. It's failing to keep up the difference between the individual, collective and ideological levels.
I guess I want to challenge the notion that the behavior of early Christians 0r the writings of the church fathers are especially informative as to why Christianity won. Christianity won because the elites took it up. Question is why Constantine decided to convert and why his successors decided to essentially ban paganism 300or 400 years after the death of Christ. By the time the elites were done with it Christianity did not look anything like the teachings of Jesus. Nor does it today.
That doesn't answer the question of how Christianity survived through centuries of persecution, long enough to reach the time of Constantine, though, which is what Scott is attempting to answer here.
0 one answer is that Christians overstate the amount of persecution. No doubt there was persecution, but the baseline attitude of the Romans was that they didn't give a shit what people believed or how they worshiped. Christian's kind of invented caring a lot about that as a n organizing principle. Most of the time Christianity was popular among the urban poor, the Romans carry a bit less about the urban poor than we do. Again to me the interesting question is why Constantine and his successors decided to go all in on Christianity, and then morphed Christianity into something that suited their preferences. I suspect the motivation was more or less the same that Henry the 8th had seizing the monasteries
I started to type a comment about this post, but it is so long that I turned it into its own post:
https://ariethoughts.substack.com/p/the-early-christian-strategy-solved
> After all the Vikings and steppe nomads and Spartans have had their way with each other, the leading ideology of the 21st century thus far appears to be a hyper-Christian bleeding-heart liberalism: COOPERATE-BOT in a bloodstained sweater. I don’t know why this keeps happening, but I wouldn’t count it out.
acoup speaks of this [0]. TLDR: liberalism was a social technology that Locke and friends invented to solve Christianity's (internecine, btw ) Wars of Religion. So, like other comments point out, I suspect the strength of the strat is context-dependent. We ain't at the end of history yet.
https://acoup.blog/2024/07/05/collections-the-philosophy-of-liberty-on-liberalism/
People are imperfect representations of their ideals, so an ideal like TIT-FOR-TAT-WITH-FORGIVENESS would have expected deviations that include full martyr COOPERATE-BOTs and TIT-FOR-TAT, but perhaps the ideal ideal is something like TIT-FOR-TAT with _extra_ forgiveness. The New Testament places priority on "deserving poor", says if you don't work you don't eat, has prescription for putting people out of the church (community) for grievous violations, and a defined process (ie from Matthew 18) for internal discipline. A high-trust society is so beneficial, it's probably worth erroring more on the side of unwarranted trust, but COOPERATE-BOT still seems to be a losing proposition unless you have God handling the punishment bit.
I think that optimising social interactions for freeloader detection and it's accompanying emotional module that ranges in manifestations from focus on fairness (or if extreme, equality) to obsessive horror of being "cucked" are scarcity-rooted, survival-focused adaptations. Naturally (literally as well as figuratively naturally) they feature heavily in human social interactions.
But the more we get away from survival-threatening scarcity, the less cost and the more benefits there might be to allowing freeloaders, and especially allowing "seeming" freeloaders who might turn out not to be freeloaders ultimately. But even real ones (you list some, including freeing policing resources).
I either lack the "fairness for its own sake" function or have it very underdeveloped, so it's very difficult for me to imagine motivations of people who are concerned with fairness outside scarcity/survival situation. But with this caveat, the world of cooperate-bots seems intuitively appealing not just because it feels "nice" and not because it feels heroically moral, but because it seems free, optimistic, hopeful. The implicit message it sends is "there's plenty, enough X for everyone, we don't need to scrap and fight over every bit or make deadly sure of fair distribution". It's a world of somewhat wasteful abundance and benevolent forgiveness in which the death itself is not quite real. I'm not Christian so I'm not going to suggest that "X" stands for divine love and everlasting bliss, but someone who was could see it like that. And this is an extremely appealing a vision, surely!!
A world in which one could genuinely NOT CARE about being "stolen from" (literally but also by being treated unfairly). A world of love, or at least benevolence, and not tit for tat "justice". (I'm leaving aside the contractual/"paying ransom" interpretation of soteriology via the Passion).
If this vision appeals to a materialistic mind living its days out in relative comfort, safety and security unimaginable to most humanity historical and current, think how much it must have appealed to those early proto Christians with their brutish, short and suffering filled lives.
With lots of handwaving because I made a promise to do a better job getting my toddler to speak, I think this is because in those game theoretical situations you have to make your predictions in steps once you leave the theory world. One of those steps is “and I am a good, morally justified person” and when you keep hurting someone who isn’t hurting you back AND wishes you well then it starts to throw you out of your “defect” loop. Subject to all kind of initial size effects and what exactly that “good morally justified” test means to the person taking the action. But people in general won’t do things they consider bad for very long. They just won’t think about it, delude themselves, consider it amoral, etc, but I’ve not really known someone who can sustain “this is bad, going to keep doing it anyway” for a very long period of time. You have to, I think transcendentally, consider yourself worthy of the next game to keep playing the game as an agent.
The best strategy is to hone strength while showing grace, to cooperate until you feel like a total cuck, and to punish defectors just often enough to keep defection rare.
An excerpt from something I posted recently on DSL, to suggest another reason why Christians might have cooperated so freely:
One moment I remember very specifically, the moment before I found Christ, feeling agonized by a sense of worthlessness as I sought both to get a sense of self from my academic record and from feeling like I belonged to a group of friends. I worshiped Good Grades and Social Belonging. And that worship, that idolatry, that creation of other gods and giving them the power to define my worth, that caused me immense pain. The moment I saw those idols for what they really were—dumb, mute, powerless—was the moment I was able to say, “I’m actually not as smart as I think I ought to be, nor am I as interesting as I think I ought to be, and yet, for some reason, Lord, You still found me worth dying for.”
It was pain that brought me to this point. It was pain that led me to freedom. It was pain that forced me to choose: will I define myself by the love of God, or by the rules of an idol?
It is for freedom that Christ has set us free, St. Paul writes in the Epistle to the Galatians, but our freedom is not to be used to keep on sinning, he writes in the Epistle to the Romans. I know the latter has opened the door to many a conversation about how much sin is too much sin, and what sin is too great of a sin, and what’s actually not a sin, but for me, at that moment of freedom, I had no such questions. All I knew was that God had set me free from my idolatry—He’d found me worth dying for and in so doing, had made me worth dying for—He’d given me a sense of self that was unshakeable and unlosable—I was His. He was a God worth following, worth dying for, and worth obeying in all things. And what did He want? He wanted me to love.
In other words, people are so much more than bots, and Christianity encompasses so much more than niceness. While niceness is a necessary piece of the puzzle, you won’t understand Christian success by analyzing just the niceness.
Some part of this could be described as flattening the status hierarchies.
(The organized religion then ruined this a little, with the popes and bishops and priests etc.)
The game theory tournaments typically have a single outcome ("utility") which is optimized for each agent (although some variations have agents drop out as their utility decreases, so they have to balance expected value and survival probability, the latter still depends only on the former). Can different agents optimize for different things? For example, it's my understanding that Christianity spread fastest among the common people. The pagan religion maximizing "average wealth of adherents" while Christianity maximized "number of adherents" and it's not clear to me that the IPD competitions tell us anything about this situation.
Another possibility in this vein would be that Christians didn't actually lose that much utility from being martyred. Life for most people sucked back then; being convinced that you were about to spend eternity in paradise might have been extremely comforting, psychologically. Perhaps even enough so to get >1 convert per martyr.
One important strong theory (not the complete thing, tbs) is the 100 prisoners hundred boxes math problem. Christians can follow each other's lead, very trustingly, because the signal cost is so high... And once in a while reality plays the part of a molochian mad king trying to force everyone to give up in despair that coordination could be possible... but for teams of high trust folks simply playing the hand they're dealt with total faith, coordination *is* possible, works almost 1/3 of the time, and also it's the *only* thing that does!
I think it's worth mentioning that Christianity didn't "win" until it first:
1. Through advertisement, attracted powerful people (some mix of advertising and heroic appeal, along with appeals to pity and empathy--it's hard to torture someone who is just so unrelentingly nice)
2. Benefited from those powerful people deploying non-COOPERATE-BOT strategies, including DEFECT-BOT or at least CONQUER-BOT strategies
3. Pivot almost entirely to non-COOPERATE-BOT strategies
I don't think the Romans found it hard to torture Christians.
"a pragmatist faction [of EA/rationalism] wants to stay away from hit-piece-writers, network with friendly journalists to ensure positive coverage, keep our best side forward, and de-emphasize (not deny or lie about) embarrassing bad sides. A COOPERATE-BOT faction thinks that’s what the Pharisees and tax collectors are doing, but that we’re trying to be more epistemically cooperative than everyone else and it’s our responsibility to just dump the exact contents of our brains out to anybody who asks us any question, without regard for the consequences."
As a rationalism-inclined thinker with gray tribe attributes, I can say that the outreach of EA/rationalism works on me only so long as, and to the extent that, I believe you are operating on level zero and just dumping the exact contents of your brains out without regard for consequences. If I thought you were telling me there's a tiger across the river for any reason other than "there's really factually a tiger across the river, it will eat you" I would dump the lot of you in the same bucket I dump politicians and salesmen. No matter how many utils or QALYs that generates to lie about, it would be the end of any attraction I had to this group. Whatever the benefits with powerful outside groups, it would greatly reduce your ability to attract people nearer to your circle to step within your circle.
Now maybe it would be possible to have one approach within sites speaking to the circle and the those near it, like this blog or LW or a few others, and a different side that lies to the outside world. But that seems like a hard line to draw and maintain, in large part because once it's known you're doing that, the people who think they're in the circle will question whether they really are. This blog is pretty normie-facing for a rationalist blog, can I trust this is being honest, or is there a secret Discord where they are actually honest and this is all marketing? Nobody wants to think they may be a dupe. You can dodge all of that skepticism by being maximally open and honest every single time without fail, and I have to think this would've helped the early Christians too, especially when a huge part of their narrative is contrasting themselves with a privileged priestly caste.
Epiphenomenal: What you're observing is not cooperation bots winning, it's set expansion. Accelerated by the Catholic church's ban on cousin marriage, people became much less clannish and much more nationalistic. The set of "friends" expanded and people started cooperating with more people. Groups still viciously attacked groups, but now the larger groups were winning.
"Cooperate bot" would not be a winning international strategy, nor would it be a winning strategy in a state of anarchy, but it works within a nation.
But Rome was plenty nationalistic -- an early Brutus was honored for putting to death his own children when they conspired against the Republic, because Roman values included valuing Rome above one's own family. This probably didn't happen very often, but I don't think it happened often in Christian Europe either.
#5 seems like the one Chesterton would endorse.
The Early Christians believed there was rewards in the afterlife:
Mark 10:29-30
And Jesus answered and said, Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel's,
But he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life.
As far as the COOPERATE-BOT strategy, in their minds they were winning rewards for the afterlife. So it wasn't just giving it up now for others benefit, but also hoping for rewards for themselves later.
One of their own Prophets, Apostle Paul, acknowledged that it was the hope in being resurrected that kept them going.
1 Corinthians 15:19 If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.
So if you want to understand the motivation for the early Christians and many Christian groups afterwards, the belief in a resurection should be considered.
I think he understands the motivation: he is trying to figure out how such behavior took over the Roman Empire. Why it was successful, rather than why they were doing it at all.
I know I'm banging a drum here, but Roman society was not 'corrupt and decadent to the core.' In fact, it's clear that the Christians were keen to appropriate pagan virtue - specifically, the four cardinal virtues of courage, justice, self-control and wisdom - to fill in considerable gaps. There really isn't much ethical guidance in the New Testament (other than the Mosaic Commandments which are assumed), plus the Golden Rule, and what there is - such as (again, as noted in a comment on the earlier article), the injunction to put Jesus ahead of one's family, and only to marry if one can't stand celibacy - it's kind of weird. As the three parables in Luke make clear, Christian ethics isn't about virtue, i.e. being a good person, as much as it is about being saved in the next life. That this was clear to outside observers is confirmed by Emperor Julian, who, in his satirical work 'Caesars,' has Constantine, the famous 'Christian emperor,' use the new faith as a pretext for getting away, literally, with crimes.
A couple points:
Christianity isn't mindlessly tolerant. The concepts of sin, penance, and forgiveness (not to mention excommunication) provide a fairly robust framework for preventing infinite-defect exploitation. "Be nice to everyone" can be understood as a marketing come-on. Once you've converted you're held to fairly high standards by the community. Becoming Christian isn't a version of getting on the welfare role.
Christians also aren't mindlessly generous. There are plenty of scriptural references which encourage the application of judgement along with generosity. "Don't cast pearls before swine," and lots of admonitions to abandon people if they don't quickly accept the good news. That could easily be recast as a form of tit-for-tat. Also be mindful that "love your neighbor as yourself" doesn't mean to love him MORE than yourself. It means you should offer reasonable assistance to someone in legitimate need, not hand your entire net worth to the first beggar you see.
Quakers aren't representative Christians. The long history of religious war should convince you of that. Christians have never been shy about the application of violence in defense of the faith.
I'd say that the game-theoretic strategy of Christianity actually is quite close to tit-for-tat and all the "love thy neighbor" stuff could be properly interpreted as "default to COOPERATE-BOT even for outgroup members, otherwise it's tit-for-tat with forgiveness." It *emphasizes* the cooperation stuff because the natural human tendency is to lean into retaliation (so kind of the #3 above, plus shades of Scott's earlier essay "The Ideology Isn't the Movement").
"This is why I’m so fascinated by the early Christians. They played the doomed COOPERATE-BOT strategy and took over the world."
Hypatia of Alexandria would like a word with you.
Early Christians were perfectly capable of brutal and norm-violating violence when it was strategically useful. Yes, they did lots of good things too, and I agree that they practically invented the concept of goodness, and that this goodness was a major advantage, but characterizing them as 'cooperate-bot' is wrong. They tried to convert people, and were into forgiveness, but reacted to any serious philosophical attack (be it heresy or a smart pagan) with rapid and brutal escalation.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you are not repeating the pop culture version of Hypatia's life.
Yes, she was collateral damage in a nasty, messy, political three-way power struggle in Alexandria, a place and time notorious for volatile, riotous, nasty, messy political fights and for the Alexandrian mob being happy to riot and cause damage, be they Jewish, pagan or Christian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia#Death
"Socrates Scholasticus presents Hypatia's murder as entirely politically motivated and makes no mention of any role that Hypatia's paganism might have played in her death. Instead, he reasons that "she fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed. For as she had frequent interviews with Orestes, it was calumniously reported among the Christian populace that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop." Socrates Scholasticus unequivocally condemns the actions of the mob, declaring, "Surely nothing can be farther from the spirit of Christianity than the allowance of massacres, fights, and transactions of that sort."
The bishop and those claiming to be acting for him certainly didn't cover themselves in glory in this affair, but it was because Hypatia was popular, influential, and did wield a certain degree of power in the sphere of Alexandrian civic life that she was killed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-NXEpZ7j5g
"The story often told about Hypatia of Alexandria was that she was a great scientist, rationalist and scholar who was brutally murdered by a mob of Christians who hated her knowledge and learning, with her death ushering in the Dark Ages. But this story is mostly nonsense and the real history is far more complex and much more interesting."
The irony - or balance between the pragmatic and the co-operate bot factions? - is that the parabalani, the people who voluntarily acted as nurses to the sick and buried the dead, were also used as bodyguards by bishops and involved in these very physical fights:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabalani
"The Parabalani (Late Latin parabalānī, "persons who risk their lives as nurses", from Ancient Greek: παραβαλανεῖς) or Parabolani (from παραβολᾶνοι or παράβολοι) were the members of a brotherhood, who in early Christianity voluntarily undertook the care of the sick and the burial of the dead, knowing that they themselves could die.
Generally drawn from the lower strata of society, they also functioned as attendants to local bishops and were sometimes used by them as bodyguards and in violent clashes with their opponents."
The violence of that setting does undermine the claim that early Christians followed the COOPERATE-BOT strategy.
By 400 were they really "early" Christians? They had been in political power for more than a century. And Hypatia was as removed from Christ in a temporal sense as we are to the Puritans.
Part of it is the problem formulation, unlike prisoners dilemma, you aren't registering actions simultaneously but separately. Instead, it's closer to turn taking. In this formulation, if you assume most people are tit-for-tat, but there's margin for error and some people who just like to 'test-the-waters', tit-for-tat immediately devolves into the dreaded defect-defect doom loop.
Think about how much of human history consists of "someone, somewhere, did something bad and we've been killing each other ever since". Forgiveness, one of the primary virtues of Christianity, is the only way to escape a defect-defect doom loop. It's not that Christians as a whole are super altruistic cooperate-bots, it's that they are slightly more likely to escape the circle of violence. If most people would rather be cooperating than defecting, then a little bit of forgiveness can quickly snowball into a lot of cooperation.
Based on the quote about lawsuits, I think the ideology of early Christians was cooperate-bot but their actions were more like tit-for-tat with a very high rate of forgiveness. Add in the possibilities of reputation and communication and I can see where that would be a very effective strategy for human interactions.
>There’s a parallel debate in charity funding. A pragmatist faction wants to make sure everything we fund is PR-friendly and won’t make everybody hate us or be incredibly embarrassing if it fails; a COOPERATE-BOT faction thinks we have a moral duty to fund the exact object-level highest-utility projects even if everyone will hate us for it and we’ll never get another penny of funding ever again.
I think you're conflating unconditional co-operation with ideological purity here. These are identical in the case of "mere" Christianity, but the EA faction you're labeling COOPERATE-BOT are not actually co-operating.
Same goes for the Quakers to some extent, actually. Refusing to pay taxes in the name of pacifism, sympathetic as we might find this, does not directly follow from the Christian imperative of universal love.
I've got another theory to add to the pile: Environmental confounds. Real world interaction is balanced between player-player and player-environment models. More investment in player-player leads to less investment in player-environment, and vice versa.
Of these two, player-player interactions are more variable, and shorter term; which means they adapt more efficiently to exploitation. Player-environment interaction is far more lucrative long-term, so any decrease puts a society at a distinct disadvantage. This winnows the most efficient player-player model down to either COOPERATE-BOT, or DEFECT-BOT, since they are the simplest. However, DEFECT-BOT disallows information transfer, which means player-environment breakthroughs can't spread.
Christians may have succeeded because COOPERATE-BOT allowed them to focus more of their energies on highly lucrative player-environment interactions. While others were gathering info on who to trust, Christians were figuring out the best way to fight back against a plague. While others were thinking up a revenge plot, Christians forgave, then forgot, then started thinking about how they could solve problems which would matter for longer than a single human lifespan.
To me, free speech seems more like "rules of engagement" than it does like "surrender". It doesn't mean you stop pushing for your own ideology, just that you limit the means for doing so. Though that does suggest that you can gain a counter-intuitive advantage by unilaterally limiting your own means, even when your opponents don't. I suppose you could view martyrdom as a very extreme example on that continuum?
Non-violent protest movements like Ghandi and MLK Jr. also see like central examples of unilateral rules of engagement. I seem to recall a TED talk that claimed non-violent radical movements succeeded about twice as often as violent ones (though both usually fail), and argued this was because non-violent movements succeed in mobilizing more people to their cause (especially women & children, but generally anyone who doesn't like violence or isn't good at it).
Notice that Gandhi & MLK were only able practice non-violence within the British Empire & United States, among the most liberal polities of their time (and ones with a common political heritage). Nobody was able to have any success with such a strategy against Nazi Germany (even though Gandhi recommended just that to the Jews).
Has there been a Prisoner's Dillema-type tournament where pairings are at least partly chosen by the participants - with some awareness of how far their own personal current score is from the elimination threshold - rather than purely random? i suspect that would explain part of it.
Christians often explicitly compare themselves to sheep. If you see two intruders on your territory, one a sheep, the other a man with an axe, with no time to gather further information, which are you more likely to kill on the spot vs. bring further inside and feed?
Lot of roman politics was founded on patron-client relationships https://acoup.blog/2024/06/07/collections-how-to-raise-a-tribal-army-in-pre-roman-europe-part-i-aristocrats-retainers-and-clients/ so in a sense perhaps the Christian community as a whole was playing "moneyball" against the mainstream client-recruitment algorithm - they'd accept people who didn't look like good prospects for patronage (because they'd accept literally anybody) and the ones who turned out to have potential that the mainstream algorithm failed to recognize would then, after recovering from whatever personal crisis required charity, defend the Christian community from outside aggressors - out of a sense of reciprocity, and to preserve a valuable resource just in case they needed it again in the future.
Christianity is not just undiscerning cooperate-bot. Christianity should be thought of as strong discernment about when to cooperate at an astonishing level (in giving charity to all) and when to defect at an astonishing level (from Roman sexual immorality, nasty gladiator shows, Roman legal system, pagan rituals). They were persecuted because of all the defecting they did from stuff the Romans saw as an essential part of being Roman.
John Locke argues (and I agree) in The Reasonableness of Christianity that Christianity got the closest to the Natural Law of any system that has been put forth and this was successful in creating a thriving society. The things Christians defected from were detrimental to human society flourishing and the ways in which they chose to cooperate were ways that enhanced human flourishing.
I think the real power is in caring more about the impact to the community than the impact to the self. COOPERATE-BOT is mindless without thought for the impact on DEFECTOR-BOT; in real life, a devotee can express a willingness to accept cost for the sake of another, which is powerful. This is perhaps just your points 1/2; but I think that the human interaction is critical when thinking about a movement.
I feel like you keep seriously discounting how memetically optimized Christianity is. You can get away with suboptimal game theory when all of your competition is just completely awful. Of course, once Christianity became the dominant religion, and the only competition became other Christians and other similarly optimized religions, you're back to using Tit-for-Tat. Which history seems to reflect quite well.
Also, on the part about liberalism... Really?? Even ignoring the absurdity of implying that liberalism follows COOPERATE-BOT in practice, it's a bit soon to be celebrating that liberalism triumphed over fascism, don't you think? Especially given recent events...
Too soon? No, fascism was an interwar phenomena that got stomped out to the extent basically nobody will claim to be a fascist anymore. There are certainly other varieties of authoritarianism, but none seem to regard war as the highest aspiration even since the countries that did lost the big war.
Tit-for-tat is only optimal under a certain kind of initial conditions, which happened to be the ones around which the IPD was originally designed. For anyone who thinks it's some kind of Pareto optimal: https://ncase.me/trust/ is both cute and insightful.
I thought from some old SSC post (Albion's seed?) that, although the Quakers as a group diminished, the Quaker ideas have so taken over the Western world that they're just considered normal these days. Consider, pre-pandemic at least, the handshake: at the time this was a radical and antiauthoritarian gesture as opposed to the complicated system of bows and curtseys and other expressions to acknowledge the differences in one's relative standing.
You can do egalitarian bowing.
Indeed you can, but that's not how the system worked that the Quakers replaced. It would be a good custom to adopt during a pandemic though.
I've watched several martial arts tournaments where both contestants bowed to each other before starting the fight, and I'm all for that kind of ritual.
Up to about 15 years ago I was a member of a religion well spread down here in Brazil called Kardecism (aka Spiritism, aka Kardecist Spiritism). It has something between 4 and 40 million followers, meaning something between 1% and 10% of the population. The trait that attracted me the most in it was its very intense, and I mean INTENSE, focus on charity.
It's derived from Christianity, but with several tweaks. One of them was to take the sayings of Jesus in the Gospels about what people ought to do, ignore most everything else, including ignoring the doctrines, dogmas, and the like, and say to followers that's what one needs to actively do to reach a higher state in the afterlife. That belief or disbelief don't matter, all that matters is doing charity, towards everyone, whether Spiritists or not, all the time, without demanding from them anything in return, at all -- not even demanding from them to listen to the Spiritist message itself, unless and until they express interest.
I left due to not believing the metaphysics anymore, but I still admire them and contribute to one of their charities. And they do have lots and lots and _lots_ of those, some of which really huge.
Interestingly, since it's a religion that dwells on necromancy (channeling the spirits of the dead either for them to give instructions to the living, or to do charity towards them, depending on whether the channelers presents them as being in a good or bad situation on the afterlife), they're also heavily attacked by more typical Christian branches, which accuse it of satanism, all the while recognizing the charity they do under clenched teeth, so there's that too.
So, several parallels with your text, it'd seem.
If you look at passages on church discipline (for example in Matthew 18), it's clear that Christianity's strategy is not COOPERATE-BOT, but DELEGATE-PUNISHMENT. https://cameronharwick.com/writing/christianity-cooperation-and-state-formation/
Good point. The individual is not supposed to PUNISH by himself, which is good because (a) we're all biased, and (b) we get bitter. The Matthew 18 procedure is to (1) talk to the person you have a grievance against, (2) if that fails, get somebody else to go with you -- if you can, and (3) if that fails, go to the elders and get them to talk to the person and maybe expel them from the church.
One nit-pick. When you have the two or three witnesses, you go to the assembly which can decide what to do as a body. There is no hint that the elders/overseers were supposed to have disciplinary powers early on.
Hah-- a presbyterian slip on my part.
In Matthew 18:21, Jesus says that you should forgive your brother who sins against you not seven times, but seven times seventy times. Has anyone tried this as an iterated prisoners dilemma strategy?
In the original IPD experiment, with the interaction between bots set to 100 iterations, wouldn't 490 forgivenesses be indistinguishable from always-cooperate?
As an aside, I wish that the IPD experiment had also been run with the bots told at each interaction, how many interactions were left with the other player...
The hole in Scott's argument here is so obvious that I strongly suspect this is some kind of self-deprecating parody of the rationalists' characteristic naïveté about human nature.
Early Christians did not "play the doomed COOPERATE-BOT strategy and take over the world". They played COOPERATE-BOT only as long as their capacity to meaningfully retaliate against their enemies was severely limited, then they mostly switched to ~TIT-FOR-TAT once they had control of an actual army. This is pretty basic Roman history, so it's puzzling to me that Scott doesn't seem to have noticed it.
Correct. I don't think the Docetists, Montanists, Donatists, Marcionites, Valentinians, and Pelagians would have thought that the Christians who were cancelling them were 'playing Cooperate-Bot.' In fact the Pelagians were still getting slammed in the 16th-century Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles, still used today - some hatreds die hard.
"This was so boring that Axelrod sponsored a second tournament specifically for strategies that could displace TIT-FOR-TAT. When the dust cleared, TIT-FOR-TAT still won - although some strategies could beat it in head-to-head matches, they did worst against each other, and when all the points were added up TIT-FOR-TAT remained on top."
The story's even better than that. Even in the first tournament, some strategies could beat TITFORTAT in one-on-one; it's just that they only beat it by a little bit, and they piled up very bad scores against each other and against other aggressive strategies. Also, in the second tournament, if I remember right, some strategies were submitted that would have won the first tournament, even beating TIT FOR TAT there-- but the second tournament had new entries that fouled them up. The great thing about Tit for Tat is that it's robust to lots of different environements, because of its simplicity.
See my https://rasmusen.org/GI/chapters/chap06_pbe.pdf .
"Not exactly the same, but maybe rhyming: what about modern liberalism? To the monarchs and dictators of the past, free speech might seem kind of like COOPERATE-BOT in a limited domain: the idea that elites shouldn’t make any forceful/legal effort to protect their ideological and spiritual position must sound almost as crazy as them not making any forceful/legal effort to protect themselves if attacked, or to prevent themselves from getting cheated. It is, in some sense, a unilateral surrender in the war of ideas; fascists and communists will do their best to crush liberalism, but liberals cannot ban discussion of fascism or communism. The fact that this, too, has worked, makes me think early Christianity wasn’t just a one-off, but suggests some larger point."
Well put. This is the essence of Popper's Paradox of Tolerance. See the second half of https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/the-yale-law-school-protest-and-karl?utm_source=publication-search . I think the problem there is that liberals can't ban advocacy of communism without falling onto the slippery slope of banning democratic socialism, etc. Also, in the marketplace of ideas, allowing competition from marketplace destroyers doesn't always end up badly, unlike in physical combat.
Almost invariably when someone brings up Popper's Paradox of Tolerance they misunderstand it (something I've harped on before https://x.com/TeaGeeGeePea/status/1596534549571588098 ), so I was expecting you to do the same thing, so it was gratifying to see that your post is about someone else invoking it in a misunderstanding that you ably point out. The CPUSA was not obviously such a group falling outside the domain of tolerance, even if Communists elsewhere have been. As I said in another comment, that could have been a result of their weakness that they couldn't just try to seize power by force and had to focus on building up their movement first.
I share your frustration. Lefties seem to think the Paradox of Tolerance means liberals should suppress conservative speech because it criticizes people and that's intolerant. Of course, what Popper meant, writing in 1950 or so, was that liberals should suppress Fascists and Communists because they advocate suppression of everyone else, which is almost hte opposite.
Even advocating the suppression of everyone else is insufficient. As Scott said:
"As a Jew, if I heard that skinheads were beating up Jews in dark alleys, I would be pretty freaked out; for all I know I could be the next victim. But if I heard that skinheads were circulating a petition to get Congress to expel all the Jews, I wouldn’t be freaked out at all. I would expect almost nobody to sign the petition"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/02/be-nice-at-least-until-you-can-coordinate-meanness/
Oh, and on Gus Hall and the American Communist Party: it was not a serious threat, but they certainly advocated suppression of free speech and the overthrow of hte US Constitution, and they were funded by our foreign enemy, the Soviet Union.
> They were very serious about this; history records many Quakers who were arrested or even killed rather than compromise their principles, and the British Crown seized Pennsylvania from the Quakers a few times because they wouldn’t make extremely cheap gestures like pay taxes or swear oaths.
Not sure if my sarcasm detector is broken, but given the history of conflict involving disputes on taxation and the literal nature of paying taxes, it seems inaccurate to bucket "pay taxes" into the "extremely cheap gestures" category.
I) Jesus said "turn the other cheek" (singular) and not "turn infinitely many cheeks".
II) With that out of the way this is ground already covered by https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1820, no?
Funny, since Scott Aaronson's post is full of him noting that other people had similar ideas earlier.
Shortly before his death Freeman Dyson (Dyson spheres are named after him) co-authored a paper that attracted a lot of attention where they came up with a new strategy for iterated prisoner dilemmas (that they called "extortionist") that is better than tit-for-tat in many situations.
But the answer to what is the best strategy is very sensitive to how you define best, and the specific set up. Building on the work of Dyson, people have shown that in evolutionary iterated prisoner dilemmas certain generous strategis prevail. There is an interesting discussion of it here https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2012/07/zerodeterminant_strategies_in.html
This blog post discusses the connection between Press-Dyson strategy and the advantages of theory-of-mind:
"In their discussion, Press and Dyson focus on the results in terms of “evolutionary” players versus those with a “theory of mind”. In their parlance, an “evolutionary” player is one who attempts to maximize his own score using some optimization scheme. This is the sort of player against which you want to play an extortionate strategy, since his optimization will then lead him to cooperate, giving you an unequal share of the payoffs."
There's a great essay called "The Power Tactics of Jesus Christ," by Jay Haley that's relevant here. It's not about Christianity, though, but about Christ himself, but does present some of Haley's ideas about how being coming across as good and forgiving give you power. Here are a few quotes from a summary of the essay's view of Christ's tactics:
===
Promise a paradise in some undefined future if only you follow the leader. Threaten misery if you do not follow the leader
====
Make great personal sacrifices to avoid the appearance of seeking personal power
==
Claim you are merely an interpreter of a preexisting supernatural force.
==
However, you are the only correct interpretation of that force.
====
Publicly announce your authority as equal to the entire existing established authority
===
Use flexible tactics, answering attacks with attacks where the establishment is weak, but with nonviolence techniques where the establishment is strong.
===
In the final struggle with the establishment, do not negotiate, as your goal is power outside the establishment, hence no compromise is possible.
It is crazy how Christianity pioneered the modern cult while also perfecting it so quickly that new cults still use the same tactics two millenia later.
Groups who win moral victory are always persistent, and often aren't very cooperative. The Taliban are not very nice, but they are very persistent, and they were able to win Afghanistan from the much nicer US-backed government.
Try this thought experiment: Somebody is being tortured, but they refuse to confess, even when they're right on the edge of dying. Who do you sympathize with, the Martyr or the torture? The Martyr obviously! It doesn't even matter what ideology the Martyr is using, just the fact that they resist to the end is really compelling. This illustrates a general principle: people infer moral truth from whoever is the most persistent, not who gets the most utility or who is the most powerful. So the same thing happened in early Christianity: the early Christians for whatever reason, really really believed in Christianity, and people could see that. Their persistence was what persuaded people and why they won, not because they optimized utility. If they had optimized utility, everyone else would see that they changed their beliefs whenever it's convenient, and so everyone else would conclude that the optimizers were faking their beliefs. This doesn't answer the question of how the early Christians became so convinced. But I think the answer is to look at conviction, not at utility.
WEIRD people are likely to sympathize with the martyr, but the Aztecs might not have.
Within your attempt at modeling this, we might regard Christianity as a whole as playing the following strategy:
1. Start out acting like COOPERATE-BOT
2. Once the optics of that have swept the globe, gradually switch back to defecting at a self-serving rate
That is, you truncated the experiment too early by considering only the *early* Christians. We're still in the middle of the game! (at least up till 50 years ago, maybe).
... I don't think that's the actual answer, though; the people who acted less COOPERATEy over time were just new people, not the original players, and they were adjusting to new scenarios. I think the actual ancient Christian game theory is more like this:
The big difference between reality and a regular IPD setup is: whatever strategy you/your group chooses, everyone else is going to model it and try to predict your behavior. It's easy, too, because you're actively telling them what your behavior is going to be, and honestly (this is important) signaling it also.
In the IPD game, I'm sure plenty of bots tried to model their opponent bots in order to outsmart them, and probably some bots tried to fake our their opponents into mis-modeling to outsmart them back. The limiting factor ends up being "whoever is better at modeling" or "whoever has more computation power / a more efficient algorithm" or something. TIT-FOR-TAT then is like a "model with a lookback of 1", in the sense that it models the opponent in the dumbest possible way -- and *presumably* a model with more lookback would strictly do a better job than that. Simply:
1. Play TIT-FOR-TAT for a while
2. Once you understand your opponent's strategy, gradually start playing against it on purpose
3. If it stops working, go back to TIT-FOR-TAT
At some mathematical level I think this *has* to be better than TIT-FOR-TAT, at least if you're the only person doing it (which isn't that interesting in IPD cause you won't be) or if you're the person who's *best* at it (which maybe is, and reminds me of "game theory with AGI involved" stuff that I've seen around). But it's entirely contingent on the "once you understand" part. If you can't do that, it falls apart. And if you *both* doing it, it also falls apart, or at least, finds a winner and degenerates into the same game-theoretic equilibrium that TIT-FOR-TAT comes out ahead in.
But IRL the game is different. I think there are two main ways:
1. People's goal isn't necessarily to *win*, but rather to achieve a certain amount of safety and security. 2. People playing a strategy may *genuinely believe* that their strategy is morally right -- and other people might be able to *discern that* (from vibes, at least).
Which means that
1. It's possible for early Christians to play COOPERATE-BOT (or TIT-FOR-TAT) as an "honest signal" that can't be faked (at least in the short-term
2. It's possible for other people to (a) model the fact that they're doing that, and trust it (because it's an honest signal), and then (b) gradually adjust their own morals to pick a strategy in reaction to that which optimizes their outcomes in the face of it.
When your opponent promises to be good and kind and not take advantage of you if you also become good and kind, and you can *believe them*, then it's a lot easier to consider strategies that would never win a "wild west" game where everyone is out to get each other. Why play TIT-FOR-TAT if you trust your opponent to be nice and the game isn't zero sum because there's a way you can both be happy?
The great innovation of Christianity, perhaps, was realizing that "COOPERATE has to start somewhere and it may as well be us, and the only way it works is if we stick to our guns for a really long such that other people, who are modeling us, begin to trust that we really mean it". And how do you show that you really mean it? Martyrdom and sacrifice: individuals putting a lot on the line personally, over and over, in order to prove beyond doubt that the group really, really does mean it.
Many of the mystery cults also taught Universal compassion. The pythagoreans emphasized compassion towards animals, were vegetarian, and refused animal sacrifices. Universal compassion was absolutely *not* a Christian invention, and doesn't explain the spread of early Christianity.
The Pythagoreans also murdered a mathematician who developed a "heretical" proof that irrational numbers exist, so...
I guess that's what happens when you turn mathematics into a religion. There must be a lesson for rationalists in here somewhere...
Maybe you're overthinking this? Maybe it's just "luck" ( ie a combination of many things, not one master game theory strategy)?
Islam clearly adopted a somewhat different plan, and they basically came in second and (who knows) maybe some better luck against Charles Martel or the Hungarian Army and they might be first?
Christianity, meanwhile, was far from kind, even to its OWN ADHERENTS...
An outsider may not be aware of this, but basically from the day Christianity had any sort of state power, that power was used mainly to crush dissenting Christians, whether the dissent was based on Donatism, on various bizarre Christology disputes, or in arguments about icons. The Christian Roman State killed far more dissenting Christians than the pagan Roman state ever killed.
And this began even before state power. The first big heresy I know of is Marcionism, culminating in Marcion being excommunicated in 144 CE, with plenty following, eg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schism_in_Christianity
Christianity did have a deeper breadth of texts than, say Judaism, so there was more scope to find a passage proving whatever it was you wanted to prove, sometimes turn the other cheek, sometimes an eye for an eye. But that mainly shows that you want to found your religion on as many disparate texts as possible, so that you have this flexibility (a real problem if your founding texts are as narrow as Communism, Nazi'ism, or Woke. Probably also the case for Scientology. Mormonism does better here, having the full Christian corpus along with also the Book of Mormon).
"fascists and communists will do their best to crush liberalism, but liberals cannot ban discussion of fascism or communism."
The way this is framed is very slightly motte+baileyish. . . There is not the clear distinction here you are implying, pretty much every country that's been liberal or communist or fascist "allows discussion" of other systems while de facto "crushing" them internally. You can discuss that other systems are out there and exist, and what may have led misguided people to them, but you can't identify as one, fly their flags, use their symbols, argue that they had benefits on the margins despite their mistakes and some better iteration might be a good way forward, etc.
Modern American style free speech with generous bounds for devils advocacy and "just asking questions" is still an outlier for liberal orders in general. Most liberal orders out there, historically or presently, are nowhere near "unilateral surrender in the war of ideas."
I suppose that societies in which communism was much more popular than the US either went communist or authoritarian anti-communist during the Cold War.
I'm experiencing Deja Vu.
Were you inspired by this Veritasium video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM ?
Points 1 and 2 in particular, feel eerily familiar.
The "mysteries" of the Greco-Roman mystery cults were extremely bloody, shocking visual spectacles. The impact of witnessing these performative, gorey rites was that any message conveyed in these private spaces became deeply entangled with the emotional memory of the horror witnessed.
Christianity supplanted these private mystery religions around the time that early Christians shared their accounts of the torture and public execution of the Son of God. The visceral impact of such bloody imagery has been vastly underrated in the history of Christianity's appeal and mass spread.
I think it’s a question of their opponents’ strategy. It’s probably no coincidence that the early Christians had their success in a Greek/Roman context, where even when they were persecuted, there was still some pretense of law and rationality at the core of the society. Not that the Romans went easy on them, but I am not sure their strategy would have been as successful in a different context, like a theocratic, ethno-nationalist, or even just a less developed authoritarian state. They probably wouldn’t even have succeeded in, say, 14th century Europe if they weren’t already established by then.
It’s the same reason Gandhi, MLK and eventually Mandela largely succeeded, even if they had a hell of a time doing it: Because the culture at large allowed it. Had they tried the same strategy for getting influence in Nazi Germany, we wouldn’t even have known their names.
Good point. The Romans tolerated other religions without their polytheistic/henotheistic empire much of the time. Monotheistic religions have been less liable to permit such a cancerous growth Mormonism might be a recent example within the USA with its freedom of religion, but even there a successful 19th century kulturkampf was waged against them until they were forced to give up polygamy.
I am gobsmacked at how much ink you just spilled dancing around the edges of what Christians actually believe: COOPERATE-BOT + Eternal reward.
All the hemming and hawing over game theory and you couldn’t even once admit that most Christians believe in Heaven.
He'll get there. I have upgraded Scott's conversion-to-Christianity date from 2033 to 2031. Denomination prediction holding steady with a 2/3 probably of Catholic, 1/6 Orthodoxy, 1/6 other.
He's now a husband and father, no way he is going to dump his family heritage and leave Judaism for the rotten Papists 😀
Once you get older and have your own family, you get more traditional, whatever the tradition you were raised.
I don’t care if he becomes a Christian, but if he’s going to agonize over why they acted a certain way, at least consider that they believe the tenets of their religion.
Try adding noise into the game, so that it’s not obvious whether or not the other party really has defected against you. The fact that other people’s intentions aren’t legible to us, and that our actions often annoy or upset others when we don’t mean to, isn’t a small detail of the world. It’s huge.
If the noise is negatively biased, so that you don’t get the false appearance of someone cooperating, but you do get the false appearance of defecting, the more the tit-for-tat strategy fails.
>Even Emperor Julian, an enemy of Christianity, admitted it lived up to its own standards
I'm skeptical as to whether he could actually tell. A lot of the discussion in the last post was about selection effects between people, and selection effects between ideologies. I also expect selection effects in repeating stories about people. Given an impressive anecdote about person A and a lukewarm anecdote about person B, I expect the former to be repeated more often.
We have a hard enough time in the modern world getting accurate statistics about antisocial and prosocial behavior in various subgroups. I doubt that anyone in the ancient world could nail down such differences solidly.
I think it's worth noting that Christians did not, in fact, remain pacifistic. Hence Quakers & the Amish having to reinvent it. They were only able to run the empire (and the fragmentary polities that emerged from it) as militarists. COOPERATE-BOT was displaced by at least TIT-FOR-TAT-BOT (and arguably a more aggressive bot than that, since these states tended to be expansionist when they could be).
I think what helped Christianity succeed was social-psychological and institutional factors orthogonal to the above game-theory stuff.
Scott, is that image of the man with the bloody sword from GPT4? If so, how'd you get it to make that? I can't get it to make anything even faintly violent. Asked for an image of an animal nipping somebody's toes and it refused. Asked for a whirlpool image showing parts of the ocean a ways off getting sucked into the vortex, and it refused because my prompt had "suck" in it.
>Asked for an image of an animal nipping somebody's toes and it refused.
DALL-E accepted
>Image of a kitten pouncing on their owner's toes in bed
though the kitten's paws (and claws) don't really quite connect with the toes...
heh. think how many cat pix it trained on. it’s probably dying for a chance to offload some cat cute.
True! Giving it an excuse to add feline content likely improves the chances for a purrfectly formed image. Many Thanks!
It seems like you're falling for early Christian propaganda, and then going well beyond even their own claims, when you say "the early Christians played the doomed COOPERATE-BOT strategy and took over the world". Look at this list of Roman civil wars and revolts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_civil_wars_and_revolts
The Roman Empire became Christian by the mid 4th century, and pretty much everyone was Christian by the late 4th century. Did they stop killing each other? Not at all. There were even more assassinations, usurpations, and civil wars after Christianization than during the pagan Pax Romana. Constantine himself murdered both his wife and his son. Even most of the external wars after the 4th century were Christian vs. Christian because most of the barbarian tribes, including the Goths who sacked Rome in 410, were some version of Christian. Does this sound like COOPERATE-BOT to you?
There are some Christians, most famously Augustine, who say that the Christians were nicer in war than pagans were. Rather than killing or raping everyone and stealing everything, the Goths who sacked Rome spared people who fled to churches, and only killed or raped some people. Fine, maybe they're right. But that's not COOPERATE-BOT; at most it might be TIT-FOR-TAT-WITH-SLIGHTLY-MORE-FORGIVENESS-BOT.
That sounds like "weak theory" #3: "Overwhelm downward adjustment". If it wasn't for the high standard to start with, they might not have even had the "SLIGHTLY-MORE-FORGIVENESS" part.
It seems like something similar happened in international relations. If Curtis is right, then the ancient world was essentially a world where every country was playing tit for that strategy. It’s also the world he advocates we should go back to. Only involve yourselves if there is something material affecting you from one another country.
History has had four great religious revivals, called the great awakenings. This most recent awokening... sure seems to have a lot in common, as our gracious host so eloquently points out. Will history remember the death of George Floyd as the beginning of the fifth great awakening? I think it is possible.
Interesting theory; what would those 4 be?
oh they were called the great awakenings.
This is a confused post.
Tit for tat is studied in a two player setting, and yet you are talking about multi agent settings. Transfering the reasoning from a two player, to a complex hugely large social one is as likely to delude and confuse, as it is to enlighten.
That is unless one is very careful, and keep track, and reason about the generalisation. This post does none of those things.
I agree. In the two-player tournament, COOPERATE-BOY was forced to play a hundred iterations against DEFECT-BOT. In a more realistic setting the DEFECT-BOT’s reputation would precede them and they’d be increasingly hard-pressed to find anyone to engage them at all.
I agree as well. The winning strategy was to cooperate and then associate (and further cooperate) with other cooperators. It is a large scale reputation game, where cooperators cooperate together and defectors get left out in the cold.
The winning move is to start as a cooperator and then select for cooperators and against defectors.
I remember a computer games column (maybe in Sci Am.) with a 2-D grid of players, and you played prisoners dilemma with your NN. There might have only been two choices for each player (grid point), always defect or always cooperate. You'd get areas of each group, and one or the other would eventually take over the whole grid (array)
Isn’t there an obvious answer that you haven’t considered?
While Christ-like or cooperate-bot strategy could not be implemented by the spontaneous will of individuals (because it only takes one spoiler to ruin the perfect harmony). It can work (by and large) when imposed top-down from a (sometimes hypocritical) sovereign.
In the post, Scott says that he has little time for attempts to found morality is self-interest and finds them to be generally cranky. This is merely because he hasn't yet read my insane, quasi-religiously inflected attempt to found morality on FDT + plus the simulation hypothesis. If he had, I'm sure he'd see the light 🙏:
https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/create-worlds-unto-others-as-you?utm_source=publication-search
What does it even mean to "found" morality? You can explain its rise in evolutionary terms, but that merely gives you a "how it got there", not a "why is it good". Plus, our moral intuitions are way too complicated and contradictory to be reduced to some formula that you might want to "found" on some moral axiom such as cooperation or common benefit.
Gotta share my favorite demonstration of the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma: https://ncase.me/trust/
Old Godzilla was a hoppin’ around…
I don't think it makes sense to model the Christians' behavior as a prisoner's dilemma strategy:
- It's not clear that the payoff distributions for the L1 question of whether to be nice or not follow the classic prisoner's dilemma (though they may)
- The L2 game is won by conversions; the points in the L1 game are irrelevant anyway unless they affect that
- There are a lot of players having repeated and visible interactions with lots of other players, with the payoff matrix for each (on both the L1 and L2 levels) likely slightly different
The hurdle the early Christians had to get over was getting a large number of people to hear about and believe in their God. Once someone believes, the cooperation behavior follows directly from the teachings (and more cynically, the worry that God's judgment after death may look more like tit-for-tat). Radical cooperation in the face of persecution has some advantages for spreading belief:
- It's shocking. Unusual behavior probably got the Christians disproportionately talked about in a way that was on-brand and at least somewhat positive ("They're just TOO nice and TOO committed" was probably ok PR even in Roman times even if it wasn't the #1 ideal)
- It's a strong signal of genuine belief. We're far more likely to believe something if we think others do, especially if we're losing confidence in alternatives
- It could lower the barriers to entry by making the group look welcoming (don't have to worry about being hazed as the new guy)
- Rejecting the incumbent status game has the effect of raising perceived social status in some situations, which could be appealing to someone struggling to live up to expectations or otherwise disillusioned with the existing social system
The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny is from 2005 according to wikipedia. I remember seeing it in 2007.
I think of the introduction of Christianity as a transition towards a higher-trust society. In the Book Review, Scott discusses how ancient Rome was a shithole und everyone would get robbed as soon as they left their house at night. Thats not gonna happen if everybody really loves their neighbor, and makes for a better place to live. Turning the other cheek is what allows you to brute-force yourself to this position. Societies are low-trust for a reason, and suddenly becoming high-trust incurs costs for any individual who does it.
I particularly like this perspective because I feel that it is broadly applicable to societies of the time, like Scandinavia.
I do not believe that the history of Christianity shows any great commitment to relentlessly forgiving cooperation with people who are A: not Christians and B: weaker than the Christians they are dealing with. Admittedly, that didn't come up terribly often in the first few centuries AD, but that just means that we don't have evidence either way, not that the early Christians were broadly omnicooperative.
I also think it is relevant that humans are social animals, most of whom spend a lot more time and effort rationalizing what *feels* right than reasoning about what *is* right. Hurting nice people, doesn't feel good, and that reduces the payoff of "Defect". Doubly so for hurting members of the ingroup, not so much for members of the outgroup. Perceiving one's self as virtuous also feels good, and the standard for virtue is mostly set by the observed behavior of the ingroup.
So, it seems to me entirely plausible and entirely consistent with the history of Christianity that the winning strategy is:
When dealing with the outgroup, tit-for-tat with forgiveness for all the usual game-theory reasons, *provided* you are strong enough to inflict substantial punishments for defectors.
When dealing with a particularly powerful outgroup that can crush you like a bug, cooperate. Whatever meager benefit you might gain with some minor bit of punitive defiance, is outweighed by the bit where your forgiveness and cooperation makes them feel bad about defecting - and as more of their people shy away from hurting you, their consensus definition of virtue shifts towards "don't hurt those nice people over there, they haven't done us any harm".
When dealing with the ingroup, cooperate pretty much always, Everybody will try defecting now and then because of the obvious short-term gains, but surrounded by all that cooperative forgiveness they'll feel really bad about it and the equilibrium will be for serious defections to be uncommon. Occasionally some fool or sociopath won't get the message and won't even try to fake it, and maybe we'll have to throw him out of the group, but that should be very rare.
This only works if the ingroup consensus actually is "cooperate pretty much always"; it's not a recipe for victory in every-man-for-himself-istan.
An alternate framing might be, we live in a fuzzy imperfect universe so the winning strategy is going to be tit-for-tat with forgiveness, but the setting on the "forgiveness" dial is very context-dependent and with a devoutly Christian ingroup may be at the 90+% forgiveness level.
One of my managers at MS was a cooperate bot. His name was Kaushik.
Things are seldom fixed pie, purely scarcity based. Even when food, shelter, and other resources may be limited, even severely limited, conceptual & soft resources like caring, friendliness, knowledge, optimism / hope, humor, a sense of energy are all sharable, replicable, enabled by a growth mindset. This is the essence of liberalism. And it is what is missed, misperceived, and often simply not understood by those who reject liberalism. These lessons are taught everywhere. Many people are just not able to understand, to generalize the concepts, instead cycling their thoughts on these toy models of reality, motivations, and animating stories. Interesting, the long path you have taken to get to where you are sensing the shape of this.
The ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny is from 2005 yes it's really really old
I
>the leading ideology of the 21st century thus far appears to be a hyper-Christian bleeding-heart liberalism: COOPERATE-BOT in a bloodstained sweater.
Or so the propaganda goes, anyway.
Just briefly addressing part I, I am a bit surprised people take these Axelrod's results at face value. Especially if they have played Universal Paperclips, which I believe many here did. In the bot tournament phase of the game, you quickly realize that TIT-FOR-TAT is *not* the best strategy with the highest payoff.
It happened in Axelrod's experiments only because the dilemma's payoffs were of a very specific type. But in Universal Paperclips the payoffs are chosen in a wider sample, and in many cases TIT-FOR-TAT actually kinda sucks.
So you can't generalize Axelrod's result to the real world in any way, because: (i) there is no reason to believe that payoffs in the real world -- for _any_ problem -- look like the ones in Axelrod's tournament; and, even worse, (ii) payoffs for cooperation-defect in the real world aren't legible, so there is no real way for you to check whether (i) is true or not.
It's safe to say that there are many (most?) cases in real world where TIT-FOR-TAT isn't at all the correct strategy, the one discussed here seems to be one, so readily accepting that you should behave like a TIT-FOR-TAT bot will lead you to have a _very_ bad time.
I’d say Tit for Tat is the foundation of law and justice, and general sociability as well.
Defecting to begin with would be a justice system assuming guilt. Or a human disliking somebody without cause.
just got a second notification for this a day later (?)
I would go with Christian philosophy is Cooperation-Bot but the individuals within it are Tit for Tat. Combining the two gives you Tit for Tat with Forgiveness. I am pretty sure that despite the overarching philosophy, individual Christians who were kicked in the nuts every time they dropped food of at an individuals house, would change behavior promptly.
New year's resolution proposal for ACX: all posts should end with a Neil Cicierega reference.
It may not be a coincidence that Quakerism had to fold when non-Christian enemies attacked; and that Christianity arose during the Pax Romana and became very much attenuated after the Roman Empire fell.
Also, it's possible that immigration of very racially different peoples with very high breeding rates is analogous to the Indian-attack situation that the Quakers faced.
Another point: we have to distinguish between the bot flourishing, vs. the *strategy* flourishing. When you say that Christians triumphed, what you really mean is that Christianity as an ideology and culture triumphed. The individual Christians and their families may not have come out of it well.
>It is, in some sense, a unilateral surrender in the war of ideas; fascists and communists will do their best to crush liberalism, but liberals cannot ban discussion of fascism or communism
Empirically, no. After WWII, the liberal occupying powers in West Germany actually did pass a bunch of laws banning discussion of fascism. Even today, publicly expressing approval of Nazism in Germany is still a criminal offence.
Correct.
Plus, "the fact that this, too, has worked", isn't proven yet. Letting fascists go about their fascist narratives normalizes them. They seem to have more leverage in that sense. (See political developments in many Western countries in the last decades?)
"The most dramatic version of this hypothesis is that God is real, and loving thy enemy is an epiphenomenon of following the actual Divine Law."
What if the truth is found in this last sentence of your last possibility? What if this is a metaphor for your faith journey, which eventually leads to you becoming a Christian?
After resisting and considering -- but then having to exclude -- every last possibility, you realize the answer has been transcendent all along. Something like a CS Lewis experience?
Why does TIT FOR TAT win in simulations but COOPERATE won in Rome?
In simulations all agents compete for the same ecological niche, but humans compete for at least 3 different ecological niches. To maximize the number of surviving descendants there is competition between groups of humans each consisting of all 3 niches. There is also competition within each niche. However there is almost no competition within a group between the 3 niches.
COOPERATE won, because it is optimized for its ecological niche. Life is not a random competition between equal individuals competing to put their own offspring into the same ecological niche. The simulation also lacks have group competition and assumes no costs to punish.
In a group of humans + dogs + sheep, you don’t have the humans or the dogs eating all the sheep. The sheep being weak and stupid are nevertheless the majority of biomass in this group. The sheep is not replaceable by humans or dogs, because neither dogs nor humans can eat gras. The conflict is human vs. human or dog vs. dog not human vs. sheep. Would the sheep improve its number of expected surviving descendants by improving at violence or cunning? No. Not only would the additional skills threaten dogs & humans and be selected out, but also the extra skills would use up valuable calories, which otherwise could go into the immune system or reproduction. A group of humans killing all its sheep will become weaker (because less food) and be replaced by another group of humans.
Human society has a similar dynamic. You have 3 groups of people:
(i) People, who control people (like humans controlling dogs and sheep)
(ii) People, who control violence (like dogs)
(iii) People, who control things (like sheep)
People, who control people (e,g, kings, journalist, public relations) manipulate information and emotions to control other humans. People, who control violence (e,g, soldiers) have the potential do kill humans and destroy things. People, who control things (e.g. engineers, plumbers, farmers) extract resources from nature by applying the laws of nature, intelligence and persistent work.
Could a king kill all Christians? He could, but he would weaken himself. The King may worry to be poisoned, be fearful of other powerful people in his court, a peasant rebellion or a neighboring kingdom. The nonviolent Christians paying taxes are very low on the priority list of enemies to deal with. The King might even protect his Christians as a useful tax base.
Playing Tit for tat means you need ability to attack, either by violence or by cunning. But violence needs muscles and training consuming valuable calories, which could be used farming more. Also it might get you killed. Learning cunning will lower Christians’ in group cohesion and family stability. In the end Christians are optimized for farming and building machines. Kings are optimized for cunning. Solders are optimized for violence. Neither group is able to place its descendants successfully into a different ecological niche, since all 3 niches require incompatible genetical and cultural specialization.
People will say kings and soldiers are strong, Christians are weak. But kings and soldiers have quite a high rate of being killed, probably higher than Christians. They also have fewer offspring. Kings and soldiers have a narrow ecological niche, a less harmonic family and community.
Interesting analysis, but even if I do not think social mobility is that great (and was probably even lower in Rome), assuming it to be zero is a little bit extreme. Especially between human-dogs and human-sheeps: if you want to simplify, a perfect social mobility between those two makes more sense than zero mobility.
And, contrary to dogs turning into humans, soldiers turning into politicians, while uncommon, is a time-celebrated alternative to elections and administrative promotions ;-)
As far as I know, christianity mostly spread by "flame and sword". That is, for power dynamics and through coercion.
This of course doesn't say anything about the first ~200 years; but for anything beyond I believe you have to look no further than "who is in power? who did gain from it?"
I have often thought the message of Jesus can be reduced to two words: "Let go." Or, from the perspective of game theory, "Don't play the game." That may, paradoxically, be the winning strategy.
Interestingly, I have heard Jesus's teachings summed up in one word, which was also used in the musical "Chicago": reciprocity.
I question whether any significant numbers of people have ever followed any doctrine at all. Think of humanity as this huge agent based simulation, where agents are randomly trying various responses to other agents responses. They often network themselves into conglomerates, which then adopt a name and a doctrine to help with membership signaling, but the average behavior of individuals between these conglomerates isn't that different. Which grow and which die off may be more than a little dependent on small critical differences in initial conditions.
Or, if that's too abstract, Christianity is like Microsoft--it provided a standardized practice at the right time and the right place. They needed some way to justify pooling more resources across nationalities, and Christianity was handy. It's not that significantly superior to it's rivals, but changing identities now would be too costly.
On your point about "selecting a moral elite," I think an element that helped early Christianity not devolve into a typical power-hungry sex cult was the development of the three priestly vows: poverty, obedience, and chastity. Poverty to filter out people only interested in money, obedience to filter out people only interested in power, and chastity to filter out people only interested in sex. Not perfect or always upheld, but if you wanted to be a typical cult leader, being an early Christian priest probably wasn't your first choice.
As Jude (nominative determinism??) said above, I think framing the entire thing in terms of game theory strategies rather misses the point. But the wider question stands, what did Early Christianity do that was so different and so amazingly successful in its historical context?
And it does seem that insane generosity, backed by a strong current of unconditional love, was a major part of the story. But love itself is old as dirt, you can observe it in mama cats and mama birds. Christians often describe Christian love as fierce, but fierce love is also nothing new, at least among humans, just ask any decent parent. So what did the Christians do that was actually new?
Here's my take: they lowered the taboo on helpful interference with a stranger. Every society worth its salt values things like generosity and hospitality, but that is usually counterbalanced by the rule that people should ask first. People have their pride, so we respect that, and if they need help, let them ask for it. Christian love doesn't do that; it feels secure enough to put itself in the other's shoes and to offer help even when they are not asking for it.
The result is, on one side, is that Christians will often step up to help those no-one is helping, which is why there are so many Christian NGOs. Even in my small town the local Catholic help group is the go-to place for people in need. That is of course quite admirable.
The dark side of that, is that by offering help unasked, you're overriding the other person's sensibilities, which means that Christianity gets a well-deserved reputation for being pushy. And if you're convinced enough that your God is the one true God of the universe (that bit was inherited from the Jews), and that your savior is the one savior in all of history (that was a Christian extension), then giving someone else your religion quickly sounds like the highest form of love and generosity. This is probably what stands behind the 2000-year-old programme of missionary proselytism, openly trying to christianize the whole world and replace their existing religions and ways of life, "for their own good".
The really fucked up part is that it's hard to see how you can get one without the other.
As you point out, game theory competitions require more cooperation and less tit-for-tat when there's a chance for error. And the more likely errors are, the better cooperative strategies become.
I don't know how that translates into the real world. But I do know that, by default, people tend to assume bad intent even when mistake is more likely. And I also know that this problem gets worse as social trust breaks down. So if the thing is just that cooperate strategies work best when society is in a defection spiral, then the declining Roman Empire seems like as good a historical place for this to work as any.
I know the whole "the U.S. is in decline in the same way the Roman Empire thing" is a little facile, but it's true that we're having a similar breakdown in social trust. A movement of pure, no restrictions altruism might be about to have its moment. We'll see.
The COOPERATE strategy wins long term because it builds a high trust network that produces better ROI than low trust TIT-FOR-TAT networks which maximize short term individual gains at the expense of long term network gains. People are then incentivized to play by the rules in the COOPERATE network in fear of being kicked out and excluded from the outsized gains. Also beause TIT-FOR-TAT is low trust, it also requires far more security overhead, the cost of having to always watch your back really adds up. Think of why the open source software model works to fuel so much growth. High trust = high value.
Yeah that makes sense. Thx.
The Book of Mormon tells about a group of new converts who called themselves the Anti-Nephi-Lehies who followed COOPERATE-BOT to a very high degree. That's the tl;dr summary. If you want more details, here they are:
Context: Early in the book, a group of people flee Jerusalem before the Babylonian captivity (600 bc) and are led by God to the American continent. The important part of The Book of Mormon is the prophecies of various prophets about the coming of the Messiah, but it also gives a summary of their history. They split into two groups, the Nephites and Lamanites, who are constantly at war with each other. The (often good guy) Nephites usually defend themselves but sometimes flee and establish a new home. The (often bad guy) Lamanites either keep to themselves or attack. The one time the Nephites decide to go on the offensive (Mormon 3), it is treated as the final straw in their descent into wickedness before they are finally wiped out (around 400 ad).
Somewhere around 80 b.c., a group of Lamanites numbering in the thousands convert to believe in God and the coming of the Messiah. They bury their weapons as a sign that they have repented of the many murders they had committed, and change their name from Lamanites to Anti-Nephi-Lehies (Alma 23).
The remaining Lamanites attack the ANLs for reasons that are not specified. They lay down and praise God in the act of dying (Alma 24:21-22). The attacking Lamanites realize that this is not glorious battle, but a massacre, feel terrible about what they are doing, and many of them throw down their own weapons (Alma 24:23-25). Seeing this, the leaders of the attacking Lamanites take the army elsewhere to regroup. More Lamanites joined them than the number who were slain (Alma 24:26).
Around 77 b.c. the Lamanites attack again and the ANLs again lay down and submit to destruction (Alma 27:3). The Nephite missionaries who had converted them get them to agree to come join the Nephites. They are accepted by the Nephites, given some land, and told if they will pay taxes to support the armies that defend them, they won't need to fight (Alma 27:22-24).
Around 72-65 b.c., the Lamanites attack the Nephites and the war has been going badly for the Nephites, so badly that the ANLs consider breaking their non-violence oath and fighting to defend the Nephites who have been protecting them. The prophet, Helaman, convinces them not to (Alma 56:6-8). Their sons, however, had not made that oath. 2000 of their young sons take on them the name Nephites and join the army under Helaman to reclaim the lands and cities they had lost. This group of youth turns out to be critical in turning the tide of the war and reclaiming lost lands (Alma 56-58).
That is the last time we hear about the Anti-Nephi-Lehies as a separate people.
I think anyone who liked this, or Scott's review of "The Rise of Christianity," might really enjoy "The Evolution of God" by Robert Wright. He looks at the emergence of Christiantiy from a game theoretic perspective. One argument he makes is that the COOPERATE-BOT nature of early Christianity came less from Jesus and more from Paul, who treated spreading Chrisianity like an enterprise. I recommend the chapter "The Apostle of Love" in particular. A few quotes:
> Why did Paul become the point man for a God whose love knows no ethnic bounds? Is it because he was naturally loving and tolerant, a man who effortlessly imbued all he met with a sense of belonging? Unlikely. Even in his correspondence, which presumably reflects a filtered version of the inner Paul, we see him declaring that followers of Jesus who disagree with him about the gospel message should be “accursed”—that is, condemned by God to eternal suffering. The scholar John Gager has described Paul as a “feisty preacher-organizer, bitterly attacked and hated by other apostles within the Jesus movement.” ... So where did the doctrine that some people now think of as “Christian love” come from? It emerges from the interplay between Paul’s driving ambitions and their social environment. In the end as much credit should go to the Roman Empire as to Paul.
...
> The key to understanding why Paul became the Apostle of Love and a symbol of universal brotherhood is to remember that he was far more than a committed follower of Jesus. He was a man of much ambition. That ambition seems to have been earnestly spiritual, harnessed to a message Paul considered the true path to salvation. Still, it’s illuminating to compare Paul to modern entrepreneurs of more mundane motivation. He was a man who wanted to extend his brand, the Jesus brand; he wanted to set up franchises—congregations of Jesus followers—in cities across the Roman Empire. Oddly, these imperial aspirations infused Paul’s preaching with an emphasis on brotherly love it might never have acquired had Paul been content to run a single mom-and-pop store.
...
> We’ll never know for sure what Paul’s secret was, but some of the best candidates are the ones I’ve stressed. First, he used the information technology of the day—hand-carried letters—with unusual adroitness to keep distant congregations intact. This meant hammering home the theme of familial love. Second, he extended this sense of brotherhood beyond local congregations and particular ethnicities. This lubricated the provision of hospitality for traveling church leaders and, as time wore on, for Christians more broadly. In this and other ways, brotherly love helped keep the church unified—or at least more unified than other multicity religions, and unified enough to stay strong over the long haul.
A general principle here is that in a multiethnic polity like the Roman Empire, anyone who wants to start a vast organization should be ethnically inclusive, lest valuable resources go unused and potential recruits go unrecruited. The synagogues scattered across the Roman Empire were one example of a valuable resource. The Christian church in Rome was another example. Paul hadn’t founded the church in Rome, and there presumably were doctrinal differences between these Latin Christians and the Christians in Greece and Asia Minor whom Paul had cultivated. Had Paul chosen to, he could have harped on these differences to the point of schism. But he wanted to use the resources of the Roman church as he prepared for missions to Spain and elsewhere, and that may help explain the warmth of his letter to the Romans: “To all God’s beloved in Rome.… I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you.… I remember you always in my prayers.… I am longing to see you.” Pretty intimate, given that almost all of them were people he’d never met! Yet this was a simple application of the early Christian formula for success.
...
> We’ve seen the pragmatic value of brotherly love and so seen how Paul could have happened on this precept without inspiration from Jesus. But what about “Love your enemy”? If Jesus didn’t really say that, then where on earth did Paul get the idea?
Maybe from facts on the ground—facts that gave Paul reason to see the wisdom of passive perseverance in the face of enmity. Paul was part of a religious minority that was widely resented and that, if it didn’t demonstrate restraint amid provocation, could be persecuted to the point of extinction. In that sense his situation was quite like that of Philo, another adherent of a suspect faith in the Roman Empire of the first century. Philo, as we’ve seen, adapted by urging fellow Jews not to antagonize the pagan majority—and by working to find a doctrine of interfaith tolerance in the Jewish scripture.
Certainly Paul seems to have known that an onslaught of kindness can frustrate the enemy by denying him what he most wants: a rationale for hatred, a pretext for attack. After urging Christians to give food and drink to their enemies, he adds, “for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.”
Actually, Paul wasn’t the first to figure out that befriending an enemy can be a potent counterattack. His “burning coals” line comes from Proverbs, where it is preceded by this advice: “If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat; and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink.” Paul, in injecting the doctrine of kindness toward enemies into Christianity, wasn’t just being wise; he was being wise with the guidance of the Hebrew wisdom literature.
The way I see it is: first, people like to hang out with people who are generous and nice more than they like to hang out with regular people. Then, since most people's beliefs are mainly influenced by peer's beliefs, they tend to share their point of view eventually. This happens even when the beliefs are false and self-destructive, and would work even if the generosity isn't really helping people more than it costs.
Heh, there’s some poetic irony in this coming out a day before Noah Smith’s take that liberalism is in serious decline.
I’d quibble on the interpretation of this evidence: Christianity may have taken over the western world, but while its COOPERATE-BOT strategy may have got it there, I don’t think it kept it on top, not by a long shot. I’d argue that its COOPERATE-BOT mode was turned off by the time of Justinian, if not Constantine. Turns out people really don’t like being martyrs forever, particularly people in positions of power.
It seems like no one has pointed out the obvious answer here: wolves in sheeps' clothing. Altruists, being self sacrificing, are seen as likeable by nature of their utility to others, and as a result, recieve preferential treatment to both preserve their utility and incentivize their useful behavior to third parties (we do this instinctually out of reciprocity, of course, us being here sane humans for the most part, but this is the post hoc GT reason for why evolution has allowed us to persist like this).
This benefit might offset the immediate cost of altruism, but is lesser to the net gain available to those who seem altruistic without actually paying the price. Therefore, society via evolutionary principles adapts to an equilibrium optimizing for agents that seem altruistic without actually being so. Like the Roman cities persisting despite the deaths of their inhabitants with influxes of rurals, cooperate-bot Christianity is thus memetically successful but parasitic upon its hosts.
The true believers are all already dead or dying. Hence the widespread complaints of hypocritical christians and pedants with their empty platitudes. These are overabundant because they are the true game theoretic optima. Taking this a step further, the best way to effectively impersonate a sheep is to present oneself as being unaware of this chain of reasoning. This is why you, Scott, have gone to such lengths to disguise the fang of your intellect by presenting various elaborate explanations of the phenomenon which all hopelessly blunder past the obvious reality. Your entire commitment to EA is a ruse. You seek to obscure the massive threat you pose to others with a veneer of harmless ineptitude and good natured naiveté, but I see right through you. You are the greatest deceiver of them all. Jk lol
You're missing one last part, the key to perfecting the deception: the wolves have decieved even themselves into thinking they are sheep. They genuinely believe that they are righteous and altruistic despite all evidence to the contrary.
Your mention of Christianity being parasitic is also interesting, as it reminded me of the nature of a literal parasite, Toxoplasma gondii. It's a parasite that reproduces only in felines, and there's evidence that it manipulates the behavior of the rodents it infects to make them easier prey for their true hosts. ...The parallels should be obvious.
This analysis is missing a key ingredient: Credible fear of supernatural judgment. Take the case of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5:1–11:
"But a man named Ananias, with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property, and with his wife’s knowledge he kept back for himself some of the proceeds and brought only a part of it and laid it at the apostles’ feet. But Peter said, “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back for yourself part of the proceeds of the land? While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal? Why is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to man but to God.” When Ananias heard these words, he fell down and breathed his last. And great fear came upon all who heard of it. The young men rose and wrapped him up and carried him out and buried him.
"After an interval of about three hours his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. And Peter said to her, “Tell me whether you sold the land for so much.” And she said, “Yes, for so much.” But Peter said to her, “How is it that you have agreed together to test the Spirit of the Lord? Behold, the feet of those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out.” Immediately she fell down at his feet and breathed her last. When the young men came in they found her dead, and they carried her out and buried her beside her husband. And great fear came upon the whole church and upon all who heard of these things."
Ananias and Sapphira defected, and in a fairly clever and complex manner, but it didn't take the church defecting back for them to be punished -- God took care of it. Similarly, Paul advises the church in Romans 12:17-21:
"Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.' To the contrary, 'if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.' Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."
This was great, thanks. Memories of the 'computer recreations' column in Sci Am, followed by Douglas Hofstadter's column. I vaguely recall a prisoners dilemma game that was played on a 2-D grid, where each square only interacted with it's nearest neighbors. And (IIRC) you could get a group of 'always cooperate' in such a game. So maybe an 'always cooperate' strategy would work better if you were mostly just interacting with neighbors and not the whole group. Finally I find myself again recommending "The Goodness Paradox" by R. Wrangham. Quick premise, we self domesticated ourselves, after which there is much greater in group (tribe) cooperation. And perhaps the Christians were one of the first to include everyone in their tribe. "Let's help everyone!"
I just have to add that 'always cooperate' is how I've always operated, and it's great. I live in rural america which is still a high trust place to live.
There's also an element to this where COOPERATE-BOT is the best strategy in a system where you want to stay on the ride. Often, a lot of the people doing the "post-Christian Nietzschean thing" want *off* the ride.
This reminds me that over the past few years I've seen Nietzsche's "slave morality" gain some increased attention. I don't think the core framing of 'slave morality' is quite right; I think a better framing is something like "swarm morality." Swarm optimization is one of the most basic evolutionary optimization approaches when you are facing an extremely difficult objective surface -- for example, one that may be extremely spiky, have large flat regions, be extremely high-dimensional, and/or be dynamic and responsive to the optimizers' explorations -- see the simple "dynamic fitness landscapes" example here: https://youtu.be/4pdiAneMMhU&t=26s for a responsive surface (the full video is great), or see here https://youtu.be/8xycqWWqz50&t=15s to visualize on "very bumpy" problem. Now imagine that the real types of problems that humanity faces are very high dimensional -- some dimensions looking like each of those different types of benchmark problems, many dimensions are dynamic and change as the space is explored, and ti takes a tremendous time to learn the values at any given point, as in a [stochastic approximation setting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_approximation).
In this world, evolutionary optimizers like swarm optimization or genetic algorithms (also particle-based) can perform when others aren't tractable.
When you code these solutions, if the particles themselves have their own individual utility that they gain from exploring the space, then you can get a very complicated principle-agent problem. There may be very real externalities related to whether particles will clearly communicate "ground truth" with one another, or whether particles will allow other particles into their portion of the space, or whether particles will be willing to go do very risky things (eg. explore a very flat space or low-expected payouts) that would benefit the full social structure. You probably need something like the golden rule to be implemented in your particles; otherwise if they are selfish, society may very easily get stuck at local maxima. This is all the more true since social structures and supporting institutions don't emerge de novo from the ether -- they are implemented by the particles in the society.
If the particles care about something like total lifetime utility or dynastic utility, then you're also facing the classic exploration/exploitation tradeoff from reinforcement learning, which makes solving the whole thing even harder and takes even longer, potentially requiring a high level of cooperation.
Why might we expect the objective surface of a society to be very messy and high-dimensional? I think this falls out of combinatorial technology growth pretty easily (excellent lit review here: https://www.newthingsunderthesun.com/pub/2elwp33m/release/4 ).
Dwarkesh recently had an interview exploring, among other things, why humans came to dominate (https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/david-reich ) -- at least some of the lesson seemed to be that "humans could cooperate at a large social scale better."
I can't help but wonder -- if technological growth is in fact combinatorial, implying that the objective surface that society is solving is increasingly complex (even if occasionally the complexity drops before renewing its upward march, eg. see here, https://www.theseedsofscience.pub/p/against-the-burden-of-knowledge ), then perhaps society needs an increasing ability to get particles to coordinate effectively in a swarm-type optimization. The societies that are most effective at this will, on average, be better at discovering new technologies (physical, social, mathematical, organizational, etc) and out-compete the societies that are not as good at doing that.
I think this also ties into the "intractability frontier" that arises in a system comprised of forward-looking, interacting, intelligent agents who are aware of, and model, one another (think of there being a "k-frontier" in a K-level rationality system) -- but this comment has gotten pretty long, so perhaps better to return to that in the future.
tldr: Christianity is better framed as a "swarm morality" (as compared to Nietzsche's "slave morality"). The problem human society is solving is high-dimensional and complex, and due to combinatorial technology growth, it only gets more complex and harder. Societies that can implement a swarm-style optimization the best will discover better technologies (physical, social, etc) and out-compete others, on average, that don't explore the space as well. Particles in a swarm optimization need to act in a golden-rule sort of way, and Christianity put extreme emphasis on the golden rule as a core meme.
Two Gospel quotes come to mind for threading the needle between the Pragmatists and COOPERATE BOT. "Be as gentle as doves, and cunning as serpents." and the Parable of the Unjust Judge who is harassed by an old woman until she gets what she wants. Niceness, plus prudence, plus brute constant insistence.
Otoh, if you can be part of an ideological movement that consistently offers routes to being marginally more copperative say 10% and occasionally generates cracked saints who go for gold while being somewhat insulated from the downsides of full COOPERATE BOT, you've got something that can last forever in dynamic equilibrium.
"other groups who deserve mention"
The (now extinct) Moriori.
I thought about mentioning them, but I don't think they were a "movement." They didn't have any interest in winning converts to Moriori-ism, did they?
I suppose they weren't really a movement, except perhaps in the early days when their leaders had to persuade their people to abandon their warrior ethos and embrace pacifism.
"A clever person gets out of a situation that a wise person would never get into"
I think this question is about collectivism-individualism dichotomy and to what extent globally optimal solution exist in a dynamical domain. As we can see, generosity has its place in the world even with fake greenbeards because greenbeard is just a placeholder for which can change in time, and needs to so optimal personality traits can rise to occation (big five optimal). (sry for my english)
Unrelated, but -- did scott ever post the results of the ai art turing test? I didn't see it them in any of the recent articles
The confessing church and the jehovah's witnesses for nazis are examples. The hidden Christians in Japan may represent another.
If you reframe the principle of universal cooperation from the lens of consciousness, it's surprisingly obvious that people can be touched by "saints". This kind of spiritually-inclined people can make the general populace reflect on the fact that the very essence of life and its meaning is the incredible act of existing in the first place, and inspire them to a more noble and worthy life. I'd reckon that these guys can make their enemies realize the absurdity of their desires and their ego-clinging through lack of opposition. How can one turn the other cheek happily, when I seek my satisfaction through anger, how can one give me everything they have on them, when I wish to steal and add to my possessions? How can one live so unburdened?
"the leading ideology of the 21st century thus far appears to be a hyper-Christian bleeding-heart liberalism: COOPERATE-BOT in a bloodstained sweater"
Is that really an accurate description of reality? It seems to me that the "keeping it real" crowd tends to be marginalized, whereas the strategic manipulators rise to the top. Maybe that's the secret sauce: Pretend to be COOPERATE-BOT, while in reality you are a pragmatist. This should be testable in an experiment.
More game theoretic thoughts.
When you don't have power in society and join a social group that is COOPERATE BOT, individually your lives all become much better! No infanticide, less divorce, fewer dissensions. Sure. But also, less energy spent on TIT FOR TAT. You don't have much to lose and everything to gain on this world (love, respect) and eternal life and the conquest of death. Why not join COOPERATE BOT.
As a single organism, COOPERATE BOTs experience safety in numbers, and it is only when they become powerful that aspects of the organism start TIT FOR TATTing. So by the time you get to Constantine and Christological controversies, there are elements of TIT FOR TAT. When the Church gets too powerful, it becomes the one doing a lot of TATTing. Reform movements and orders spring up, many playing COOPERATE BOT. You get renewal for a couple hundred years, until they become more pragmatic as well. The general equilibrium though becomes a large ideological umbrella with distinct subgroups engaging in niche strategies. If the ideology is good, the dynamic equilibrium is more cooperative, kind, virtuous, excellent.
The game model fails in not accounting for conversion of the heart. In real life, the actions of COOPERATE-BOT can turn others into COOPERATE-BOT.
Witnessing someone totally transformed by love touches us. Here I think your EA purists are missing something. People value love more than intellectual consistency. Donating your kidney to a stranger moves people; autistic honesty not.
PS. The Amish, Mennonites, and other Anabaptists are also good examples of consistent cooperators, even more principled than the Quakers.
I think that where the COOPERATE-BOT strategy thrives is in low-trust environments that default to might-makes-right, and the reason it does so is precisely because it's radical and irrational. It's so radical that it shows you must be serious about kindness and cooperation.
Consider these examples:
-A kitten showing you its belly. Cats purposely make themselves vulnerable to humans they trust. The reason it's such an effective demonstration of trust is because it acts against their rational self-interest (you could easily tickle it to death, but you wouldn't).
-Israeli-left consensus on Middle East peace (not to be confused with the campus left). Liberals like me want Israel to do the unexpected (withdraw settlements, extend unilateral olive branches to the PLO, etc). Underlying this isn't just a moral case but also a strategic signal; it would be such a reversal of current policy that it demonstrates moral high ground and a commitment to burying the hatchet.
-Barack Obama's overtures to Iran in 2009 (https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/videotaped-remarks-president-celebration-nowruz). Note that this was during the first term of Ahmadinejad, a saber-rattling lunatic, not one of Iran's more moderate leaders. The U.S. could have further isolated him or stalled until Iran's next election (or the one after; their presidents are term-limited), but instead chose to be magnanimous. The liberal foreign policy doctrine towards Iran is very much based in magnanimity and unilateral gestures of trust, when it might be more hyperrational to just crush them.
-Western foreign policy morality generally. When Saddam invaded Kuwait, the U.S. intervened even though Kuwait was a staunch Soviet ally and one of the most astonishingly anti-Semitic countries in the world (https://global100.adl.org/country/kuwait/2014). Is it a coincidence that the most thriving societies in the world are more likely to decouple kindness from self-interest? Probably not!
-The free speech example you mentioned. Liberal democracy is basically the codification of unilateral surrender. In addition to moral high ground and all of the other signals it sends, it's also a flex: if you're confident in the supremacy of your ideas, why would you be afraid of dissidents being able to say whatever they want or vote for whoever they want? It's like not letting your girlfriend break up with you; if it's meant to be, set it free etc. Even the 2nd amendment (which I despise) is essentially a statement that the U.S. ensures the conditions for its own undoing; therefore, if it's not undone, then its citizens are consenting to be ruled under a voluntary association.
I'm utterly floored with the brilliance of this post. Rodney Stark has been pre-eminent in his field, the (scientific/comparative) study of religion(s), for decades. Scott swoops in, pretending to aim for just a review, and outright improves on the book! I know he has done this before, but it hits differently when he does it with a book so admired in a field that I happen to have a Master's degree in.
If Scott ever does a review of Stark's still more famous, and far more influential (with Roger Finke) "Acts of Faith" I will need a lot of effort not to pee my pants.
"Are there any other groups who deserve mention in this section besides early Christians, Quakers, and Cathars? I think some German and Russian sects have tried similar strategies, though they mostly failed and I don’t know much about them."
Check out the Hopi people.
Of course, 2 of our presidents were (nominally) Quakers: Hoover and Nixon. I don't know that Hoover was much of a war-monger, but I lived through the Nixon administration and was just barely old enough to be politically aware. Smedley Butler, "the most decorated Marine in US history," is another famous American who was raised a Quaker (and grew up in West Chester, PA, which I believe is/was part of the Philadelphia Main LIne).
> The initiatory structure holds off freeloaders and makes sure the people on the inside are of approximately equal rank (so that you get as many benefits as you give)
This is not a sense of the word "rank" that I'm familiar with. Social groups are generally not known for ensuring that all members hold an equal rank, and Christians obviously don't do so and never did.
Compare the popular view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JokWbIEt3n8
Even the definition provided in the quote doesn't work. If everyone gets as many benefits as they give, someone for whom both values are very high is a high-ranking member, and someone for whom both values are very low is a low-ranking member.