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A review by tbauman
The Evolution of Cooperation: Revised Edition by Robert Axelrod
5.0
Many of my favorite non-fiction books are those that leave you feeling like an expert in the topic. This is one of those books.
This book is about a game with two players, each of which chooses one of two moves: cooperate or defect. You might recognize this game as the prisoner's dilemma. I won't go into the details of what the prisoner's dilemma is, but the "correct" strategy to the game is to always defect. The game is often seen as an example of how selfishness is inevitable, even though cooperation is better for everyone. When you play the game repeatedly with the same opponent, though, something amazing happens: cooperation suddenly becomes a good strategy.
Axelrod ran several tournaments of strategies and found that, time and time again, a simple "tit-for-tat" strategy--cooperate if the other player just cooperated, and defect if the other player just defected--was the most effective. In other words, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" combined with "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." "Tit-for-tat" is at the core of human morality--and Axelrod proves that it has a number of properties that make it extremely advantageous. (The ones that I can remember: It starts out being nice, it retaliates quickly, it forgives just as quickly, it coordinates very well with itself, it is extremely predictable for the other player. In short: the other player begins to play against itself, so the only solution is to cooperate.) The book also dives into examples of iterated prisoner's dilemma in biology, business, politics, and war.
This book gives deep insights into a simple game that can be found almost everywhere if you look for it.
This book is about a game with two players, each of which chooses one of two moves: cooperate or defect. You might recognize this game as the prisoner's dilemma. I won't go into the details of what the prisoner's dilemma is, but the "correct" strategy to the game is to always defect. The game is often seen as an example of how selfishness is inevitable, even though cooperation is better for everyone. When you play the game repeatedly with the same opponent, though, something amazing happens: cooperation suddenly becomes a good strategy.
Axelrod ran several tournaments of strategies and found that, time and time again, a simple "tit-for-tat" strategy--cooperate if the other player just cooperated, and defect if the other player just defected--was the most effective. In other words, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" combined with "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." "Tit-for-tat" is at the core of human morality--and Axelrod proves that it has a number of properties that make it extremely advantageous. (The ones that I can remember: It starts out being nice, it retaliates quickly, it forgives just as quickly, it coordinates very well with itself, it is extremely predictable for the other player. In short: the other player begins to play against itself, so the only solution is to cooperate.) The book also dives into examples of iterated prisoner's dilemma in biology, business, politics, and war.
This book gives deep insights into a simple game that can be found almost everywhere if you look for it.