Order is the difference between: putting on your clothes then going out, and getting a ticket for public indecency. As in citizenry in understanding. Yes, first algebra, then calculus. First grammar, then literature. First childish things, and then you put them away. What gets to me is all the different journeys we can take. Some engineer learns a very particular and analytical way of solving a problem. A marketing researcher learns a very different set of habits, tools, and mental models. Yet, they can both mow a lawn. If you go to these two ideals and ask them how they track their grocery lists, the engineer might tell you about a mansion in their head, and the marketing researcher might tell you they think of what they would be eating with their partner. Yes, they might be better or worse at filling a cart, but we all have different ways of storing and processing information. My favorite metaphor for this is the scaffold. If you have an engineer's scaffolding, you'll be better equipped for some tasks, and if you have a marketing scaffold, you'll be better equipped for others. Though I find between any two people even with the same training, vast chasms of difference. To me, green recalls the blades of grass at my grandmother's house in the hot summer, and to you, green might recall the eyes of a tiger. Yet, despite the radically different connections, the radically different mappings of information, we wield them to communicate, sometimes better, sometimes worse. It is in this way I felt lucky to read first a book published more than 120 years after another.
Now, of these two men, I have seen but a shadow, and I cast but another. What I would like to share here is what I wish I could tell Nietzsche, for although I am thankful for the questions he asks, I pity him his anguish on "the will of man to find himself guilty and reprehensible to a degree that can never be atoned for". He asks so many good questions, and we still don't have answers, but I am not convinced "one must forcibly forbid oneself to gaze too long into these abysses. Here is sickness, beyond any doubt, the most terrible sickness that has ever raged in man; and whoever can still bear to hear (but today one no longer has ears for this!) how in this night of torment and absurdity there has resounded the cry of love, the cry of the most nostalgic rapture, of redemption through love, will turn away, seized by invincible horror." I think here, Nietzsche expresses in himself the psychological torment he predicts that comes with the throwing out of the knowledge of the old, of religion, of throwing out the good along with the bad. If we can see the use and inevitability of the religious narrative of guilt and salvation, then there is no need to feel such sorrow for those who haven't found a better one. The psychological "self-torture" Nietzsche sees against the temptation of selfishness is for the long-term benefit of an individual. Let us take back up his gaze into this abyss; it may even speak back at us.
In the first essay of his book, Nietzsche presents a dichotomy of morality (perhaps, life strategies?). He defines master morality with good as the will of the strong, courageous, noble, etc. In this case, a powerful group or individual controls the narrative of a society such that whatever benefits the powerful is good, and whatever hurts it is bad. We could also call this a selfish strategy. An example of this strategy at play is an authoritarian government or a demanding individual. The other type of morality Nietzsche suggests is slave morality. Here, the will of the individual is consumed by the group, and good is the will of the group: humility, mercy, forgiveness, etc. We could call this a charitable strategy. An example of this strategy could be pooling resources, a democratic government. Master/slave morality. Selfish/charitable strategy. Immediate individual/immediate group needs.
Nietzsche talks about an endless battle of these two moralities. The strong take over, establish their will, until the sentiments of the oppressed understand the value of working together. When this "weakness" is spread sufficiently, then the strong can take over again. A master is too hard on their subjects and incite revolt. The group which works together, when they become too soft, is weak to an aggression. Note: this is way earlier than G. Michael Hopf.
These two strategies, or narratives, or moralities are very general, and they don't focus on prediction (they say roughly what can happen, not when). It's also a false dichotomy. When living life, we can choose to be selfish or charitable in different situations, with different people, or depending on our mood. Selfishness and charitableness exist between individuals and groups, accidentally and intentionally, at all levels in our society or societies. There is injustice in the will of the strong and in the will of the weak (hence they are both self-destructive).
If you aren't familiar with the dilemma, it's worth a search (and for your troubles, you can find out why it is called this). The prisoner's dilemma, in a situation where two individuals are competing for resources, is the choice to cooperate or defect, to unite or rebel, to be selfish or charitable. In order for this to be a dilemma, it needs to be the case that there is an immediate temptation to be selfish (and if both players are selfish, they get burned). In this topic, we aren't really interested in talking about obvious choices, only the hard ones. Here are some examples:
Generally when we talk about prisoner's dilemma (and when Nowak runs simulations), we focus on very formally defined mathematical models. For instance, we might talk about the abstract game where both players cooperating yields 3 utils each, one player cooperating and the other player being selfish resulting in 4 utils for the selfish player but 1 for the charitable player, and both players being selfish resulting in the destructive outcome of 1 util each. Clearly, the best result for an individual is that you are selfish and the other player gives to you. Though, one game isn't very interesting. What Nowak talks about is when this game is played over and over again.
In iterated prisoner's dilemma (this repetition), a cooperating player can, for instance, punish a selfish individual by showing retaliatory selfishness. There are many different strategies actors can take (always cooperating, always defecting, making retaliatory strikes), and Nowak focuses on how these interact on different populations. For instance, he talks about the potentially surprising fact that charitable strategies tend to do better in the long term. If there are strategies which are retaliatory, then a defecting strategy will always lose. However, as long as there are some charitable strategies in the population of strategies, a retaliatory strategy (at this point in the exposition, "tit-for-tat") will have emergent group power against defective strategies. Though, there is another endless battle. When the retaliatory strategies take over a population, and they cooperate, there is no force to prevent fully charitable strategies from entering the mix. If they reach a sufficient critical mass in the population, then selfish defective strategies can ravage the overly-kind strategies. In their charity, they become soft, too charitable.
Nowak spends most of the book modeling different types of interactions and strategies that are possible. He looks at introducing randomness (small chance selfishness will be changed for charity and vice versa) to model real life situations, and this helped destroy unstable equilibriums from his populations. He also modeled how group membership, reputation, common hobbies, and familial relationships, if they became part of the calculus of the iterated strategies, affected things. One of the more interesting things I found here was that his models showed, even if an individual does well in a group by being selfish, it may damage the group's overall fitness, so that a group which is able to maintain cooperative individuals will out-compete and therefore replace the group which cannot fight off selfish individuals.
Note: I read SuperCooperators because I heard it made a great foil to The Selfish Gene, and I would say it does an incredible job of this, though it is a bit too autobiographical at times. Still, what a shock to see positive statements about Epstein there and read about the subsequent problems this caused for the author. Though, I think that it provides an excellent example of the injustice of the will of the weak. The author was too cooperative with a defector, and he got bit.
My goal here is to consider Nietzsche's framework in terms of the ideas discussed by Nowak, but I first want to justify why we can make this comparison. These are both abstract frameworks which can be used in a wide variety of situations. Though, it is tempting to ask: are they fundamentally the same? Well, I would reject that these narratives are ideas that have an independent existence. These are both ways of thinking, and given the right abstract psychological space, we can consider the shared terms. Given any metaphor, the curse of the metaphor (the associated curse of knowledge) is ambiguity with respect to what facets the comparison is being made. If I say, she dances like a butterfly, it could mean she dances beautifully, both with her own attention, but also as if one with the wind, carrying herself and being carried. Though, we could also reject this metaphor: a butterfly has two wings but she has none. Oftentimes, when a metaphor is rejected the unsaid tragedy is that we disagree on which aspects of the metaphor we wish to consider. In order to make use of a metaphor (or any isomorphism), we need to be very clear about which structures and ideas and facets we want to preserve.
In the case of morality and prisoner's dilemma strategies, they are not directly interchangeable. However, what we can carry: ideas for where to look for the long term impact of selfish actions and how the success of the group affects the success of the individual. Any rule that we come up with, there will always be situations where that rule is unjust. We have no way to efficiently encode all the situations in the world. So, it is very tempting to say "this is how we should act", but the point is, we really don't know. Old man lose horse. We live in the post-evaporated remains of surviving strategies. This doesn't mean that they are even good; they may be outdated. Though, we can apply the ideas, for their understanding of something deeper, something in the real world. Always, we need to remember that perhaps a story has something to teach us, but it needs to be measured against the world. I can make no claims about how one should act, except in very particular circumstances, and even that is opinion. Though, these tools we have are a way of understanding what is good, there will always be another perspective.
In one of Nowak's models, the cycle of the selfishness, revolt of the retaliators, softness of the charitable, and a new openness to selfishness can be defeated. There is a strategy his evolutionary algorithm finds which does quite well and slows down or stops the charitable from becoming too soft. The strategy of win stay, lose shift is to keep on being charitable if it works and to keep on being mean if it works. So, when the too-charitable start to infiltrate a population, due to random chance, a win stay, lose shift strategy will dominate and take everything from the weak individuals. Either they will stop being so nice, or they cannot survive in the population. This stuck with me, because it is a formal statement of tough love, of when you need to be mean in order to help. The immediate strategy of taking advantage of the weak seems to be beneficial to society.
Now, this is a very dangerous idea, and it took me a long time to realize just how wrong it is. So perhaps for a paragraph, you can consider, should a charitable strategy be thankful to the one that dominates it? Can you morally justify non-retaliatory defection? Nietzsche got here himself, in The Will to Power, saying "To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering ... I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not, that one endures." So, should we be thankful to those who defect against us?
Depending on the strategies employed by those in a population (and in real life, you can't know these, you can only guess), there is a meta dilemma. Either you do what is good for yourself or you do what is good for the group. This is a microcosm because in real life, you are part of a hierarchy of groups with different degrees of attachment, but for sake of example, we continue to focus on a binary choice. If you are selfish in a population of retaliators, you will need to learn to work together if you want to survive. If you are charitable in a population of the selfish, you will be evaporated away. If you are selfish in a population of the charitable, you will have control over all. Though, in dragging down everyone, you will ultimately be paving the way for your own demise. That is, an overly-charitable population, which does not care for itself, creates a perverse incentive. If you have a perspective to do what is immediately useful to you, then you are only fomenting revenge. The victory over the charitable is illusory. They are a limited and unsustainable resource. In order to avoid this calamity, we are in need of a change of perspective. We must reconsider the value of our immediate needs to balance with our future needs.
A charitable strategy should not be thankful to that which leaches off it, since definitionally, that charitable strategy will be suffocated. A strategy which can grow and change and learn when faced with the selfish should feel thankful in itself for its ability to overcome adversity. What is dangerous about accepting this strategy is that although it is okay in a mathematical game, it means harm to many individuals in order to achieve stability. We have gotten to the point in real life where we don't even need to lose in order to learn the problem with a strategy.
Taking advantage of the weak is especially dangerous in a population of the weak, because you will be in a race with the other defectors, and you will be creating a very volatile situation, and you will ultimately be taking more than the weak are comfortable with. Though, they do not know how to stop it, because they will only retaliate when the situation becomes extreme, a matter of life and death, when the ultimate conclusions of their misguided charity are paraded in front of their horror-stricken eyes to see in shame what they must do. People understand this intuitively. Brothers wrestle to learn to fight. We challenge our friends. We have healthy competition, and from this competition, we learn to stand up again. When someone loses their job, or someone has a bad day, people encourage each other to remind them of who they are. However, how we encourage is also of concern. If we encourage lightly, we are creating the too-charitable. If we are a crutch for someone in a situation, then they are still vulnerable to attack. We must encourage, not in the immediate, but by also considering that encouragement without a foundation, without a tool to propagate itself, is weakness and will be destroyed. Rather than needing the too-charitable to fail and get replaced, we have the tools of language and understanding to teach them and others to stand up for themselves.
So, to the selfish, I am reminded to be thankful for myself. To a good friend, in India a few months ago, who saw I left my passport in an auto-rickshaw and grabbed it, I am thankful. Though, perhaps you should have let me sweat for a few minutes, for at this very moment, I am wearing those same lose-pocketed shorts. All the suffering I could have done then would be unforgettable and without consequence. Well, let us see what I think after a few more months of practicing these ideas.
Nietzsche was horrified by the narratives of guilt and salvation promoted by religion. Though, it's not our immediate needs which help us, but by considering the needs of the group, can we truly help ourselves and our progeny. This is one of the reasons why religious guilt and salvation are so effective. They promote collaboration in these types of situations. It doesn't matter what the narrative says exactly, and it may incur some suffering, but the in-group selflessness it promotes is an effective strategy for individual preservation because it is an effective strategy for group preservation. We need to give each other the tools to understand, as well as the tools to propagate that understanding. Until we figure out how to do that, we will see narratives propped up again and again: a taboo, a religion, a law. In each one, some good ideas and some bad ideas, and the more tied up they are in stories and false ideology, the more the good will get thrown out with the bad. Nietzsche understood how much we were losing in religion, and he didn't have answers for how we could start to get some of that back. Even now, even if you accept this framework of strategies at face value, it is so, so tempting to cheat, lie, steal, and all the other things that provide an immediate benefit. If there is no one watching, who would convince themselves against an advantage! How can we distinguish between teaching someone a lesson and taking advantage of them? On a changing backdrops of strategies? I hope some of these ideas shed light on how we can think of our longterm needs when we are making decisions. Alas! We will find a way, but my pity was too soon, from one abyss to another.