6 ms·

>Swartz claimed that the Joker is actually “homo economicus, a supremely rational actor ... arXiv:1103.3257: The Joker effect: cooperation driven by destructiv

by pella 10y ago

>Swartz claimed that the Joker is actually “homo economicus, a supremely rational actor ... arXiv:1103.3257: The Joker effect: cooperation driven by destructive agents (2011) https://arxiv.org/abs/1103.3257 https://arxiv.org/abs/1103.3257 Keywords: public goods, cooperation, destructive agents, cycles Abstract: "Understanding the emergence of cooperation is a central issue in evolutionary game theory. The hardest setup for the attainment of cooperation in a population of individuals is the Public Goods game in which cooperative agents generate a common good at their own expenses, while defectors "free-ride" this good. Eventually this causes the exhaustion of the good, a situation which is bad for everybody. Previous results have shown that introducing reputation, allowing for volunteer participation, punishing defectors, rewarding cooperators or structuring agents, can enhance cooperation. Here we present a model which shows how the introduction of rare, malicious agents -that we term jokers- performing just destructive actions on the other agents induce bursts of cooperation. The appearance of jokers promotes a rock-paper-scissors dynamics, where jokers outbeat defectors and cooperators outperform jokers, which are subsequently invaded by defectors. Thus, paradoxically, the existence of destructive agents acting indiscriminately promotes cooperation."

pella 10y ago
direct pdf link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1103.3257v1.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1103.3257v1.pdf original publication: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519311001639 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519311...
paganel 10y ago
I've been thinking about this subject of "cooperation" for the last couple of days (also thanks in part to some links which made it to the front page of HN), and I have something to say about this: > Eventually this causes the exhaustion of the good, a situation which is bad for everybody. (...) where jokers outbeat defectors and cooperators outperform jokers, which are subsequently invaded by defectors. Thus, paradoxically, the existence of destructive agents acting indiscriminately promotes cooperation." I'd day that this culture of cooperation for defeating "jokers "doesn't apply to all cultures. It certainly doesn't apply to mine (somewhere in SE-Europe, on the fringe of the Balkans), where a realistic similar scenario would look somth like this: > Joker does his bad stuff, he shares some of his spoils with his relatives and very close acquaintances (god-fathers, god-sons etc.). These latter people are also part of the community that supposedly should cooperate in annihilating the Joker. Is fair to say that they won't. You've now got a fractured community, with some of its members (the Joker's friends and relatives) having no interest in "cooperation", and more importantly having the economical and power-related means of silencing the part of the community that would want to seek justice (because when you do bad stuff you usually do it in order to increase your economical and power-standing among your community). The Joker becomes an example for other people who see that doing nasty stuff supposedly pays off if you've got enough people by your side. Rinse and repeat. Aaron Swartz's theory is easier to implement where the Joker is an external element of the community, think immigrants, Jews in early 20-th century Europe, Armenians in late-Ottoman times etc, and I'd say that he's right, those communities actually got a lot more cohesive in chasing out the foreign Joker-like actor(s).
- nostrademons 10y ago
  I think the point of the "Joker" archetype (as opposed to the "defector" archetype) is that the Joker's actions are purely malicious, not self-interested. In other words, nobody benefits, not even the Joker. In the movie this includes actions like burning money and blowing up hospitals; in real life, it could include actions like nuclear terrorism, destroying holy sites, genetically engineering plagues for the extinction of humanity, blowing up buildings, wanton destruction of famous landmarks, etc. The idea is that when faced with an enemy whose actions are bad for everyone, all the people who previously had been engaging in conduct that was bad for everyone else but good for themselves will be forced to cooperate, lest the world burn to the ground.
  - paganel 10y ago
    > The idea is that when faced with an enemy whose actions are bad for everyone I think this only happens in works of fiction (movies and the like). In real life even things like "terrorism, destroying holy sites, genetically engineering plagues for the extinction of humanity, blowing up buildings, wanton destruction of famous landmarks" have benefits for some members of those communities (ok, maybe not "nuclear terrorism", which is a big no-no for everybody). The recent acts of terrorism in Western Europe have only managed to increase the fracture between the Muslim part of the community (which has been around these parts of the world for some 3 generations) and the rest of the people.
    - hueving 10y ago
      The ability to short markets makes it very easy to profit off of mass destruction. Blowing up hospitals and even nuclear terrorism could be profitable with well-placed short positions.
    - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
      >The recent acts of terrorism in Western Europe have only managed to increase the fracture between the Muslim part of the community (which has been around these parts of the world for some 3 generations) and the rest of the people. Daesh have gone pretty far into the Joker realm, I'd say.
pella 10y ago
"How to keep punishment to maintain cooperation: Introducing social vaccine" (2016) http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2015.08.053 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2015.08.053 ( Under a Creative Commons ) http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437115007189 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437115... Keywords: Evolutionary game theory; Social dilemma; Free-rider problem; Agent based simulation; Social vaccine Abstract "Although there is much support for the punishment system as a sophisticated approach to resolving social dilemmas, more than a few researchers have also pointed out the limitations of such an approach. Second-order free riding is a serious issue facing the punishment system. Various pioneering works have suggested that an anti-social behavior or noise stemming from a mutation may, surprisingly, be helpful for avoiding second-order freeloaders. In this work, we show through mathematical analysis and an agent-based simulation of a model extending the meta-norms game that the coercive introduction of a small number of non-cooperators can maintain a cooperative regime robustly. This paradoxical idea was inspired by the effect of a vaccine, which is a weakened pathogen injected into a human body to create antibodies and ward off infection by that pathogen. Our expectation is that the coercive introduction of a few defectors, i.e., a social vaccine, will help maintain a highly cooperative regime because it will ensure that the punishment system works."
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- kovek 10y ago
  How did you find these papers? Did you know about them before finding this post? If so, do you remember how you discovered them?
  - pella 10y ago
    old HN topic and easy to remember :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3707691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3707691
  - tejtm 10y ago
    ... I was in this closet at the university ... I'll get my coat.
pella 10y ago
arXiv:1210.7085: "Stability and robustness analysis of cooperation cycles driven by destructive agents in finite populations" (2012) https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.7085 https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.7085 Abstract: "The emergence and promotion of cooperation are two of the main issues in evolutionary game theory, as cooperation is amenable to exploitation by defectors, which take advantage of cooperative individuals at no cost, dooming them to extinction. It has been recently shown that the existence of purely destructive agents (termed jokers) acting on the common enterprises (public goods games) can induce stable limit cycles among cooperation, defection, and destruction when infinite populations are considered. These cycles allow for time lapses in which cooperators represent a relevant fraction of the population, providing a mechanism for the emergence of cooperative states in nature and human societies. Here we study analytically and through agent-based simulations the dynamics generated by jokers in finite populations for several selection rules. Cycles appear in all cases studied, thus showing that the joker dynamics generically yields a robust cyclic behavior not restricted to infinite populations. We also compute the average time in which the population consists mostly of just one strategy and compare the results with numerical simulations."
aaron-lebo 10y ago
Are there any historical examples of "a joker"? The sole example cited by the article is Nazi Germany which forced the US and the USSR to work together for a short time. That doesn't to me seem to be a real example of a "joker" however, that's just the enemy of my enemy being my friend kind of thing. Hitler wasn't just fucking things up for the sake of it, but had a very specific world he was trying to create. The Joker wanted chaos, or if he wanted anything else, doesn't tip his hand, being an unreliable source of information. How many different ways did he get those scars? I'm just asking because scholarly articles about the actions of fictional psychopaths seem a bit much. Especially when we are talking about applying it to entire groups of people (nations) without some good examples. Note, this is also different than Swartz's or the author's suggestion - that this cooperation was intended. That's not implied by the movie, nor the joker of the article. This is the first paragraph: In the recent Hollywood movie The Dark Knight (2008) the comic character known as the Joker jeopardizes a whole society spreading chaos and destruction with no aim of benefit at it. That's not Nazi Germany (the sixth paragraph or so and example). Hitler may have had a fucked up sense of societal benefit, but that was his goal, not wanton destruction (at least until he went completely crazy).
- rocqua 10y ago
  I'd say nature is the best example. Natural hazards with immediate and predictable effects are much like the joker. It hurts producers and freeloaders equally, and everyone sees them coming. The dutch 'polder' politics seem like a very fine example of this. I imagine predators are another example. As are very periodic floods or droughts.
- nostrademons 10y ago
  I'd expect such characters to get written out of the histories fairly quickly. The point of a "joker" is that they're purely destructive and don't work in anyone's self-interest, not even their own; thus, they're eventually defeated and have nobody that cares about them enough to keep their memory alive. But thinking about a few examples: Julian Assange is a modern-day joker, with Wikileaks indiscriminately publishing damaging info about many different institutions (several of which would otherwise be at odds with each other). Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who assassinated William Mckinley, who ironically spurred both cooperation among anarchists and cooperation against anarchists. Heck, the traditional description of Satan very much is the in line with the joker archetype, which makes me wonder if his depiction in religion is a composite of various joker-like characters that people have faced but not wanted to remember.
tarkin2 10y ago
Or, a common enemy is often needed?
dmichulke 10y ago
At the risk of stating the obvious: private property completely avoids this problem. There's a lot of libertarian literature as to why private property is preferable to "public goods" in many instances.
- dontreact 10y ago
  How do you make something like air quality a private good? My point is that it seems like there are many times when I don't see how you could apply the solution of private property.
  - oskarth 10y ago
    I haven't read it in detail, but here's the gist from Mises Institute articles that touch on air pollution [1]: > In sum, no one has a right to clean air, but one does have a right to not have his air invaded by pollutants generated by an aggressor. Also see this quote [2]: > There is, first of all, this stark empirical fact: Government ownership, even socialism, has proved to be no solution to the problem of pollution. Even the most starry-eyed proponents of government planning concede that the poisoning of Lake Baikal in the Soviet Union is a monument to heedless industrial pollution of a valuable natural resource. But there is far more to the problem than that. Note, for example, the two crucial areas in which pollution has become an important problem: the air and the waterways, particularly the rivers. But these are precisely two of the vital areas in society in which private property has not been permitted to function. Agree or disagree, this is the typical libertarian response to externalities as far as I know. There's probably more to it w.r.t to public goods as "naturally given", and when something turns into private property, if you are look further into the literature. 1: https://mises.org/library/law-property-rights-and-air-pollution#11 https://mises.org/library/law-property-rights-and-air-pollut... 2: https://mises.org/library/libertarian-manifesto-pollution https://mises.org/library/libertarian-manifesto-pollution EDIT: I'm assuming the question is in good faith. To understand libertarian thought in general and their views on property rights and how contracts organically occur, refer to a primer book by someone like Rothbard. It has nothing to do with denying the social domain of humanity.
cmurf 10y ago
OK but what if reputation is unreliable, untrustworthy? Reputation exists on a continuum. A destructive agent could damage the reputation assessment by being completely cooperative with some people and capricious with others. The resulting mixed reputation doesn't make you convincingly a destructive agent.

by pella 10y ago

pella 10y ago

direct pdf link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1103.3257v1.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1103.3257v1.pdf original publication: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519311001639 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519311...

paganel 10y ago

I've been thinking about this subject of "cooperation" for the last couple of days (also thanks in part to some links which made it to the front page of HN), and I have something to say about this: > Eventually this causes the exhaustion of the good, a situation which is bad for everybody. (...) where jokers outbeat defectors and cooperators outperform jokers, which are subsequently invaded by defectors. Thus, paradoxically, the existence of destructive agents acting indiscriminately promotes cooperation." I'd day that this culture of cooperation for defeating "jokers "doesn't apply to all cultures. It certainly doesn't apply to mine (somewhere in SE-Europe, on the fringe of the Balkans), where a realistic similar scenario would look somth like this: > Joker does his bad stuff, he shares some of his spoils with his relatives and very close acquaintances (god-fathers, god-sons etc.). These latter people are also part of the community that supposedly should cooperate in annihilating the Joker. Is fair to say that they won't. You've now got a fractured community, with some of its members (the Joker's friends and relatives) having no interest in "cooperation", and more importantly having the economical and power-related means of silencing the part of the community that would want to seek justice (because when you do bad stuff you usually do it in order to increase your economical and power-standing among your community). The Joker becomes an example for other people who see that doing nasty stuff supposedly pays off if you've got enough people by your side. Rinse and repeat. Aaron Swartz's theory is easier to implement where the Joker is an external element of the community, think immigrants, Jews in early 20-th century Europe, Armenians in late-Ottoman times etc, and I'd say that he's right, those communities actually got a lot more cohesive in chasing out the foreign Joker-like actor(s).

nostrademons 10y ago
I think the point of the "Joker" archetype (as opposed to the "defector" archetype) is that the Joker's actions are purely malicious, not self-interested. In other words, nobody benefits, not even the Joker. In the movie this includes actions like burning money and blowing up hospitals; in real life, it could include actions like nuclear terrorism, destroying holy sites, genetically engineering plagues for the extinction of humanity, blowing up buildings, wanton destruction of famous landmarks, etc. The idea is that when faced with an enemy whose actions are bad for everyone, all the people who previously had been engaging in conduct that was bad for everyone else but good for themselves will be forced to cooperate, lest the world burn to the ground.
- paganel 10y ago
  > The idea is that when faced with an enemy whose actions are bad for everyone I think this only happens in works of fiction (movies and the like). In real life even things like "terrorism, destroying holy sites, genetically engineering plagues for the extinction of humanity, blowing up buildings, wanton destruction of famous landmarks" have benefits for some members of those communities (ok, maybe not "nuclear terrorism", which is a big no-no for everybody). The recent acts of terrorism in Western Europe have only managed to increase the fracture between the Muslim part of the community (which has been around these parts of the world for some 3 generations) and the rest of the people.
  - hueving 10y ago
    The ability to short markets makes it very easy to profit off of mass destruction. Blowing up hospitals and even nuclear terrorism could be profitable with well-placed short positions.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    >The recent acts of terrorism in Western Europe have only managed to increase the fracture between the Muslim part of the community (which has been around these parts of the world for some 3 generations) and the rest of the people. Daesh have gone pretty far into the Joker realm, I'd say.

pella 10y ago

"How to keep punishment to maintain cooperation: Introducing social vaccine" (2016) http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2015.08.053 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2015.08.053 ( Under a Creative Commons ) http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437115007189 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437115... Keywords: Evolutionary game theory; Social dilemma; Free-rider problem; Agent based simulation; Social vaccine Abstract "Although there is much support for the punishment system as a sophisticated approach to resolving social dilemmas, more than a few researchers have also pointed out the limitations of such an approach. Second-order free riding is a serious issue facing the punishment system. Various pioneering works have suggested that an anti-social behavior or noise stemming from a mutation may, surprisingly, be helpful for avoiding second-order freeloaders. In this work, we show through mathematical analysis and an agent-based simulation of a model extending the meta-norms game that the coercive introduction of a small number of non-cooperators can maintain a cooperative regime robustly. This paradoxical idea was inspired by the effect of a vaccine, which is a weakened pathogen injected into a human body to create antibodies and ward off infection by that pathogen. Our expectation is that the coercive introduction of a few defectors, i.e., a social vaccine, will help maintain a highly cooperative regime because it will ensure that the punishment system works."

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
kovek 10y ago
How did you find these papers? Did you know about them before finding this post? If so, do you remember how you discovered them?
- pella 10y ago
  old HN topic and easy to remember :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3707691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3707691
- tejtm 10y ago
  ... I was in this closet at the university ... I'll get my coat.

pella 10y ago

arXiv:1210.7085: "Stability and robustness analysis of cooperation cycles driven by destructive agents in finite populations" (2012) https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.7085 https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.7085 Abstract: "The emergence and promotion of cooperation are two of the main issues in evolutionary game theory, as cooperation is amenable to exploitation by defectors, which take advantage of cooperative individuals at no cost, dooming them to extinction. It has been recently shown that the existence of purely destructive agents (termed jokers) acting on the common enterprises (public goods games) can induce stable limit cycles among cooperation, defection, and destruction when infinite populations are considered. These cycles allow for time lapses in which cooperators represent a relevant fraction of the population, providing a mechanism for the emergence of cooperative states in nature and human societies. Here we study analytically and through agent-based simulations the dynamics generated by jokers in finite populations for several selection rules. Cycles appear in all cases studied, thus showing that the joker dynamics generically yields a robust cyclic behavior not restricted to infinite populations. We also compute the average time in which the population consists mostly of just one strategy and compare the results with numerical simulations."

aaron-lebo 10y ago

Are there any historical examples of "a joker"? The sole example cited by the article is Nazi Germany which forced the US and the USSR to work together for a short time. That doesn't to me seem to be a real example of a "joker" however, that's just the enemy of my enemy being my friend kind of thing. Hitler wasn't just fucking things up for the sake of it, but had a very specific world he was trying to create. The Joker wanted chaos, or if he wanted anything else, doesn't tip his hand, being an unreliable source of information. How many different ways did he get those scars? I'm just asking because scholarly articles about the actions of fictional psychopaths seem a bit much. Especially when we are talking about applying it to entire groups of people (nations) without some good examples. Note, this is also different than Swartz's or the author's suggestion - that this cooperation was intended. That's not implied by the movie, nor the joker of the article. This is the first paragraph: In the recent Hollywood movie The Dark Knight (2008) the comic character known as the Joker jeopardizes a whole society spreading chaos and destruction with no aim of benefit at it. That's not Nazi Germany (the sixth paragraph or so and example). Hitler may have had a fucked up sense of societal benefit, but that was his goal, not wanton destruction (at least until he went completely crazy).

rocqua 10y ago
I'd say nature is the best example. Natural hazards with immediate and predictable effects are much like the joker. It hurts producers and freeloaders equally, and everyone sees them coming. The dutch 'polder' politics seem like a very fine example of this. I imagine predators are another example. As are very periodic floods or droughts.
nostrademons 10y ago
I'd expect such characters to get written out of the histories fairly quickly. The point of a "joker" is that they're purely destructive and don't work in anyone's self-interest, not even their own; thus, they're eventually defeated and have nobody that cares about them enough to keep their memory alive. But thinking about a few examples: Julian Assange is a modern-day joker, with Wikileaks indiscriminately publishing damaging info about many different institutions (several of which would otherwise be at odds with each other). Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who assassinated William Mckinley, who ironically spurred both cooperation among anarchists and cooperation against anarchists. Heck, the traditional description of Satan very much is the in line with the joker archetype, which makes me wonder if his depiction in religion is a composite of various joker-like characters that people have faced but not wanted to remember.

tarkin2 10y ago

Or, a common enemy is often needed?

dmichulke 10y ago

At the risk of stating the obvious: private property completely avoids this problem. There's a lot of libertarian literature as to why private property is preferable to "public goods" in many instances.

dontreact 10y ago
How do you make something like air quality a private good? My point is that it seems like there are many times when I don't see how you could apply the solution of private property.
- oskarth 10y ago
  I haven't read it in detail, but here's the gist from Mises Institute articles that touch on air pollution [1]: > In sum, no one has a right to clean air, but one does have a right to not have his air invaded by pollutants generated by an aggressor. Also see this quote [2]: > There is, first of all, this stark empirical fact: Government ownership, even socialism, has proved to be no solution to the problem of pollution. Even the most starry-eyed proponents of government planning concede that the poisoning of Lake Baikal in the Soviet Union is a monument to heedless industrial pollution of a valuable natural resource. But there is far more to the problem than that. Note, for example, the two crucial areas in which pollution has become an important problem: the air and the waterways, particularly the rivers. But these are precisely two of the vital areas in society in which private property has not been permitted to function. Agree or disagree, this is the typical libertarian response to externalities as far as I know. There's probably more to it w.r.t to public goods as "naturally given", and when something turns into private property, if you are look further into the literature. 1: https://mises.org/library/law-property-rights-and-air-pollution#11 https://mises.org/library/law-property-rights-and-air-pollut... 2: https://mises.org/library/libertarian-manifesto-pollution https://mises.org/library/libertarian-manifesto-pollution EDIT: I'm assuming the question is in good faith. To understand libertarian thought in general and their views on property rights and how contracts organically occur, refer to a primer book by someone like Rothbard. It has nothing to do with denying the social domain of humanity.

cmurf 10y ago

OK but what if reputation is unreliable, untrustworthy? Reputation exists on a continuum. A destructive agent could damage the reputation assessment by being completely cooperative with some people and capricious with others. The resulting mixed reputation doesn't make you convincingly a destructive agent.