Either the Comment of the Day by CEES VAN BARNEVELDT on yesterday’s post on “tit for tat” needs to introduction, or I’m not awake enough to write one. I was just made nauseous by catching Letitia James’ shrill, shouted address declaring her self a victim of a politicized Justice Department. How does anyone that hard to listen to get any votes at all? I would rather listen to Kamala Harris until they hauled me off to padded room before I’d endure a whole James speech even once.
Ah! This reminds me of how most women in politics desperately need to seek vocal and public speaking training if they are going to successfully compete with (competent) men in elections without depending solely on pro-female voter bias. Don’t giggle, ladies, and don’t shout in a strident high-pitched tone! That’s the short version: give me two hours of coaching, and I might make one of you President.
But I digress. Here is CEES’s Comment of the Day on the post, Let’s Begin With The Comment of the Day, Shall We? In Response to “On The Axis Hypocrisy Re Letitia James, Tit-For-Tat, and Trump’s ‘Revenge'”(that’s clip #24 from the Ethics Alarms Hollywood Clip Archive above.)
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We need to discern the tit-for-tat rationalization from the tit-for-tat strategy. The tit-for tat strategy is a cooperative strategy that is used to enforce cooperative behavior from your opponent. The strategy is called cooperative as the first move in the tit-for-tat game is always cooperative. It will take a long post to explain the in’s and out’s of he tit-for-tat strategy as part of game theory; as I am traveling now that may come at a later day, as there is a lot of math involved and I also want to address how biologists use the tit-for-tat strategy as an explanation for why altruism and ethics even exist.
The Trump administration is following the tit-for-tat strategy. The reason why Trump, and the MAGA Republicans are following this strategy is that they never want to see the Democrats use the lawfare as practiced by Democrats during the Trump I and the Biden administration again. In other words the tit-for-tat strategy is used for the value of deterrence in the case of Laetitia James. The argument used against this strategy is that if the Republicans use lawfare against the Democrats, the Democrats will use lawfare against Republicans when they come back in power. The counter argument is that the Democrats have already practiced lawfare against Trump to the maximum extend possible during the two previous administration; they will jump at the chance to do further lawfare against Republicans whenever they get the chance regardless of the strategy of the Trump administration.
The situation is similar to a boy (let’s call him Rick) who is being bullied by another boy (let’s call him Dave). Dave hits Rick with a stick almost every day, with Rick protesting that it is wrong to hit someone with a stick. At one day Rick is able to grab Dave’s stick, and now start hitting Dave. Dave protests “You always said that it is wrong to hit someone with a stick”. Rick responds “Wong answer, it was wrong for you to hit me with a stick”, and keeps hitting with demands to apologize and a promise that Dave will never hit Rick again.
When the tit-for-tat strategy does not work as intended, and the opponent keeps defecting than the game actually becomes an iterative prisoner’s dilemma. In a prisoner’s dilemma game the only optimal move is to defect. In an iterative prisoner’s dilemma the optimal strategy is to continue defecting until the opponent breaks the doom loop with a cooperative move.
The tit-for-tat rationalization appears in situations where no real strategy exists. It often includes the use of prima facie unethical behavior such as violence and criminality. The Hatfield and the McCoy families are a prime example of this. I would think that the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers operate in tit-for-tat rationalization territory more than in tit-for-tat strategy territory, with the events at J6 as a prime example.
My take is that the Trump administration acts perfectly rational according to the tit-for-tat strategy. And I consider rational behavior to be ethical and irrational behavior stupid and unethical.
Ethics Alarms 
Very well explained. Congrats on the COTD
Great comment! Very nice explanation of how TFT operates within a PD. Also true that intergroup PD is much more prone to DD lock than two-person PD. Why? Fear and greed are amplified by intergroup group dynamics. However, when the players within those groups change over time (as is true for the back and forth among political parties typical in democracies, and also true for family feuds across generations), opportunities for the “generous” version of TFT (one player tries out C as an olive branch) increase, as the hope that things have maybe changed since the last exchange become more feasible.
Jack wrote: “I was just made nauseous by catching Letitia James’ shrill, shouted address declaring her elf a victim of a politicized Justice Department.”
You no doubt meant she declared herself a victim of politicized violence, but I quite like the image of James’s poor little victimized elf.
As perhaps you may have discerned, you host need to buy a new keyboard…
As I am traveling (leaf peeping in New England) there was a lot that I left out that I would have added if I were writing from home. That is just as well, as it kept the comment concise, and focused on the main argument.
I am now going to add a bit more detail, focusing on the math aspects of TFT; please bear with me if I get to pedantic. There are many more aspects that I am going to skip for now.
Tit-for-tat strategy is a game theory strategy, having its basis in the prisoner’s dilemma scenario.
Game Theory is the mathematical study of mathematical models in strategic interactions. It has applications in many fields of science such as economics, social sciences, biology, logic, computer science, as well in strategic planning at corporate and at government level ( e.g. war planning). It can be used as an umbrella term for the science of rational decision making by humans, actors, and, animals.
The first caveat that needs to be made is that models are always an abstraction of reality, containing simplifications. Models make assumptions about reality, e.g. we may assume that the actors in that model act rationally, and are purely driven by self interest. Another assumption is that the actor acts as one, whether it is an individual, a political party etc.
We need to have a proper understanding of the prisoner’s dilemma scenario first. I will use some Google AI text here.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma (in short PD) is a game theory scenario where two individuals acting in their own self-interest do not produce the optimal outcome, even though mutual cooperation would lead to a better result for both. It is a thought experiment that illustrates why cooperation can be difficult to achieve, even when it is beneficial for all parties involved. The classic example involves two prisoners who must decide whether to betray or cooperate with each other; each prisoner is better off betraying the other, but if both betray each other, they both end up with a worse outcome than if they had both cooperated.
How the dilemma works:
Now I will introduce some terms often used in game theory, using the PD as example:
Can the paradox of a prisoner’s dilemma be resolved? The answer is that this is possible in an iterative prisoner’s dilemma where the number of iterations is unknown or infinite. If the number of iterations is a known, let’s say an integer number with the value N, it can be proven via induction that this is a simple prisoner’s dilemma, and the Nash equilibrium is to always defect:
This doom scenario can only be broken if there is no identifiable step N. In that case the TFT scenario is the most optimal scenario (out of many possible scenarios) for both players together provided no one defects! The first step is always cooperate.
In the real world defection occurs, e.g. this may happen due to a misunderstanding. Here is where it gets interesting, as you need to model via computer simulations a number of variations on the TFT, e.g. on how forgiving you should be, e.g. only defect after two subsequent defections of the opponent, or immediate defection. I will ask you to look it up at Wikipedia if you need more info.