Oh damn, damn, damn. You are really just an advanced version of me. If I met you on literally any other site I would want to meet you. (I know you have no reason to want to meet me, just wanted to say how impressed I am by you)
Thank you for the kind words. I don't really mind meeting people from on here, in fact, I have been trying to get exactly that to happen with some other users. Online acquaintances don't really satisfy my need for social interactions any longer and I have come to accept bigger risks as part of my desire to not die slowly rotting away in my room while waiting for some positive change to find me in here by itself. If you ever visit Germany (assuming you aren't already here), I would be happy if you would hit me up.
Yes. I think in a simple "game" the most successful strategy was initially cooperating, then tit-for-tat, but I guess that only works for repeated encounters.
I'm thinking of something less general, more in line with something like
cold winter theory. A harsher climate selects for intelligence and cooperativeness, because you have to rely on each other to survive, meaning either everyone makes it or everyone dies. People who can't compromise for the sake of the group either get kicked out or wipe out their own group by creating unnecessary conflict.
In such a setting it makes sense to give and cooperate easly and freely. You can trust you will get something back in return in the long run and you have a vested interest in other members of your group doing well. But there probably still is a degree where you become
too indiscriminately cooperative, where it starts to become possible for other members of your group to exploit you for their own benefit. If you give easily, you need to be harsh in punishing others who abuse this as a way to disincentivize such behavior and prevent it from becoming a pattern. Someone using you as part of a parasitic relationship is basically a death sentence, if not for you, then for your genes. Better to force a
you-or-me type of conflict as quickly as possible. If you win, you gain respect and won't be bothered like that again, if not, it's the same as letting yourself be exploited. So, being sensitive to attempts at abusing your generosity makes sense as part of that whole pattern.
Obiously this is the kind of just-so evolutionary storytelling they warn you about in your first year, but a) this is no university, b) I have no strong attachement to this idea or the details I used to illustrate it, it's mostly just an intuition around there being a conncection between being cooperative and being unforgiving to defection/exploitation of good will, something you would base a hypothesis on to test later, not the actual test result.
