The Nephite Prisoners’ Dilemma
Inasmuch as ye are not guilty of the first offense, neither the second, ye shall not suffer yourselves to be slain by the hands of your enemies.
This is a game theory strategy. In fact, it is the winning game theory strategy for a repeat prisoners’ dilemma.
The prisoners’ dilemma goes like this. Two guys get nabbed. The cops separate them and try to get them to confess. If neither talks, they both get light sentences. If only one talks, the other gets a heavy sentence and the crook who turned gets off scot free. If both talk, they both get heavy sentences.
The situation where both choose not to testify is called “cooperate-cooperate” and is the situation where everyone is best off. Generally speaking the Prisoners’ Dilemma describes any situation where everyone is better off if they cooperate but where someone has incentives to not cooperate (“defect”) if the others involved still “cooperate,” letting the defector play them for suckers.
If the game is repeated over and over with the same players involved, a good strategy is called Tit for Tat. You start off by cooperating, then defect in round 2 if your counterpart defects in round 1, but switch back to cooperating once the other starts to cooperate.
But if you have imperfect information–in other words if occasionally you think your counterpart has defected but you are wrong, or you counterpart thinks you have defected when you haven’t, the best strategy for either of you to adopt is Tit for Two Tats. Ditto if you live in a world where people are angry and emotional and take time to correct their course.
What is invariably a losing strategy is to always cooperate no matter what. Eventually you must respond.
Filed under: We transcend your bourgeois categories | No Tag
Jacob G.
August 19, 2024
If Moroni is quoting a commandment there, it puts god-fearing people who have already committed the first and maybe even the second offense in a bind. They can never not be guilty of that, so they cannot blamelessly defend themselves with force.
Perhaps this is referring to the Anti-Nephi Lehies. They were not pacifists in the modern sense, rather they had been part of the Lamanite raiding culture that we read about with Ammon, and the people who were attacking them did have legitimate grievances against them, so they could not engage in ‘just’ war.
H/t: Bradley’s The Lost 116 Pages.
Jacob G.
August 19, 2024
On topic: How do we square that tit-for-tat strategy with the injunction to ‘turn the other cheek’.
One possibility is that tit-for-tat, like a lot of algorithmic solutions, require exact conditions to work out. If conditions are different, and sometimes only by a little bit, the solution no longer holds.
The tit-for-tat strategy requires repeated interactions and near symmetry between the parties to work. As such it may be a good rule for in between peer nations, but a bad rule for subjects to deal with rulers, such as Jews, Greeks, and Romans dealings with the Empire.
NR
August 19, 2024
This reminds me of the old web-demo about different strategies and why this is the correct one:
https://ncase.me/trust/
AMG
August 19, 2024
Turn the other cheek matches the imperfect data optimal strategy of tit for two tats.
Interesting theory on the anti Nephi Lehi’s perhaps having lost their right to righteously defend themselves. I have previously thought that there might be an addiction like aspect to it. That might seem pretty strange to us, but the experience of war seems to have been fundamentally different, before modern industrial war, with nothing like PTSD in any form coming through surviving accounts predating the modern times. Most accounts are actually very enthusiastic about the experience of battle.
Robert S.
August 24, 2024
The more that violence scales up, the less individual agency is preserved.
If I stab my enemy with a sword, I know that I did it; if I did so in battle, presumably I did so under lawful orders or in defense of some noble objective: Ammon v Lamoni’s Father, Moroni’s Bodyguard v Zerahemna
If I attack a single enemy at range, or carefully choose one target at a time to engage, the same applies: David v Goliath, Ammon v the Lamanite Sheep Rustlers
Stealth is also lawful in the right circumstance: Nephi v Laban, Teancum v Amalickiah/Ammoron
However, the factors of destructiveness, distance, surprise, and (lack of) discrimination have multiplicative or even exponential effects on how frightening/disturbing/repulsive a violent act is:
No discrimination, or asymmetrical (innocent) target selection: suicide bomber terrorism, et c.
Surprise: Assassination via treachery (Julius Caesar)
Destructiveness: Executing out-of-favor army officers via anti-aircraft artillery (North Korea)
Long-range attacks aren’t inherently heinous, as long as the target is reasonably aware of their possibility.
Chemical and biological weapons tend to combine several of these factors, greatly increasing their repulsiveness; and the cases of Hiroshima and Nagasaki show that combining all of them (long range surprise bombing of a previously ignored target of logistical and support importance, but no immediate military significance) can alter the modes of warfare permanently.
Nephi had full agency when killing Laban; the guy aboard Enola Gay pushing the bomb-chute release switch was merely the tip of a very, very long and complex spear.