The Prisoner's Dilemma

It’s a cynical take, but the more I think about it, the more I think life is essentially the prisoner’s dilemma, but on a grand, recurring scale. In the purest prisoner’s dilemma, the optimal strategy is to always defect, and the best possible outcome is when the protagonist defects and the antagonist cooperates. In applied situations, one player can of course attempt to exert their influence on the other player to cooperate in order to increase their EV, as demonstrated here wonderfully by none other than Liv Boeree (on another note - the comments on that video are hilarious/incredibly depressing depending on how you look at it).

And really, I think that is all life boils down to. Our systems are so broken and riddled with misaligned incentives, and why is that? It’s because people are trying to persuade us to cooperate, so they might defect and exploit others for their own gain. It’s inevitable in a capitalist society, where the stated aim is to maximise your own expected value (as seen through the lens of wealth), that eventually people will work out optimal strategies for this game and exact them upon the rest of us. The lengths to which they go to persuade us to cooperate is remarkable, and somewhat grim - it happens in every possible aspect of life. Even in schools, at a young age, we espouse to children the values of being kind, generous and, uhh, cooperative - leaving them vulnerable to be exploited by those who have no moral qualms about taking the defector’s path.

So it seems the correct strategy is to ignore those that would coerce you into cooperation and defect instead. I’ll let you know how it goes (although if it goes well, I’ll preach that it went horribly in order to raise my own EV further).