JBP X Robert Sapolsky | Today at 5pm EST

If you're going to have interaction with someone, do you stab them in the back or do you cooperate?

Your starting point is you're never going to see this person again, and they have no means of telling anyone else on Earth if you were a jerk or whatever. The only real politic thing that anyone could ever do is don't cooperate; stab them in the back.

If you have only one round that you're going to interact with, and then you get this horrible regressive thing: if you're going to interact with them for two rounds, what's the logical thing to do on the second round? Stab them in the back.

So you've already defaulted into knowing that the second round is going to be non-cooperation. So what do you do in the first round? You already know the second round is a given, so you might as well stab them in the back on the first one.

And if there's three rounds, you go backwards. At every one of those points, if you're hyper-rational, no matter how many rounds ahead of you there are, if you know how many there are going to be, the only like uber Spocky and logical thing to do is to never ever cooperate.

Where the breakthrough comes in is when you don't know how many rounds there are in the future.