Some articles I read in Nature a few years back suggested an even better strategy: play tit-for-tat, but only after checking for and exploiting suckers who are always nice regardless of what you do. In their models this was actually necessary for a stable system. Other experiments have said that in a noisy system where two players don't always communicate perfectly (rather like in life) it's important to not just play tit-for-tat but to be nice sometimes even when someone doesn't seem to deserve it.
Yeah. Much of this is explored by game theory. Basically, what I'm arguing is that you should look past the standard two-person model and try to bias an n-person model such that the group benefits are maximized.
I have reason to believe the name may have its roots in the science fiction community, actually. I have a friend, James Stevens-Arce, who had a number of short stories published in the 70s and 80s, and finally sold his first novel a couple of years ago. Back when Jim was starting out, he got a lot of useful advice from other writers he met, and asked one of them what he could do to pay back the favour. "Don't pay it back," was the response. "Pay it forward."
Jim told me this story a couple of years ago at a WorldCon after I thanked him for introducing me to an editor. He also said the putative coiner of the phrase is Robert Heinlein.
Huh. That ethic would make a lot of sense, coming from that community. But I'd be a bit skeptical about the RAH reference. That smells of urban legend.
It's funny, because part of my psych textbook that I should be reading for Thursday mentions how the world actually works quite a bit like that already, for much the same reasons you state (if you default to being nice to any member of your own species, rather than just people you know personally/family, then things work out better).
What I'm advocating isn't that you should be nice to people. I think lots of people do that by default. What I'm advocating is the active propogation of niceness, which is not a normal property.
What you basically want to foster is an environment where people don't exploit anyone else, because that's only beneficial locally.
I know we've barely done anything together, but even from the short bit that we have it's been made quite evident to me that you are a very generous fellow!
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Anyways, I find this stuff fascinating.
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Jim told me this story a couple of years ago at a WorldCon after I thanked him for introducing me to an editor. He also said the putative coiner of the phrase is Robert Heinlein.
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What you basically want to foster is an environment where people don't exploit anyone else, because that's only beneficial locally.
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I know we've barely done anything together, but even from the short bit that we have it's been made quite evident to me that you are a very generous fellow!
Yay for you! :)
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