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kaberettMore Than Two on poly and the prisoner's dilemma. I find it reassuring, which of course means that my immediate reaction is to declare that I'm exhibiting confirmation bias and should look at it harder to work out why it's wrong (and also I've got a vague sense that I've seen substantive criticism of MTT that I ought to be taking into acount?), but -- right, okay, models for interaction to think about.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-17 04:51 pm (UTC)It also glosses over the most important part of the prisoner's dilemma for me, that in an ongoing relationship, you shouldn't usually have to guess if the other person is going to screw you over, you should have an ongoing pattern of good will, and be able to ASK and decide together what to do.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-17 05:02 pm (UTC)I agree that one shouldn't usually have to guess, in that there ought hopefully to be an established baseline of good-faith interaction; I'm not sure I agree that it glosses over that, though, in that it's focussing on (the early stages of) introducing metamours who haven't really known one another at all prior to that point; it does give several examples of long-term expectations (leaving money under the bridge) in addition to the relatively short-termist description of how Tit for Tat works?
(The relief for me is naturally mostly "okay, here's a source that's presenting itself as authoritative that's suggesting that I did actually make the best set of choices I could in the situation I was in" with respect to some interactions I'm still prone to second-guessing myself ad nauseam over -- and naturally that's precisely why I'm going, okay, I should be a bit careful about how much I trust this. Having said which, the thing I'm actually finding reassuring is that Tit for Tat worked best in that particular study in long-ish term simulations, so perhaps what I should be doing is looking up whether it's still the case that that constitutes and "optimal" model and have a thing about whether what it's optimised for in social situations is congruent with my aims!)
(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-17 05:25 pm (UTC)(I don't know enough about it, but that relief sounds valid to me.)
(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-17 05:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-17 05:42 pm (UTC)I'm kind of thinking this through as I go. I hope that's ok. Now I actually think about it, maybe longer-term decisions are naturally tit-for-tat and that comparison is scarily good. Like, "is this partner making a serious effort to make this work, or are they just making the right noises because it's convenient for them for now?" :( Then, you can't know for sure, except by deciding if gambling on trust is worth it and waiting to see. I hadn't thought about it before, but that's kind of scarily accurate, right down to someone saying "trust me, it's better for both of us", and not being able to know for sure.
What I was concerned about was, a prisoner's dilemma is explicitly when you have to decide separately whether to cooperate. If you can talk to each other, and *see* that you're both cooperating, there shouldn't be any dilemma. And that shouldn't normally be the case in a relationship (romantic or otherwise) in the medium term, because you should be able to simply say "we both want to cooperate right?" and assume the other person isn't outright lying about it.
Although now I stop to think, they're talking about a situation where you don't know *at all* how much to trust your partner's partner. "Suppose you start out, prior to the meeting, by believing that your partner’s new love is a conniving, self-centered bitch (or bastard), determined to undermine your relationship and to take your partner away from you." That's a much, much lower level of trust in your partner than I'm used to that that could be true. But now I think it's probably much more common than my experience, and the "should I trust my metamour" makes sense.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-17 06:32 pm (UTC)The specific situation the discussion's geared to is, I think, one that's very much aimed at people who are new-to-poly and still stuck in thinking of all other partners as competition/threat rather than collaboration (that's not the right word, but).
And there's something here too about what wanting to cooperate means (matching expectations of cooperation; whether there's the available cope/ability/etc to support the desire). And the issue of trauma histories causing false positives or otherwise priming one to expect (and see) defection where it might not actually exist; automatically approaching things in bad faith as defence mechanism causing the spiral of defensive defection is very much a thing I've seen happen even where it wasn't what anyone involved wanted.
So: I do very much try to approach things by trusting my partners and, by extension, my metamours. I'm confident that in all of my current relationships we are working in good faith and giving each other our sincere best efforts at information-sharing and collaboration and so on. I've sort of ended up, post the repeatedly-poisoning-me debacle, at "no third chances" -- I'm not *interested* in playing the game, any more, of guessing whether someone is making a serious effort and weighing that up; if they cause me serious harm twice in the same way, particularly if we discussed ways to avoid causing me that harm before they did it the first time, they don't get a third opportunity to harm me.
I think there are ways in which this can turn into an unduly negative model, but -- well, for me it keeps coming round to the Hogfather thing, right? You believe the small lies as practice for believing the big ones; that I can't know that people are trustworthy is why I keep coming back to the idea of falling in love (or choosing to trust) as analogous to learning to fly by throwing yourself at the ground and missing.
... yeah I'm still being handwavey about this, but maybe that's something to spark off?
(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-18 10:43 am (UTC)Oh good. That's what I thought, but if something is already stressful, it's easy for someone else's thinking aloud to tread on bits that are sensitive, so I always want to check.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-18 11:16 am (UTC)Now this suddenly ties into something *else* I was thinking about.
When you take a big not-completely-reversible step like moving cities to be together, having a child together, moving in together, getting married, etc, it *is* prisoner's dilemma-y, because you can both think you're in committed, but you can't be sure your partner is as committed as you think, and even if they are, you can't be sure they can live up to their intentions. Although you can hopefully buttress your confidence if you've shared big decisions together before. I didn't think of it enough because my romantic relationships have not involved most of those things.
But it's also making me think, I sometimes have a mistake where I feel obliged to trust someone or something, and that makes me feel like I have to gamble on that with no backup. Like, if I'm meeting someone somewhere, and I know they're trustworthy (both in the sense of being self-aware about what they're able to do, and not prone to reneging, and that they're either usually on time, or have specifically said they're GOING to be on time), then I'll expect to turn up and find them there on time. And if I don't trust someone *at all* then I simply won't go. But there's a middle ground where I like them and trust them on some things and feel like I SHOULD trust them on this. And I use to feel like I was being disloyal by, eg, arranging to meet somewhere where I'd be happy to do my own thing for a couple of hours if they couldn't make it. But now I feel like that's just normal: maybe there's won't be any problem, but usually having a plan B (even just in my head, I wouldn't usually make a big deal of it) doesn't really do any harm, and is often useful, even if the chance of them missing the train or whatever is only 10%, and especially if it's more likely than that.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-18 01:54 pm (UTC)yes, this, exactly this! those are the words for my occasional twitchy feels.
also re meeting people places and the like: things are often outside of someone's control and unexpected. even I trust someone to make their absolute best effort to be there, they could get caught up being a witness to a crime and having to give the police a statement and that's why they're late - and maybe they can't get a signal to call or text that they're going to be late and they also can't remember my number to borrow a phone with a signal to tell me. that's an unlikely set of things, sure, but it is still possible, and my anxiety is going to be sure to tell me that it's still possible. it is gambling with no (or at least very little) backup. I think I live in that middle ground. I never meet someone where I don't feel safe to be alone and slightly distracted, and I never go without something to keep myself entertained (hence the slightly distracted criterion). but like you, I keep the plan B in my head the vast majority of the time.
I guess I distrust the world more than I trust individual people, despite their proven trustworthiness, because shit happens in the world that can overrule the trustworthiness of a person. if that makes sense.
to bring that all back to the prisoner's dilemma, for all I know my accomplice is in a different room with their entire family being held at gunpoint to talk, and I would in no way blame them for talking in that case! or if it's the long-term thing, maybe they are in the hospital and not able to leave even an empty bag when I leave the cash, and again that's not their fault! even if it were a clone of me somehow programmed to want to cooperate all the time, things can happen that prevent that. I wouldn't blame them, but I wouldn't be happy. I'm that odd person who believes that individuals are good and try to be good but that the world as a whole is bad and can get in the way of individual good.
my metamour is a wonderful person whom I trust not to purposefully hurt up the relationship between myself and my partner. however, it's still possible that circumstances will conspire, like he could end up in the hospital when partner and I have a scheduled date night, thereby inadvertently breaking our "don't interrupt a date night" rule - and that has actually happened, and I was upset that the date night was canceled, but I was not upset at my metamour, because who actually wants to be in the hospital? not his fault in the slightest.
I guess I find the prisoner's dilemma too basic a model for real life poly (or any sort of relationship). if you just follow it, then tit for tat says I break up partner & metamour's next date night. tit for two tats says I let it go but if it happens again break up their date night. obviously I don't think it's right to do that, though!
anyway, that's my thinking at this point in reading the comments.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-17 06:41 pm (UTC)This ends up circling back around to a lot of my work on things I know versus things I believe (you posted about a different phrasing for the same conceptual framework recently, I think -- belief versus alief?). I spent a lot of yesterday (... I was quite Off) very strongly believing that A wiping down the kitchen surfaces was a pointed and vicious implicit criticism of me for Not Doing Enough Of The Housework Well Enough and a strong statement of dissatisfaction with and disappointment in me, while knowing that this belief was completely disconnected from reality and it wasn't something to treat as true for the purposes of deciding on appropriate actions.
And the article I link, I think, addresses what happens and how you might handle it when people go that kind of wrong - perceive that kind of defection - without noticing or catching themselves and compensating for it.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-17 06:50 pm (UTC)1. There's an artificiality in the Prisoner's Dilemma, always, and that artificiality is:
- you don't know this person
- you have no ability to judge this person's trustworthiness based on previous interactions
- you have no way to encourage one behaviour or the other via secondary social pressures
- you have no idea what the history of the other person is
- you have no way to contact them
Most people actively avoid getting into situations like the Prisoner's Dilemma setups for exactly those reasons: if something important is going to be riding on another human, we want to know enough about the other human to make a reliable guess about how they're going to behave. People's ability to make that guess, and willingness to make that guess on less information, is going to depend on their background and assessment of the situation and the other person, from hard facts down to general gut-feeling, down to what you feel is being risked in this case.
It's in organized crime when someone's setting up a partnership with someone new, they don't just run with it: they check reputation, they set up a bunch of little transactions where their asses are mostly covered and then with a bit more and more risk until they feel they've built up a pattern of how you're going to behave, who you are, what's going on.
2. There is no "right" answer. There's only the answer most likely to get you what you want out of a particular situation with the minimum amount of what you don't want.
3. "Things work better if everyone cooperates, approaches each other in good faith, and is honest" is absolutely true; so is "wouldn't it be nice if everyone is nice". That is, it's true, but not particularly useful out of the context of "so can I expect this other person to, in fact, do that?"
The reasons you may not be are many and varied, from "this person has no impulse control" to "this person secretly hates me" to "this person's goals are incompatible with mine but they think they can use me and this situation to obtain their goal if they behave in a certain way" to "this person has a self-destructive paranoia they can't control."
The unspoken assumption in the second, iterative thing discussed in the article, for example, is that the desires of both parties are simple and obvious: you want the goods, the other person wants the money. That may not be true. What the other person wants may actually be to build up a long enough pattern of criminal behaviour to arrest you! Or they may want to create a relationship of trust with you so that they can get you to do/buy other things. You may actually want relief from emotional pain (since most "illegal things" bought in this manner are drugs, and most regular drug-users are self-medicating, this is in fact quite likely).
This is actually the biggest flaw in all variations of the Prisoner's Dilemma question, including even the long and complex one that that blog lists at the bottom: it assumes everyone has the same goal.
And then just to make it even weirder and more complicated, it assumes everyone even knows what their goal is, which is a super bad assumption when we're talking about realms of the human emotions. Cf my thing about "know what it is you actually want": an awful lot of people tell themselves that what they want is [thing that is socially approve of in relationships goes here], when what they're desperate for is:
- emotional validation
- a sense of safety
- a relationship that feels familiar, that takes away the fear of the unfamiliar (see also: repeating pattern of abusive relationships)
- social status
- sexual fulfillment
- getting one over on someone else
- a possession
- respite from a crushing feeling of loneliness
- an ego boost
- their mother to shut up about "when are you going to get married already?"
. . . etc etc etc.
So for instance the goal in the last complex iteration the blog talks about, everyone shared the goal of "maximize profits". So let's throw in a monkey-wrench: let's make my goal "make enough money to buy a house".
If I can make enough money to buy a house by bilking just one other partner, then sure! I don't care about "tit for tat" (potentially) because I don't need a long term relationship with them: I just need to get all of their money in one fell swoop.
Or say my goal is "become the richest person in the room". At that point it actually becomes a potentially winning strategy for me to screw at least some of my business partners over in various ways, because the point isn't BOTH of us making the most profit, it's ME making MORE profits than them.
Even going back to the original Prisoner's Dilemma, the assumption likewise is that the foremost motivation of both prisoners is, at all points in the interrogation, to avoid jail-time. Any police-interrogator will tell you that a) that's not true, and b) that's how they manage to win with interrogation. A very, very frequent interrogation tactic isn't about jail-time: it's actually about "prove to us you're not really evil."
Because it turns out self-perception about good-vs-evil is really important to a lot of people, even violent criminals, so people will implicate themselves (and another partner) just to make sure that other people don't think they're the horrible cold-blooded murderer who shot the old lady in cold blood (or whatever). "It was his idea!" is often as much about "I don't want to be the bad guy" as it is about "pinning" the jail time specifically on the other person.
tl;dr: humans are not reliably rational actors, if by "rational" you mean "going to pick the best end outcome as determined by someone emotionally detached from the situation"; the things that influence our actions and decisions are myriad, we often don't even know what it is we want in any given situation so we can't even predict our OWN behaviours and feelings, let alone anyone else's, and we can't read anyone's mind.
4. The conclusion is . . . simplistic, at the least. Among other things, it presents the world as if it were a simple "defect or cooperate" dichotomy, which is frankly just wrong.
Taken out of the simplistic form of the Dilemma games, the questions start piling up: what is defecting? what is cooperating? why? who defines it? why do they get to define it?
Say in your relationship you have an agreement about date nights: you and your partner's other partner both get date nights with partner once a week. Date Night is Important. (For whatever reason.)
Except POP is severely ill with the flu on one of your Date Night's, and doesn't have anyone else to look after them. And that sucks, so of course this time Date Night gets cancelled and Partner goes over to look after POP. Sure. Reasonable. After all, that means if the reverse happens, Partner would cancel THAT Date Night and come look after YOU.
And it's easy to say "well of course you just use your common sense and be flexible" . . . except what if you just about never get sick, but POP gets sick a lot? Or vice versa? When does "Tit for Tat" stop in this situation? When do you start worrying that the constant need for Partner's care is a deliberate attempt to make THAT relationship More Important than yours? Or vice versa - how does it feel to have POP starting to think that about you?
When and how do you draw the line of "I'm feeling sidelined, you have to pay more attention to me now or I'm breaking up with you"? How does it feel to have POP basically say "I don't care if they're curled up in the dark with a migraine and need help, you have to come to Date Night (or whatever) with me instead"?
And given that there truly are people out there who would both a) use this as a strategy to make their relationship with Partner more important than yours (hypothetically) and b) might even do so while insisting to themselves that they are not and would never do so . . . it gets really complicated really quick.
And I mean that's an extreme example. What do you do if you and POP just don't LIKE one another? :P Etc.
I mean the functional outcome of that is, yeah, it's probably best to enter any situation willing to trust and cooperate. And it's probably a bad idea to "hold a grudge", if what you mean by "grudge" is "resentment and ill-feeling disproportionate to the stimulus and/or continued past the point that it becomes clear a behaviour pattern has changed/when it's not a good indication of behaviour pattern." But in real life not observing the pattern of behaviour of other people and then starting to base your choices on that pattern is . . . well, kind of foolish.
That's where the saying "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" comes from: it's not actually an attempt to say that the moral responsibility for the act now belongs to the victim, it's meant to remind us that there's just about no way for us to defend ourselves against the FIRST time someone takes advantage of us (not reliably) but giving them the opportunity to do so again means we are deliberately ignoring evidence we already have. It was an unwise thing to do.
The trick is to actually parse the evidence correctly, and to put weight on the correct evidence. What you don't want to do is start with mistrust and suspicion based on this being your partner's other partner. The mere fact that they want to date your partner does not inherently make them untrustworthy!
On the other hand if your partner is dating someone you know to be kinda iffy in the behaviour area and to have done things that strike you as warning signs in previous relationships, well, you might want to have a few more defenses up and make sure those first few "are you going to defect or cooperate" interactions are based on things you can stand to lose or can fix otherwise, and see what happens.
It's complicated, and that post really, really wants to simplify it. It wants to assume that everyone has the same goal (which is a bad assumption), that everyone knows what their goal is and is in control of their desires (which is a bad assumption), that people even experience the same behaviours the same way and there is an objective standard of "default/cooperate" in emotional relationships (REALLY bad assumption*) . . . yeah.
I mean, again, the sort of basic heart of it is good: you will probably get better results approaching with a willingness to cooperate and goodwill. From there, it all gets . . . really messy, really fast.
*For Person A, being late for something is a sign of the highest disrespect; for Person B, time is an illusion, lunch-time doubly so. For Person A, the fact that Person B doesn't arrive to an agreed meeting is basically saying "fuck you" and making a farting noise at her, and thus an egregious breach of Tit for Tat; for Person B, Person A's rigidity is clearly an attempt to exert control over them, in turn an egregious breach of Tit for Tat. By the metric of the post, they are both at this point entitled to stop behaving to each other with trust and goodwill.
The impulse here may be "well if they just TALKED about it - !" except that that assumes that either of them is willing or able to change their position. That Person A is able to STOP feeling like they're being told they're worth less than the dirt under Person B's shoes when Person B does that; that Person B is able to stop feeling controlled and caged by the need to adhere to Person A's arbitrary and (to them) unreasonable standards.
Where's tit-for-tat?
(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-17 08:46 pm (UTC)(Really very thank you! I am going to try to make more words after sleep.)
(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-19 02:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-17 08:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-18 09:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-18 02:00 pm (UTC)That was excellent
Date: 2016-02-20 03:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-17 08:17 pm (UTC)I feel like a good chunk of my life has been around Really Super Untrustworthy Shenanigans in comparison to that essay. I think this means that I've perhaps had some really bad partners.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-17 08:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-17 10:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-17 11:06 pm (UTC)Binary trust situations don't ... actually crop up all that often, in my experience, where you know nothing and can only choose trust-or-bust, and there's no wait-and-see option.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-17 11:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-18 01:26 am (UTC)This is a very good point.
Relatedly (and I remember talking with you about this before, but I don't think kab was there for that conversation) trust isn't necessarily or usually fungible. I trust my cat not to try to kill me, I do not trust her to make sure my pasta sauce isn't burning. This doesn't mean I distrust my cat.
A lot of people seem to think it works differently with humans, or with humans one's in an intimate relationship with, or with humans one's known a long time, but it doesn't. Intimacy or length of relationship can give one a better idea of how one can expect a person to behave, and can change the expectations by changing the situation, and there are some commonly-used permissions categories that frequently go together, but it still can't convert that person into a mythical person who is willing to and capable of fulfilling one's trust in every situation, no matter how unreasonable that trust.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-18 02:01 pm (UTC)*giggles endlessly*
(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-18 05:19 pm (UTC)This. And to elaborate on it slightly, in human relationships even "bust" doesn't have to involve retaliaton. In Prisoner's Dilemma games, "defect" is usually set up in such a way that it has a direct unpleasant consequence for the other person. In human relationships, I can usually protect myself in ways that don't directly make the other person's life unpleasant. I might think that it could have been more pleasant if they were willing to cooperate, but usually there are choices other than "be helpful" or "be punitive", even after we're out of "wait and see" and into "I think this person is completely untrustworthy". Risk mitigation strategies, basically, tailored to whatever specific harm I'm concerned about as a result of their untrustworthiness.