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Why political revenge narratives don't make sense to me.
It essentially implies the difference between the right wing and left wing argument about things are about morals and not about the effectiveness of policy or economic ideas for the good of our country and our citizens. If "your rules fairly" includes doing things that you think are stupid, inefficient, counter-productive and extra prone to corruption then doing it back would be strange.
Presumably if you hold an idea like "smaller governments are generally better for a country's growth" or "the state taking ownership in companies leads to bad incentives" or "free speech benefits the country's citizens and the country as a whole" then it would make little sense to abandon them once you've taken power if you want the best for the nation.
After all if you care about the country, I would assume you want good and effective policy. If you see the left's policy ideas as bad and harmful to our future, it's not a great idea to join in on the self-harm. Unless you're a traitor and hate the country, you would be pushing for what you think is the best policy. Now people might disagree on what is best for growth, what is best for the people, and what is best for the country but we should expect them to pursue their ideas in the same way if they care about America, towards ideas they think are good.
This is part of why principled groups can stay principled so easily. An organization like FIRE truly believes that free speech is beneficial. Suppression and censorship when their side is in power would be traitorous to the good of the country in their mind, even if done out of a desire for revenge. A person like Scott Lincicome of CATO truly believes that government taking equity of private enterprise is bad policy, and thus it's easy for him to critique it.
They aren't "turning the other cheek", they just actually believe in the words they say and the ideas they promote. They want good policy (or at least policy they think is good) for the benefit of the country. Sometimes you can see this in politicians, like how Bernie Sanders supports the plan to take equity in Intel. He believes government ownership of corporations is good for the country so he supports it even when the "enemy" does it. I think he's a stupid socialist but it's consistent with what I expect from a true believer. And you see with libertarian Republicans like Ron Paul, Justin Amash and Thomas Massie criticizing the Intel buy.
Counter to this, the "revenge" narrative comes off like the advocates never believed the words they were saying. It suggests their stated beliefs don't reflect what they think is good for the future of the US, but rather personal feelings and signaling to their in-group community. If they changed their minds it would be understandable, but if that's the case then the revenge narrative is unnecessary to begin with, they can now argue on the merits.
Principles are easy until you've lost a few elections. Once you realize no one else has them, it becomes difficult to maintain an interest in such a filthy game without playing it.
That doesn't address anything!
Let's say there's a small government conservative who truly believes that growth, national wealth and general national prosperity are benefited through free trade and a hands off government. They want what is best for the country, so they support a small government.
They observe that other people in the world are hypocrites. Being a person who truly believes that free trade and hands off government is beneficial to the nation (and assuming they still care about the nation), they would not change on policy with this observation and would still support free trade and hands off government.
And they would never obtain power because they cooperate in the face of defection.
You know what's better than tit for tat in game theory? Tit for tat with occasional forgiveness.
Now consider in real life with real life human biases where people just take things as attacks on them when they aren't. Everyone does it. So in a real life situation, we would always be defecting in revenge because we see constant defects (even in cases where there isn't!).
Now consider even more that political groups are not hiveminds. They are rather loose coalitions. A principled traditional conservative and a new era "post-liberal conservative" might both check off for Republican, but we don't clearly match up in many ways.
If a "post-liberal conservative" keeps defecting, I wouldn't want to be blamed for them! And I should rationally be able to extend this understanding to other groups and that they too are loose coalitions.
So the defect fetishists are doomed to never have a cooperation work out, they are always willing to sabotage it. While people willing to be forgiving and work towards cooperation will get wins every once in a while.
It's why the US has been one of the greatest countries in the world while the fascists and communists kept losing. Because even our stongest internal attempts at purging and defecting are weak sauce compared to them, so we get a bunch of cooperation wins.
Wouldn't it be outperformed by tit for tat with occasional unwarranted defection?
The specific case in which TfTwF outperforms TfT is a round-robin iterated prisoner's dilemma (scoring on total utility over all players/iterations) with many other players being TfT and a small amount of random noise added to people's decisions (i.e. "my hand slipped"). This is because, in this specific scenario, the random noise causes the TfT players to feud with each other quite extensively, whereas the feuds get cut short when there's a TfTwF involved and thus, while the TfT-vs.-TfTwF head-to-head is slightly in favour of TfT, TfTwF's self-play massively outperforms TfT's self-play.
If most players are not TfT (or very similar), TfT does better than TfTwF (as there either aren't any extensive feuds anyway, or the feuds - with e.g. Grim - can't be ended by forgiveness). If there is no noise, TfT does better than TfTwF.
TfT outperforms TfT-with-occasional-defection against TfTwF, unless the forgiveness time is too short*, as the feud, while relatively short, still outweighs the value of the defection.
*Obviously, the limit of TfTwF as forgiveness time goes to zero is just Co-operate-Bot, and we all know the optimal response to that is to spam defection.
Well, that changes the things rather significantly.
Come on, you've completely changed the meaning of the game at this point.
By "total utility" I meant "the total utility you score for yourself across all opponents". I will note that the object of PD is explicitly to score the most utility for yourself, not to outscore your opponent, so adding up the scores rather than counting "who scored more" matchups is more sensible.
I also think you might be misconstruing my intentions; what drove me to post was that @magicalkittycat misrepresented the game theory (there are a lot of people pushing that same line, so I'm not claiming malice) and I wanted to clarify it. I responded to you rather than to him because you asked a question about it which meant I wanted to alert you, the clarification and answer to the question didn't directly involve MKC so I wasn't required by honour to alert him (I am now), and MKC's kinda been on an angry rampage in this thread, including when replying to me, so I wasn't really feeling very enthused about the prospect of likely just getting a third earful for my trouble.
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