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I don't have a link now, but if there is a chance for miscommunication, the good strategy becomes more "forgiving". So you can keep being cooperative and kind for more than one iterations to be sure they really want to defect. Then you can defect too, until they cooperate.

The Evolution of Trust[0] is a fun walkthrough of those game theory strategies. It adds the twist of miscommunication towards the end.

[0]https://ncase.me/trust/

Thanks! That's the link I meant!

If you’re applying game theory here, I’m curious what the objective function would be? (What are you trying to maximize/minimize?)

I think a potential flaw is assuming people are static beings. Consider if you passed me shortly after my dog died...I may not be in a mental state to even notice you said anything. If we passed weeks or months later I could be in a completely different state but we’re still not connecting because you’ve already concluded it wasn’t worth the effort.

I feel like there is a fundamental issue if people look for interactions to be transactional marketplace. It’s completely different than deliberately acting from a place of compassion

The goal is to maximize how much of your social time and energy is spent on mutually rewarding interactions and relationships relative to one-sided or exploitative interactions and relationships.

A constraint is wanting to remain open to potentially rewarding new relationships (so not simply closing yourself off to people who aren't already in your circle).

Another constraint is remaining flexible for when people update their behavior (in either direction). Which I think answers your objection? If you were in a bad state because your dog died, that's completely understandable. But now it's up to you to salvage the dynamic, not me, as I already went out on a limb once. If you do that, then the first encounter would be water under the bridge and I wouldn't hold it against you.

Giving compassion is wonderful, but life is a lot better when you reserve most of it for people who will respond with compassion in kind, rather than milking it for their own benefit and giving nothing in return. Sticking up for yourself doesn't mean being transactional--it just means that you extend compassion to yourself as well as to others.

While I can understand your perspective and probably would completely agree in the past, it still strikes me as rooted in a transactional expectation. “I did something so now it’s incumbent on you to do something.” My definition of compassion doesn’t encompass giving compassion only if I have the promise of receiving it in return. I also think you can be non-transactional while still having boundaries. Not saying hi back is probably a boundary we’d disagree on.

I found it only feels wrong because I expected something. So the problem is as much in my expectation as their behavior and based in a faulty assumption that interactions are a zero sum game. I don’t always embody non-transactional compassionate behavior but having tried both approaches, once you can get past the expectations of what people can do for you, I find it a better way to live.

Compassion can mean different things. Merely being polite, positive and listening and not screwing the other over, sure makes sense to be generous about that to many people.

But in many cases compassion may mean self sacrifice: time, money, effort etc. It's fine to expect something back, at least not being mean or more demanding to you or sour about why you didn't do more. There are toxic people like that that you better not help. You can learn it the hard way. Maybe it can be communicated better, but in many cases people are predisposed to see you as a threat. If you offer to help, they think you do it as a scheme to help yourself and screw them. And they will fume even years afterwards that you somehow screwed them over when you genuinely helped them. That you didn't help enough, that you were selfish etc.

You need to choose who you spend your finite energy on. Not every person in a bad place is some idealized angel who is thirsty for your help and will be grateful.

I think we actually agree. I'm not saying that you should expect something in return when being kind to people. That's not real altruism.

I'm more talking about when someone goes in the other direction and is notably unkind, inconsiderate, cold, exploitative, or otherwise disrespectful to you. That's when it's time to switch to a new strategy.

To me, ignoring a neighbor who greets you is pretty cold and disrespectful, but yeah, everyone has a different line when it comes to these things, and it depends a lot on context.

t4t comes from the prisoner's game, where the choices are 'cooperate' or 'fuck the other person over for your own gain', so that sets the mindset the strategy is meant for.

It seems to me that switching from immediately stopping the kind action (e.g. greening someone) as soon as it's not reciprocated to stopping the kind action if it is habitually not reciprocated could address a lot of those problems.

You could probably also put a maximum age on your game state. E.g. if it's been more than a week since this person failed to reciprocate, then treat this like an initial interaction.

You're just playing tit-for-tat. The main benefit it extreme simplicity- in principle, one bit of memory per person, and one if-then decision. And it performs very well in iterated prisoner's games.

Yes, everyone has a complex inner history blah blah blah. There's 6 billion people, and you're not going to give equal attention to all of them, so you need different approaches. Plus, explicitly playing tit-for-tat keeps you from being emotionally gamed as easily.

As you state, it’s based on an overly simplified model. I.e., it’s a heuristic that may not generalize well to the more complex realities of life, depending on what you’re trying to achieve. It’s akin to an objective function of “find a reasonable local optimum solution that requires as little overhead as possible” which can completely miss the global optimum. I was asking for clarification because I was curious how important the “overhead cost” function was as a constraint to the OP. That’s probably where our perspectives diverge; I’m usually willing to take on more of that overhead cost if it can break me out of the local solution.

As an aside, the perspective is appreciated but dismissive approaches to comments (“blah blah blah”) tend to go against HN guidelines. You make good points but I wouldn’t want them to be lost to moderators because of the phrasing

(This strategy is called “tit for tat”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat )

I can't thank you enough for how much this helps me. I've become very guarded when it comes to strangers. You lay out a good strategy on how to deal with people. This would help one get acquaintances, friends, and weed out the bad ones.