Thread by @MetaPrime001

The Batman Delusion

A Meta Thread on the necessity of evolving our understanding of morality 👾🧵

It is no surprise that in our modern times, we have a broken understanding of morality

We were ingrained with the idea that one should always strive to get along with our fellow human beings and can be achieved simply by following traditional moral codes like The Golden Rule

We grew up on superhero comics, action movies, and books where the hero could always save the day without cross the line of lethal force

And killing was always portrayed as an unredeemable sin that could never be justified

However, if someone broke into your home and threatened your family, it should be obvious that you are justified in defending yourself and your loved ones, even if lethal force is required

Morality therefore is not defined by a set of universal and immutable rules but by context

The reason we have a defined moral code like The Golden Rule is because it is optimal from a game theory perspective

A society is much more successful when we cooperate and the common Civilized Morality is the set of rules that facilitate that optimal cooperative state

But as we can see game theory outlined in The Prisoner's Dilemma, when everyone is cooperating, there is an opportunity for bad actors to take advantage of others' cooperation for their own short term gain

If you aren't familiar with the thought experiment of The Prisoner's Dilemma, it is fundamentally an experiment to understand the incentives around cooperative behavior.

The basic idea is that two robbers are caught trespassing, but the cops don't have enough evidence to convict them of the more serious crime of stealing. If they both remain silent, they both get a small penalty for the trespassing. However, they are given the option to rat the other robber out, condemning them to a much longer prison sentence, in exchange for going free.

From a pure game theory perspective, if you know the other party will stay silent, it is strictly better for you to rat them out and get off free and so both robbers are actually incentivized to rat, even though it's better over all if they cooperate.

What is so interesting about this is that if you run this experiment in the real world, people will often default to cooperation. This decision baffled game theorists and sparked a large effort to explain why so many people were making this suboptimal decision to cooperate.

What game theorists found is if you add the element of time, that is to say you have the same people repeat the experiment an indefinite number of times, the game theory optimal solution changes to mutual cooperation. This makes perfect sense. You can take advantage of someone's cooperation in the short term, but they probably aren't going to cooperate with you (let alone play with you) again.

So scientist think that because people default to thinking of the repetitive nature of cooperative decisions, even when asked to play only once, test participants will typically choose to cooperate despite the fact that game theory says they shouldn't.

This has further interesting implications when you play with people who can't think into the future, but that is a whole other matter entirely...

Because of this danger of one's cooperation being taken advantage of, the best strategy when playing the Prisoner's Dilemma is called Tit for Tat

Start by cooperating then mirror whatever your opponent does. This facilitates the ideal equilibrium of cooperation while punishing any non cooperative behavior and allowing forgiveness

The story of how Tit for Tat was discovered is also fascinating. Sparked by the seeming contradiction in people's preference to cooperate in The Prisoner's Dilemma despite game theory saying otherwise, there was a programming competition held to see which strategy could achieve the best individual results.

Programmers created algorithms and pitted them against each other to see which one performed best. Interestingly enough, it wasn't a complicated strategy that won. Nor was it a strategy that took advantage of its opponents. Tit for Tat won because it balanced incentivizing cooperation while refusing to allow itself to be taken advantage of. It didn't perform better than if both sides had only cooperated, but it performed the least worst in an environment where all strategies wanted to win and weren't shy about not cooperating to do it.

The Tit for Tat Strategy perfectly illustrates the necessity of context when defining morality

I might try to cooperate initially, but if you don't cooperate, Tit for Tat dictates that I should return your betrayal in kind

And this brings us to the core of my point:

Too many people refuse to deviate from a morality of cooperation, even when their kindness is constantly taken advantage of

This is Toxic Tolerance manifest

Life is not a comic book where Batman can always win without killing anyone

You aren't going to win if everyone else around you is breaking the rules, but you refuse to

You are just a sucker who is allowing their delusional adherence to an idealistic morality be their undoing

This is not to say we should abandon all sense of morality

Just like Tit for Tat responds in proportion and allows forgiveness, the correct morality is defined by the application of minimal necessary force

This opens the door to a much more nuanced discussion

No longer bound by a naive adherence to an idealistic morality, we can talk about what is the best path for minimal necessary force to restore order

This thread is long enough already and my goal was not to tell you what is the correct moral action, but to elucidate how morality is contextual

To explain that living by the idealistic morals of a civil society doesn't work if you are around people who are anything but

If you are reading this, you are probably a good person. You don't want to make people uncomfortable, let alone be violent, but realize that if you hold yourself to a code that your enemy does not follow, you risk losing much more than just your sense of morality

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