Survival Manual

           The prisoner's dilemma is a model that is testing the lack of altruism existing in society. Its in our human nature always wanting more. Greed and the temptation to succeed are a part of our society today, even if your success means the failure of someone else. This model suits best the interactions between animals (reciprocal altruism, hunting, hiding etc.) because their emotions and lives in general are not as complex as ours. Although the model fits animals behaviors better that doesn't mean it doesn't resemble our own selfish behaviors. 

             An example of this is when people are in business. Businessman A proposes and idea  to the other business partners B, C and D. He obviously makes this proposal simply because he knows alone he won't be as successful as he will be with the other business men. People are generally  afraid of making mistakes, but the part they fear the most is taking the blame for those mistakes. Having other partners, in the case of a business, takes away the blame of a mistake  from YOU and puts it in the shoulders of not only businessman A but also B, C, and D. Sometimes this is comforting for people. Back to the point.. When YOU enter to business YOU want investors so that YOU can succeed and accomplish what YOU want. Sometime these investors are suckers because they may invest all their money and then they don't receive anything in return or not as much money as they first invested losing their profit and their investment. 

              Something that happened in the world not long ago was the Pyramid Scandal. In Colombia one of the major "pyramids" was called the DMG led by David Murcia Gomez with the help of others. As a very smart cheater he would convince some suckers to invest in the pyramids so that they could make a profit from their investment. The first two groups of suckers would get back all their money and much more, so when people saw that the pyramids were a good investment more and more suckers would invest trusting they would have the same destiny as the other suckers. It was a very good business because they would invest what they had and sometimes even triplicate the value of what they invested in the first place. Where did all the money come form? From all of the people who had invested, the problem with this was that there was one point when the money wouldn't be enough to repay what the suckers had invested so they eventually lost everything turning into grudgers. 

                In class we played a game that in a way demonstrated how the grudgers, the cheaters and the suckers interact just to benefit or to harm the others. If both of the students would defect they would get -0.1 so it wasn't convenient. If one defected and the other was a sucker and cooperated then the sucker would get 0 and the chatter would get 0.5 points, in this case it was convenient for the defect or the cheater but not for the sucker. Last, if both were suckers and cooperated they would both receive 0.3 points, this would benefit both but for some people that is not enough. What i noticed in class is that we are all grudgers, once someone gives us their back we do the same to them for revenge. Suckers i think are naive because most of the people wanted more points so they would be defect. Once one person say the opponent was playing defect they would start playing defect so that they wouldn't help the other win more points. I think the best strategy if you play the game for five rounds would be cooperating three times the other two the opponent would be defect and the other player cooperate and the fifth time it should be the other way around.

          What I realized from this activity is that the world is full of people that are not satisfied with what they have and with what they get so they always want more. There are very few people that don't have that mentality and that is very sad. How did society become this way? Why does the world have to be so competitive? This goes back to what Dawkins talked about at the beginning, it is all because of natural selection. We are all survival machines and what i think he means is that we do anything at our reach to survive even if that means not letting others survive or get your same equal opportunities.