Cognitive Thrift 51 – Payoffs
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/22
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: That was a two-box matrix for game theory payoffs for an organism. What about more than a two-box matrix? What’s next?
Rick Rosner: We’re talking about well-adapted species, stable niche – do the standard thing and get a steady payout, diverge from that and get less of a payout. Can things diverge? Well, yea, we know that at least some animals, ourselves included, can engage in all sorts of divergent behaviors.
I love watching stuff on Buzzfeed and other trash news feed time wasting websites about animals who diverge in various ways with, I don’t know, a pretty good example being dogs that have learned to ride the subway in Moscow.
They get on the subway in Russia and then they go to the station and they ride in the morning in the station where they get on the bus to where they get rewarded, and then at night it in addition – according to the article they have used to put the cuter dog up front to have better begging rewards. That seems like a liiiiitle bit of BS, but the article is about dogs getting on the subway as if they’re going for a job.
At least in higher mammals, we are used to flexible behavior. Let’s go to an expanded payoff matrix, imagine that instead a stable niche, there’s a niche that can vary from year to year, say, where some years the nut trees are all in bloom and other years they are all blighted and the nuts only pay off at 5% of their normal rate.
So, and let’s say every other year – in good years, standard behavior pays of huge. In bad years, standard behavior barely pays off, which means that weird behavior at least relative to standard behavior may pay off relatively better if it leads to finding other ways to get calories.
So, you got a 4 box matrix now: good years where doing the standard thing is the right thing, do the non-standard thing doesn’t pay off, and bad years where doing to the standard thing doesn’t pay off very well, and doing the weird thing might lead to a higher payoff.
Now, instead of looking at a messed up niche, look at messed up members of a species, not all members of a species are ideally fit.
So, say there’s only in the standard kind of feels like that standard survival of the fittest thing, that the niche, say, can only support 80% or some arbitrary percent of the members of the species and the more fit members of the species crowd out the less fit members.
So, if you’re a sucky, geeky, nerdy, or just incompetent, or just something is wrong – you got a bad beak for nut harvesting, so your payoff for standard behaviour instead of being 1.0 might be 1.2.
You might only get 20% of the calories from standard behaviour in the niche that a jock bird might get. He was a geek and gets shunted to the side, and so your payoff is .2 compared to 1.0 for the jock bird.
So, maybe you’re forced into weird behavior or not standard behavior and if for a jock bird who’s really good at harvesting nuts, the nut payoff is 1.0 and the weird behaviour is .15, not good a figuring out.
Maybe, the geek bird with a standard behaviour of .2, which may not be enough to survive engages in weird foraging behaviour and through practice in that behaviour it manages through that behaviors manages to raise the weird behaviour to .3 It is still a miserable living, but it is better than standard behavior.
.2 for standard behaviour, possibly .3 for divergent behaviour, though the divergent behaviour doesn’t give you a uniform payout of .3. It gives you an 80% payout of .1 and a 20% payout of like .9. Maybe, you get lucky.
I don’t know if the math works out exactly right, but it averages out to be maybe a .3, but in most instances it doesn’t pay off very well, but in some instances it pays off great.
So, that’s a matrix that you are kind of growing an extra box to the right rather than to the bottom, where you’ve got divergent-bird (80% crappy payout/20% super great payout). Divergent-bird finds a new food source or a new way of harvesting food that delivers a lot of calories.
So, that bird has a choice to make. Barely surviving through standard behaviour or going divergent and maybe not surviving at all, and maybe winning and surviving really well. And what the right thing to do is depends on the various probabilities and payouts within the bird’s choice as with anything in game theory.
If things get sucky enough for a geek bird under standard behaviour, geek bird is faced with either dying or taking a risk. Maybe, dying any way or getting really lucky in a low probability event, and for the healthy and well-adapted bird, the jock bird, things have to get really bad for the jock bird.
The math is the same, but the standard behaviour is high for the jock bird. So if things have to get really bad, then the niche has to start changing like crazy or the jock has to be forced to make the gamble.
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