Nice guys finish first

What Hacker News says

1. typAug 2020
   When you respond to the guys who follow nasty strategies with niceness, you are literally rewarding the bad behaviors. If being cooperative wouldn't get much differences than being exploitative, then the nice guys will vanish and only the bad guys will remain. A reciprocal strategy is necessary and beneficial long-term for the world IMO.

   The well-known book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins has an interesting chapter titled Nice Guys Finish First giving a good illustration relevant to this idea.

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2. yregAug 2020
   Yay, that's so nice. Very similar to (perhaps based of?) the 12th chapter _Nice Guys Finish First_ of the Selfish Gene.
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3. jzlAug 2017
   I've seen a couple of oblique references to this in other comments, but I'll go a little deeper: if you want to truly understand the prisoner's dilemma scenario and how it relates to human, or more generally, animal behavior, there is incredible coverage of the topic in Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. He pioneered the idea of running PD "competitions" in an attempt to discover the best evolutionary strategy for PD, and how these strategies might predict large-scale behavior in animal populations. Each competitor (other scientists and researchers) submitted a strategy for handling the PD in the form of written code that could face off against other strategies. Each round of competition consisted of thousands of iterations of the game. Some strategies were simple and some were incredibly complex. Across two competitions, the second with 60 competing strategies, the simple and "non-cynical" strategy called tit-for-tat won handily. (Tit-for-tat is mentioned briefly in the original article without any explanation.) This is the strategy:

   - Unless provoked, the agent will always cooperate.

   - If provoked, the agent will retaliate.

   - The agent is quick to forgive.

   - The agent must have a good chance of competing against the opponent more than once.

   The fact that this strategy was a consistent winner in his competitions has led Dawkins to argue that "nice guys finish first" and could be a partial explanation for certain forms of so-called "altruistic" animal behavior -- behavior that seemingly gives no benefit to the altruist, except for the fact that too may benefit when it is their turn to be helped. See also:

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice_Guys_Finish_First

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4. klochnerJan 2012
   I encourage everyone to actually read the paper. The conclusion is that people want leaders and group members who put the interests of the group first (not a shocking conclusion):

   https://student-3k.tepper.cmu.edu/gsiadoc/WP/2011-E34.pdf

   It was pretty badly misinterpreted by the "nice guys finish first" post, and we're heaping more layers of misinterpretation on top of that.

   For example, the study found that people who contributed to the group at the expense of outsiders (perceived as medium-dominance) fared better in leader elections than the more "dominant" individuals who kept all resources for themselves.

   The group-minded individuals also were less likely to be voted out of the group than the "pure-dominant" individuals.

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5. turbojerryJun 2011
   Which Richard Dawkins using Game Theory found to be wrong-

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice_Guys_Finish_First

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