The evolution of cooperation

What Hacker News says

1. Joel_MckayFeb 2026
   I like a lot of Stephen Wolfram's work, but we must also recognize the questionable assumptions he made in many of his commercial projects.

   There is a difference between cashing-in and selling-out... but often fame destroys peoples scientific working window by shifting focus to conventional mundane problems better left to an MBA.

   I live in a country where guaranteed health care is part of the constitution. It was a controversial idea at one time, but proved lucrative in reducing costs.

   Isaac Newton purchased the only known portrait of the man who accused him of plagiarism, and essentially erased the guy from history books. Newton also traded barbs with Robert Hooke of all people when he found time away from his alleged womanizing. Notably, this still happens in academia daily, as unproductive powerful people have lots of time to formalize and leverage grad student work with credible publishing platforms.

   The hapless and unscrupulous have always existed, where the successful simply leverage both of their predictable behavior. =3

   "The Evolution of Cooperation" (Robert Axelrod)

   https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/Breakthrough/book/pdfs/axel...

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2. nosuchthingJan 2026
   The Tragedy of the Commons has long been discredited by the noble winning game theorist Elinor Ostrom and her research of numerous case studies on the commons, and how people coordinate for collective resilence and prosperity (through rules and by auditing and retaliating against abusers and selfish exploiters)

   The infamous "tragedy of the commons" rational resource optimization game is often cited as justification for machiavellian exploitation, but humans being social creatures are subject to reputations, and have sophisticated methods of communication, cooperation, reputation, trust, accountability, auditing, and retaliation capabilities. [1] [2]

   Elinor Ostrom's "Rules, games, and common-pool resources" and Robert Axelrod's work "The Evolution of Cooperation" both explain game theory in the context of human scale realities. Of particular interest to the hacker community would be Ostrom's Common Pool Resource principles, which are totally applicable to the way we form communities anywhere. Decenteralized or in any form.

   At the core of game theory and human civilization is communication and trust. The abuse of mass media to manipulate populations knows the power of communication and cultural narratives, and we're in a new enclosure [3] [4] of the commons and as media communication networks are being used to exploit through "hypernormalization" and "accelerationism" [5][6][7][8]

   For a better applicable human scale game theory primer, check out Bruce Schneier's (yes, the same legendary cryptographer Bruce), "Liars and Outliers"

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

   [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#Design_principle...

   [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

   [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything

   [5] on Cybernetics and the 20th century "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" by Adam Curtis https://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-lov...

   [6] on propaganda and 20th century culture "The Century of the Self" by Adam Curtis https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-century-of-the-self/

   [7] on the hyperreal news and the use of crisis to manipulate populations and normalize a polycrisis - "Hypernormalization" by Adam Curtis https://thoughtmaybe.com/hypernormalisation/

   [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism

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3. ChicagoBoy11May 2025
   The Evolution of Cooperation is one of the best non-fiction book I've ever read. Through basic algebra it lets you in on appreciating such a deep and profound idea.
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4. rramadassFeb 2025
   You are not quite right and there are "organized groups" active on HN influencing sensitive topics. The equivalence you are making i.e. "society is divided, the HN community is a reflection of the society and therefore the community is divided" does not say anything about how specific groups may exploit the situation and push their agenda. They are not all rational actors nor is it a zero-sum game.

   To understand what i mean take a look at;

   1) Nassim Taleb's book Skin in the Game - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_in_the_Game_(book). Specifically his The Minority Rule which basically states that an intransigent minority can almost always prevail over a flexible majority. It is the asymmetry which is being used to game the system.

   Nassim Taleb's article The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority - https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

   Nassim Taleb & Naval Ravikant video on The Minority Rule - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwlW2aamDFc

   2) Also see Game Theory(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory) and the books The Evolution of Cooperation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation), The Complexity of Cooperation(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complexity_of_Cooperation) by Robert Axelrod

   Veritasium's video on Game Theory and Axelrod's tournaments - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM

   Influence decision models: From cooperative game theory to social network analysis - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15740...

   A Survey of Game Theory as Applied to Social Networks - https://www.sciopen.com/article/10.26599/TST.2020.9010005

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5. rramadassOct 2024
   Robert Axelrod's two books;

   The Evolution of Cooperation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation

   The Complexity of Cooperation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complexity_of_Cooperation

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6. mightybyteOct 2024
   The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/366821.The_Evolution_of_...

   See also https://ncase.me/trust/ for a really nice 30-min interactive summary of the ideas presented in the book.

   My rough definition of "best" here is "most potentially impactful to humanity" (see also Andrew Breslin's Goodreads review).

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