In 1980, game theorist Robert Axelrod ran a famous Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournament.

He asked other game theorists to send in their best strategies in the form of “bots”, short pieces of code that took an opponent’s actions as input and returned one of the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma outputs of COOPERATE or DEFECT. For example, you might have a bot that COOPERATES a random 80% of the time, but DEFECTS against another bot that plays DEFECT more than 20% of the time, except on the last round, where it always DEFECTS, or if its opponent plays DEFECT in response to COOPERATE.

In the “tournament”, each bot “encountered” other bots at random for a hundred rounds of Prisoners’ Dilemma; after all the bots had finished their matches, the strategy with the highest total utility won.

To everyone’s surprise, the winner was a super-simple strategy called TIT-FOR-TAT:

https://readscottalexander.com/posts/acx-the-early-christian-strategy

The rise of Christianity is a great puzzle. In 40 AD, there were maybe a thousand Christians. Their Messiah had just been executed, and they were on the wrong side of an intercontinental empire that had crushed all previous foes. By 400, there were forty million, and they were set to dominate the next millennium of Western history.

Imagine taking a time machine to the year 2300 AD, and everyone is Scientologist. The United States is >99% Scientologist. So is Latin America and most of Europe. The Middle East follows some heretical pseudo-Scientology that thinks L Ron Hubbard was a great prophet, but maybe not the greatest prophet.

This can only begin to capture how surprised the early Imperial Romans would be to learn of the triumph of Christianity. At least Scientology has a lot of money and a cut-throat recruitment arm! At least they fight back when you persecute them! At least they seem to be in the game!

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-rise-of-christianity

I.

Polymarket (and prediction markets in general) had an amazing Election Night. They called states impressively early and accurately, kept the site stable through what must have been incredible strain, and have successfully gotten prediction markets in front of the world (including the Trump campaign). From here it’s a flywheel; victory building on victory. Enough people heard of them this election that they’ll never lack for customers. And maybe Trump’s CFTC will be kinder than Biden’s and relax some of the constraints they’re operating under. They’ve realized the long-time rationalist dream of a widely-used prediction market with high volume, deserve more praise than I can give them here, and I couldn’t be happier with their progress.

But I also think their Trump shares were mispriced by about ten cents, and that Trump’s victory in the election doesn’t do much to vindicate their numbers.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/congrats-to-polymarket-but-i-still

[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-november-2024

A red sun dawns over San Francisco. Juxtaposed against clouds and sea, it forms a patriotic tableau: blood red, deathly white, and the blue of the void. As its first rays touch the city, the frantic traffic slows to a crawl; even the birds cease to sing. It is Election Day in the United States.

Future generations will number American elections among history's greatest and most terrible spectacles. As we remember the Games in the Colosseum, or the bloody knives of Tenochtitlan, so they will remember us. That which other ages would relegate to a tasteful coronation or mercifully quick coup, we extend into an eighteen-month festival of madness.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-judgment-day

I.

Time to own the libs! ACX joins such based heterodox thinkers as Curtis Yarvin, Nick Fuentes, Richard Spencer, and David Duke in telling you what the woke Washington Post and failing LA Times don’t want you to know: Donald Trump is the wrong choice for US President.

If you’re in a swing state, we recommend you vote Harris; if a safe state, Harris or your third-party candidate of choice.

[EDIT/UPDATE: If you’re in a safe state and want to trade your protest vote with a swing state voter, or vice versa, go to https://www.swapyourvote.org/]

I mostly stand by the reasoning in my 2016 post, Slate Star Codex Endorses Clinton, Johnson, Or Stein. But you can read a better and more recent argument against Trump’s economic policy here, and against his foreign policy here. You can read an argument that Trump is a dangerous authoritarian here.

You can, but you won’t, because every American, most foreigners, and a substantial fraction of extra-solar aliens have already heard all of this a thousand times. I’m under no illusion of having anything new to say, or having much chance of changing minds. I write this out of a vague sense of deontological duty rather than a consequentialist hope that anything will happen.

And I’m writing the rest of this post because I feel bad posting a couple of paragraph endorsement and not following up. No guarantees this is useful to anybody.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-endorses-harris-oliver-or-stein

[This is a guest post by Clara Collier. Clara is the editor of Asterisk Magazine.]

Proposition 36 is a California ballot measure that increases mandatory sentences for certain drug and theft crimes.

It’s also a referendum on over a decade of sentencing reform efforts stemming from California’s historical prison overcrowding crisis. Like many states, California passed increasingly tough sentencing laws through the 90s and early 2000s. This led to the state’s prisons operating massively over capacity: at its peak, a system built for 85,000 inhabitants housed 165,000. This was, among other things, a massive humanitarian crisis. The system was too overstretched to provide adequate healthcare to prisoners. Violence and suicide shot up.

In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that California prisons were so overcrowded that their conditions violated the 8th Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. That year, the state assembly passed a package of reforms called "realignment," which shifted supervision of low-level offenders from the state to the counties. Then, in 2014, Californians voted for Proposition 47, which reduced some felony crimes to misdemeanors – theft of goods valued at under $950 and simple drug possession – and made people in prison for those crimes eligible for resentencing. Together, realignment and Prop 47 brought down California’s prison and jail population by 55,000.

The campaign for Prop 36 is based on the premise that Prop 47 failed, leading to increased drug use and retail theft (but don’t trust me – it says so in the text of the measure). 36 would repeal some parts of 47, add some additional sentencing increases, and leave some elements in place (the LA Times has a good breakdown of the changes here).

It’s easy to round this off to a simple tradeoff: are we willing to put tens of thousands of people in jail if it would decrease the crime rate? But this would be the wrong way to think about the measure: there is no tradeoff. Prop 36 will certainly imprison many people, but it won’t help fight crime.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-case-against-proposition-36

Tyler Cowen is an economics professor and blogger at Marginal Revolution. Patrick Collison is the billionaire founder of the online payments company Stripe. In 2019, they wrote an article calling for a discipline of Progress Studies, which would figure out what progress was and how to increase it. Later that year, tech entrepreneur Jason Crawford stepped up to spearhead the effort.

The immediate reaction was mostly negative. There were the usual gripes that “progress” was problematic because it could imply that some cultures/times/places/ideas were better than others. But there were also more specific objections: weren’t historians already studying progress? Wasn’t business academia already studying innovation? Are you really allowed to just invent a new field every time you think of something it would be cool to study?

It seems like you are. Five years later, Progress Studies has grown enough to hold its first conference. I got to attend, and it was great.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/notes-from-the-progress-studies-conference