Tit for tat is not the most successful strategy in conflict theory. It tends to lead to infinite loops where one side betrays the other, and then they both burn each other into infinity, which is a decidedly suboptimal result. It's especially poor when the information is uncertain, which is the case in most human interactions (we can all come up with examples where someone completely misinterpreted what someone else is saying). The best strategry depends on a priori factors like the degree of mutual trust. If you live in a society with a high degree of mutual trust, a very generous strategy will have the best results. Conversely if you live in a society with a low degree of mutual trust, then the most optimal strategy from an individual's perspective will involve more retribution. Though it's worth noting that the overall success of individuals in a society will be better in the society with higher trust than the one in lower trust, which is why societies and groups that have institutions and mores that support a high degree of trust are more successful than ones that don't. Contrite tit for tat is a very simplistic example of a slightly more generous version that's better able to deal with false negatives and positives:
https://homepage.univie.ac.at/Karl.Sigmund/JTB97a.pdf

Judging tit for tat boils down to "who started it?", which sounds like a nightmare to assess. And it's easy to avoid: The list is aimed at people who exclude entire groups based on broad stereotypes, not those who have a problem with individuals based on their individual actions. If two people are fighting, who cares? But if either or both start transferring that fight to a broader group, that's a reddening. It doesn't matter who started the fight, just whether they stopped giving a damn about bystanders.

Pat, thanks for the thoughtful response. Responding separately to your general note and then to the list specifically.

***
On TFT: I didn't say TFT was the most successful strategy in conflict theory. I said it was the most successful strategy in Repeated Iteration Prisoner's Dilemmas. I'm referring to the fact TFT won both of Axelrod's Tournament for Repeated Iteration Prisoner's Dilemmas. I purposefully didn't get into anything deeper than that; my post was already quite long.

As far as I know, the Axelrod tournaments haven't been replicated since then, but I am happy to admit my knowledge on them comes from Axelrod's book, so perhaps he was self-serving about his own greatness. I just found a 2015 papers that argued against TFT being taken too far (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0134128) but even that seems to agree that TFT is still considered the reigning champ of the Repeated Iteration Prisoner's Dilemma. Has Contrite TFT (from the paper you shared) been tested in an open tournament ? If it has and won I will accept correction... contritely. 

If you were just making a broader point, I agree and no need to discuss further.

***
As for the list itself, you say that it's a reddening if someone "transfers" a fight to a broader group - and I agree, it is. But why is it? I think it's because we (the list-supporters) believe no one should initiate aggression against those who have not aggressed against them. A "bystander" is someone who hasn't aggressed, that is, someone who is tolerating me while I tolerate them. But the corollary is that we can respond to those who do aggress against us without reddening.

For instance, let's say X tries to cancel Y for stupid personal reasons (Y killed X's favorite halfling thief). Y then responds by trying to cancel X, but also trying to cancel A, B, and C. A, B, and C are X's fans who post about his game on RPG.net. I think you and I would agree that X was wrong to try to cancel Y. But we'd also agree that Y was wrong to cancel A, B, and C, because they were innocent bystanders. This situation happened recently when one of the OSE-related Discords started banning fans of Venger even though the fans had done nothing to merit the ban.

Now let's change it up. After X tries to cancel Y for personal reasons, A, B, and C all join in trying to cancel Y. Only then does Y try to cancel X, A, B, and C. At that point, we cannot say that Y is wrong at all -- he is reacting only against those who have attacked him. A, B, and C are not innocent bystanders because they started fighting with Y before Y started fighting with them. In this example, Venger's fans would have started attacking the Discord mods, then been banned. Totally different.

So I think who starts the fight really does matter, because it justifies who you can be fighting with, without reddening. Where do we disagree?

Has anyone looked at the new PDF for the Mongoose Traveller 2nd Ed Core Rules?

Supposedly it is 100% usable with the current 2e material, but with some "rewrites".

I am hoping it was not woke-ish language that was added.

I saw a preview for Mongoose's new Secrets of the Ancients book, and Mongoose has decided to use cumbersome language that makes it harder to read for me, e.g. "The Traveller finds themselves standing in the desert..." when it refers to a single Traveller.

I pray Mongoose is not drifting yellow-ward, but perhaps I am so often disappointed in where things are heading in parts of the TTRPG world that I am just bracing myself for another letdown.

Quote from: Tullowit on October 24, 2021, 01:20:19 AM
Has anyone looked at the new PDF for the Mongoose Traveller 2nd Ed Core Rules?

Supposedly it is 100% usable with the current 2e material, but with some "rewrites".

I am hoping it was not woke-ish language that was added.

I saw a preview for Mongoose's new Secrets of the Ancients book, and Mongoose has decided to use cumbersome language that makes it harder to read for me, e.g. "The Traveller finds themselves standing in the desert..." when it refers to a single Traveller.

I pray Mongoose is not drifting yellow-ward, but perhaps I am so often disappointed in where things are heading in parts of the TTRPG world that I am just bracing myself for another letdown.

I took a quick look at the preview on DT-RPG. I did not see any overt Woke elements, but it was only a few pages and I was skimming. I read they replaced the awful isometric deckplans with 2D deckplans, and replaced the "Third Imperium" with "Charted Space."

Probably best to start a new thread on this, rather than derail this one (for discussion of Traveller.)

@amacris: It was a general point. I was really addressing the more complex cases, where you have to consider information asymmetry, assessment errors, and so on, because it more closely models how people actually behave. Game theory and evolutionary biological applied to the development of human social interactions has highlighted why trust is so important in successful societies. Those societies can still be conceived as massively parallel iterative prisoner's dilemmas, but the best options change when we mix high trust with ambiguity. But if you're interested in variations on iterated prisoner's dilemmas with different assumptions, the rationalist community has been mildly obsessed with the subject.

Regarding the list itself, I don't think your emphasis on aggression and reciprocity is particularly useful. Moreover, most of your examples seem to involve specific people with specific grudges against specific other people, which I don't think the list should care about. The distinction I'm making is between excluding individuals, and excluding entire groups. If an individual is excluded based on an individual's personal behavior, that's not a case of broad exclusion. Even we don't agree with where the line is drawn, an individual judgment call about a particular case is not categorical exclusion. On the other hand, announcing that all people who voted for X aren't welcome is exclusion. There is some overlap, but it's largely in the declaration of principles. If one person is kicked out, and the stated reason is because they voted for X, that's a group exclusion. So I don't really care who hit who first, just who escalated it.

Hi!  New here but have been a fan of the list ever since I've heard of it!
First post here - I checked back a few pages and didn't see mention of it - please forgive me if a double post.
----

Just adding something - I see the Zweihander entry added "Flames of Freedom" already - don't forget they also have "Blackbirds" under the same system/friends AND have hired ZOE QUINN as if something excreted by them wasn't enough...

Also - for S-ts and giggles I love how the "Woke" are their own blacklist...

https://twitter.com/therealepi/status/1451482293206388741 - link to their 'twitter' for "Flames of Freedom"...

A game set in pre-revolutionary times when the country was run on slave labor, indentured labor and plantations - but the characters can't have slaves/indentured servants as a hard rule of the game...!?  I mean, yeah the theme of the game is some kind of "Woke" fantasy set in those days but really.  No one save maybe a pirate was rich from anything other than slavery or some kind of system dealing with it - selling/buying rum, trading with slavers for ships, chains, whips and ropes...nobility that taxed.  Even the Pirates profited off the slavery and looting or there would not be that much money in the system.

Of course they started out ramming "Gender Neutral" into a fantasy "Grim Dark" setting.

There certainly were men of character (and women also) in those times that led directly to America but most if you met today versus their sanitized G-rated image...  Well many of us would like them but these snowflakes would MELT.

Quote from: Aglondir on October 24, 2021, 01:37:52 AM

Quote from: Tullowit on October 24, 2021, 01:20:19 AM
Has anyone looked at the new PDF for the Mongoose Traveller 2nd Ed Core Rules?

Supposedly it is 100% usable with the current 2e material, but with some "rewrites".

I am hoping it was not woke-ish language that was added.

I saw a preview for Mongoose's new Secrets of the Ancients book, and Mongoose has decided to use cumbersome language that makes it harder to read for me, e.g. "The Traveller finds themselves standing in the desert..." when it refers to a single Traveller.

I pray Mongoose is not drifting yellow-ward, but perhaps I am so often disappointed in where things are heading in parts of the TTRPG world that I am just bracing myself for another letdown.

I took a quick look at the preview on DT-RPG. I did not see any overt Woke elements, but it was only a few pages and I was skimming. I read they replaced the awful isometric deckplans with 2D deckplans, and replaced the "Third Imperium" with "Charted Space."

Probably best to start a new thread on this, rather than derail this one (for discussion of Traveller.)

My point is not about a new Traveller product per se, but whether Mongoose is drifting and whether the company's green spot on the list is phasing to yellow.

I have some of their products and have not yet played the game. I am being cautious as to where my hard earned dollars are bound, and want to know that the companies I support are all about the game and not about the ever-left-shifting trend.

Thanks for your reply!

Quote from: amacris on October 23, 2021, 08:13:17 PM
Anyone who agrees with Marcuse -- and that is almost everyone who participates in cancel culture -- disagrees with tit-for-tat tolerance. They believe in repressive tolerance, not tit-for-tat tolerance.

Technically Marcuse called his "repress everyone to the right of me" strategy Liberating Tolerance. He called I-disagree-but-will-defend-your-right-to-speak tolerance Repressive Tolerance because it 'maintained existing power relations', ie maintained a classical liberal free society, which he aimed to destroy - and appears to have succeeded. So he believed in repression but called it liberation, and called actual tolerance repression.

Quote from: HappyDaze on August 04, 2021, 06:54:39 PM

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll on August 04, 2021, 06:51:03 PM

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on August 03, 2021, 09:18:59 PM

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll on August 03, 2021, 08:59:03 PM
The Design Mechanism should go in the red column.

I've seen you make statements like this several times, but I keep missing the details. Care to explain for us slow folks in the audience? 

They had a TDS-style YouTube video (since deleted) basically saying if you voted for a certain someone, you're not allowed to buy their RPG.

But, before this statements, did you like their game? If so, it doesn't really matter, just ignore their statement and keep buying what you like. If not, then it litwrally doesn't matter.

Of course it matters, you are literally enriching people who hate you.

Quote from: silveroak on October 17, 2021, 06:16:53 PM

Quote from: Crusader X on October 17, 2021, 04:42:26 PM

Quote from: silveroak on October 17, 2021, 03:50:29 PMThe attitude that we should simply ignore and insult the accusers is *very* alt right.

Bill and Hillary Clinton are alt-right?

To steer this back into the gaming arena, hiring an all-female creative team for your core gaming product is alt-right?

Admit it.  You're just trolling.

I believe I said "more towards the alt right" or something to that effect. However assaulting a woman at a convention, being kicked out for being drunk and physically assaulting people and then trying to excuse it as offering her a cigarette with my room key tucked into the pack- yes that is alt right.

You don't know what alt-right is do you?

Quote from: S'mon on October 24, 2021, 02:48:09 AM

Quote from: amacris on October 23, 2021, 08:13:17 PM
Anyone who agrees with Marcuse -- and that is almost everyone who participates in cancel culture -- disagrees with tit-for-tat tolerance. They believe in repressive tolerance, not tit-for-tat tolerance.

Technically Marcuse called his "repress everyone to the right of me" strategy Liberating Tolerance. He called I-disagree-but-will-defend-your-right-to-speak tolerance Repressive Tolerance because it 'maintained existing power relations', ie maintained a classical liberal free society, which he aimed to destroy - and appears to have succeeded. So he believed in repression but called it liberation, and called actual tolerance repression.

Yes. But I refuse to call his beliefs "liberating tolerance." He inadvertently gave his views a better name and that's what I use. I've been writing extensively about Marcuse over at my blog but it's political enough that I won't delve deeper here.

Quote from: Pat on October 24, 2021, 01:50:56 AM
@amacris: It was a general point. I was really addressing the more complex cases, where you have to consider information asymmetry, assessment errors, and so on, because it more closely models how people actually behave. Game theory and evolutionary biological applied to the development of human social interactions has highlighted why trust is so important in successful societies. Those societies can still be conceived as massively parallel iterative prisoner's dilemmas, but the best options change when we mix high trust with ambiguity. But if you're interested in variations on iterated prisoner's dilemmas with different assumptions, the rationalist community has been mildly obsessed with the subject.

You and I are in agreement wrt to trust. I did my final paper at HLS on evolutionary biological implications for human morality and my best friend has a PhD in game theory and did his doctoral dissertation on trust. (The rationalist community has nothing on him.) He's the one who pointed me to Axelrod's book. My own training is law, philosophy, and history.

QuoteRegarding the list itself, I don't think your emphasis on aggression and reciprocity is particularly useful. Moreover, most of your examples seem to involve specific people with specific grudges against specific other people, which I don't think the list should care about. The distinction I'm making is between excluding individuals, and excluding entire groups. If an individual is excluded based on an individual's personal behavior, that's not a case of broad exclusion. Even we don't agree with where the line is drawn, an individual judgment call about a particular case is not categorical exclusion. On the other hand, announcing that all people who voted for X aren't welcome is exclusion. There is some overlap, but it's largely in the declaration of principles. If one person is kicked out, and the stated reason is because they voted for X, that's a group exclusion. So I don't really care who hit who first, just who escalated it.

If I understand your view, then, it is: "The Red List should consists of those who believe in excluding entire groups."
And my view is: "The Red List should consists of those who believe in excluding others who tolerate them."

I believe your view (or at least what I understand to be your view) falls prey to Popper's Paradox of Tolerance. "Those who believe in excluding entire groups" are themselves a group, and if that group were to be excluded, it would violate your rule. That standard, therefore, leads one to the conclusion that anyone who believes that we should exclude the Red List should themselves be on the Red List. This is the point that Hoshisabi  has been making over and over - he's been claiming we're not really tolerant if we have a list at all.

OTOH, my standard does not fail in the face of self-reference. "Aggression" matters because it tells us whether we are the good guys (Popperians who tolerate everyone BUT the intolerant) or the bad guys (the intolerant). As I said in my OP, everyone who tolerates those who tolerate them believes in what I call tit-for-tat tolerance. I thought that made the point clearly. But perhaps I'd have had better luck in explaining my point by using Popper's paradox of tolerance.

Can we stick to simple lay man standards for the red list?

You shove real life politics into your works.
You exclude customers from buying your works because they don't agree with you.

Do those two things and your in the red list.

Quote from: amacris on October 25, 2021, 03:53:56 AM
I believe your view (or at least what I understand to be your view) falls prey to Popper's Paradox of Tolerance. "Those who believe in excluding entire groups" are themselves a group, and if that group were to be excluded, it would violate your rule. That standard, therefore, leads one to the conclusion that anyone who believes that we should exclude the Red List should themselves be on the Red List.

No. I believe I was very clear that we should judge people based on their individual actions, not on their group identity. It doesn't matter whether they form a group.

Quote from: amacris on October 24, 2021, 12:33:09 AM
Pat, thanks for the thoughtful response. Responding separately to your general note and then to the list specifically.

***
On TFT: I didn't say TFT was the most successful strategy in conflict theory. I said it was the most successful strategy in Repeated Iteration Prisoner's Dilemmas. I'm referring to the fact TFT won both of Axelrod's Tournament for Repeated Iteration Prisoner's Dilemmas. I purposefully didn't get into anything deeper than that; my post was already quite long.

As far as I know, the Axelrod tournaments haven't been replicated since then, but I am happy to admit my knowledge on them comes from Axelrod's book, so perhaps he was self-serving about his own greatness. I just found a 2015 papers that argued against TFT being taken too far (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0134128) but even that seems to agree that TFT is still considered the reigning champ of the Repeated Iteration Prisoner's Dilemma. Has Contrite TFT (from the paper you shared) been tested in an open tournament ? If it has and won I will accept correction... contritely. 

If you were just making a broader point, I agree and no need to discuss further.

***
As for the list itself, you say that it's a reddening if someone "transfers" a fight to a broader group - and I agree, it is. But why is it? I think it's because we (the list-supporters) believe no one should initiate aggression against those who have not aggressed against them. A "bystander" is someone who hasn't aggressed, that is, someone who is tolerating me while I tolerate them. But the corollary is that we can respond to those who do aggress against us without reddening.

For instance, let's say X tries to cancel Y for stupid personal reasons (Y killed X's favorite halfling thief). Y then responds by trying to cancel X, but also trying to cancel A, B, and C. A, B, and C are X's fans who post about his game on RPG.net. I think you and I would agree that X was wrong to try to cancel Y. But we'd also agree that Y was wrong to cancel A, B, and C, because they were innocent bystanders. This situation happened recently when one of the OSE-related Discords started banning fans of Venger even though the fans had done nothing to merit the ban.

Now let's change it up. After X tries to cancel Y for personal reasons, A, B, and C all join in trying to cancel Y. Only then does Y try to cancel X, A, B, and C. At that point, we cannot say that Y is wrong at all -- he is reacting only against those who have attacked him. A, B, and C are not innocent bystanders because they started fighting with Y before Y started fighting with them. In this example, Venger's fans would have started attacking the Discord mods, then been banned. Totally different.

So I think who starts the fight really does matter, because it justifies who you can be fighting with, without reddening. Where do we disagree?

TFT success depends on subjective rate of return, manipulations of penalties and rewards, leadership (payoff changing actions), and a correct framing of the game circumstances. Axelrod's work is supplemented by Roth, Terhune, Bruttel (et al.), and Kreps (et al.). Much of the repetition of the repeated PD experiments, as far as I have seen, come by way of Ridley (The Origins of Virtue). See also an interesting piece in Wired, from Grossman, "New Tack Wins Prisoner's Dilemma."

What is interesting about Grossman's article? You'll note that there was an anniversary competition, which replicate the Axelrod tournament. Thus, iterations exist.  In the recent competition, "recognition-master-slave" winds up beating the old standout of TFT. The research item of note was the colluding could be achieved with up to 20 people in the competition, with the result showing a top-placement coupled with a bunch of colluder who sacrificed themselves for the others who won.