[FRIAM] What's in a name? MOTH to a Flame

Sun Nov 1 18:18:08 EST 2020

It’s funny that you should mention this  right now, because you WEREN’T at FRIAM last week, and we spent quite a time discussing whether physicists could honestly disclaim the terms they use and the metaphors those terms imply.  Eric and I were arguing that they can’t and that those metaphors not only play a role in granting them fame and fortune, but that they often play a role in the development of their thought, which, if not recognized, can be dangerous.  

In the end, it turned out that we had not been the first to come up with a conditional association strategy.  A very bright woman by the name of Athena Aptikis (?) invented it about the same time, or a little ahead of us.  And others as well.  If you want find those references, look at some of the responses to our article on JSSS, and then work your way backwards.  

People have often argued that cooperation takes some very special circumstances to evolve if competition is your base line.  But the reverse is also true; if your baseline is cooperation then competition is hard to get to.  Think about all the structures of enforcement that have to be assured before we can have a level playing field.   Who are the guarantors of fairness in the genome?

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Stephen Guerin
Sent: Sunday, November 1, 2020 5:03 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What's in a name? MOTH to a Flame

> Why is this coming up now??

*	Some sense of urgency as I want to get your input and approval on naming while your mental faculties are still at their height  ;-p
*	you mentioned having some regret on the name two weeks ago at FRIAM and I thought I heard you mention an alternative
*	We are writing code and need to name an algorithm as we discuss it I don't think MOTH is the right name. It's less of an academic exercise on naming and more of the practical need to efficiently communicate among developers. Especially so when they need to debug behavior it helps to have a good name of what's supposed to be going on.
*	we've been asked to write a paper on our approach to collective intelligence and collective action in "ungoverned spaces" and "undergoverned spaces". Think governance more broadly than government as in wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governance>  description. I'm thinking a bit about how MOTH is an example design mechanism. While the MOTH paper was introduced in the context of the "Darwinian Problem of Altruism", that may have been a forced worldview for the application of the heuristic/algorithm. I think MOTH equally fits in an alternative world view of coopertive effects in Collective Action where "selfless acts" are not a "problem" that needs explaining.

On Sun, Nov 1, 2020 at 12:12 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> > wrote:

Yes.  You are correct.  That’s why the use of stupid names is so stupid.  We could have used abbreviations such as UnconAltConAss (Moth) and UnconDefConAss (NasMoth), ConAltUnconAss (Tit for tat), etc.  Mostly I think we should obey our nursery school teacher and “use our words”.  There was a kid at one of my kid’s nursery school who used this strategy very consistently.  He would always ask politely for the toy the other kid was playing with, BEFORE he hit him with a block.  Redundancy in scientific writing is not such a bad thing.  

What I would like to remind you is that this thing we created was a platform that could have been used to rip off half a dozen publishable “experiments.”  Nobody has ever exploited it for that purpose, which is sad.  We only got the one publication out of it.  We needed graduate students. 

Why is this coming up now??

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> > On Behalf Of Stephen Guerin
Sent: Sunday, November 1, 2020 12:22 PM
To: Stephen Guerin <stephen.guerin at simtable.com <mailto:stephen.guerin at simtable.com> >
Cc: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What's in a name? MOTH to a Flame

And as I look at it more closely, Nasty Moth isn't actually "MOTH" in the meaning of "My Way or Highway" as it leaves when the other agent does "My way" which is defecting also.

_______________________________________________________________________
Stephen.Guerin at Simtable.com <mailto:stephen.guerin at simtable.com> 

CEO, Simtable  http://www.simtable.com <http://www.simtable.com/> 

1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505

office: (505)995-0206 mobile: (505)577-5828

twitter: @simtable

z <http://zoom.com/j/5055775828> oom.simtable.com <http://oom.simtable.com> 

On Sun, Nov 1, 2020 at 11:17 AM Stephen Guerin <stephen.guerin at simtable.com <mailto:stephen.guerin at simtable.com> > wrote:

> I think the proper name is Conditional Association Strategy

Yes, I think of Conditional Association Strategy as its "genus". There's an unspecified bit in the "genome" on the conditional behavior in that name that needs to be more specific to make it a species which could be either cooperate or defect. In the table from the paper, For example, there's three strategies of the "conditional association strategies" genus. Arguably the name MOTH is a name for the genus not the particular species. Note how NasMoth (NastyMoth) has that bit specified in the negative direction. We'd like the "dual" in the positive direction.

A more particular name for the MOTH strategy might be something like a "HippieMoth" ethic where it seeks reciprocity in ooperative relationships and leaves when reciprocity is absent. Another name might be "Hippy-Dippy" which gives the sense of flightiness too. But I'm wondering if there's a better character analogue. It is a kind of golden rule for dynamic networks.

As we're writing some software and related whitepapers I want input/blessing as we consider tightening up the naming. Note how google's naming of PageRank <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank>  was helpful to communicate their approach.

_______________________________________________________________________
Stephen.Guerin at Simtable.com <mailto:stephen.guerin at simtable.com> 

CEO, Simtable  http://www.simtable.com <http://www.simtable.com/> 

1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505

office: (505)995-0206 mobile: (505)577-5828

twitter: @simtable

z <http://zoom.com/j/5055775828> oom.simtable.com <http://oom.simtable.com> 

On Sun, Nov 1, 2020 at 10:14 AM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> > wrote:

I think the proper name is Conditional Association Strategy (as opposed to a Condition Altruism Strategy.  

My original impulse was not .. um … prosocial.  I was pissed by the extent to which the entire literature had gone down the Axelrod rat hole with its totally unnatural assumptions and annoyed at my colleagues for giving things cute names.  So, I thought, I can play this stupid game, too.  And,  indeed, I could.  And SURPRISE! it’s still a stupid game, even though I can play it.  

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> > On Behalf Of Stephen Guerin
Sent: Sunday, November 1, 2020 11:00 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Subject: [FRIAM] What's in a name? MOTH to a Flame

Nick,

On a recent FRIAM you expressed mild regret on your naming of MOTH (My Way or the Highway)
  http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/9/2/4.html

Given a chance to rename it what were some of the options over the years?  Does the list have better suggestions?

Naming may seem trivial and arbitrary but it is important as this CS aphorism attests <https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html> .
      "There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors."

For the list, MOTH is a winning strategy in an expanded Iterated Prisoners Dilemma game where agents can leave a relationship during a round in the tournament and be randomly assigned another unassociated agent. They always cooperate and then leave if defected against. MOTH agents unconditionally cooperate and conditionally associate.

An example of an expanded TIT-FOR-TAT strategy in this game might be to conditionally cooperate and unconditionally associate. ie cooperate until defected against then switch to always defect and  stay in the association. (think of a bad marriage without divorce). 

We continue to think MOTH remains an important simple heuristic for link formation/maintenance in trust networks / decentralized systems. And naming is important.

-Stephen

_______________________________________________________________________

Stephen.Guerin at Simtable.com <mailto:stephen.guerin at simtable.com> 

CEO, Simtable  http://www.simtable.com <http://www.simtable.com/> 

1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505

office: (505)995-0206 mobile: (505)577-5828

twitter: @simtable

z <http://zoom.com/j/5055775828> oom.simtable.com <http://oom.simtable.com> 

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam <http://bit.ly/virtualfriam> 
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ 

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam <http://bit.ly/virtualfriam> 
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20201101/d7820c4a/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image003.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 59875 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20201101/d7820c4a/attachment-0001.jpg>