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The ExChristian.Net blog exists for the express purpose of encouraging those who have decided to leave Christianity behind. This area contains articles sent in between January 2001 and February 2010. To view recent posts, click on the "Home" link.
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5/08/2007 View Comments
Nice guys finish first
A 1985 video produced by Richard Dawkins. The film is about 45 minutes in length.
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It so happens that an article in the Metamagical Themas regular column in Scientific American, in which this computer tournament of repeated-Prisoner's Dilemma was detailed, is/was the single most influential few pages on my way of life and worldview. After reading the article and thinking about it for a while, I also got the book "The Evolution Of Cooperation" by Axelrod. Near the end of the book, he gives a number of suggestions for how conditions that favour the evolution of cooperation can be set up. e.g. you start with trifling, low-consequence, low-payoff encounters, and gradually increase the consequence/payoff load as the "prisoners" build up, if not a rapport, at least a rewarding modus vivendi.
We can see the same process in action on this very messageboad, with the various passing Xtians. A fairly recent one, who will go nameless, is nice, and has been well-received by all, in spite of the fact that s/he is not deconverting, nor is s/he making any re-converts among the population here. Meanwhile, there is no _need_ to name the Xtians who do a one-off drive-by "Jesus loves you, but you're all gonna fry" before scurrying off to brag about how they ventured right into the lions' den. Or the small-spirited self-hating misanthropes who, judging others by themselves, welcome an approaching self-fulfilling doom. (There should be a name for the tendency of stationary objects to cause the objects around them to also become stationary...)
Certainty-of-re-encounter was one of the conditions that Axelrod named as fostering the evolution of cooperation amongst populations made up of individual self-interested cells. I recommend the book very highly.
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