What are UKIPs actual policies?

[littlebabyjesus]

I'm not up on game theory, but "treating as you'd like to be treated" is not thieving off the thief. It isn't making sure his potential victim has less stuff. A country could have excellent child care and still be unequal. Compassion and decency, not equality, are the key.

You're right about prohibition, and I used to employ a mechanistic "prohibition = crime" argument. I'm not so sure now. Why turn to chemical oblivion? There has to be an underlying cause. I suspect we'd have a serious drugs problem if everything was on sale over the counter, or heroin was freely available from GPs. Something deeper than the law of the market is going on here.

.

We might still have a serious drug problem if prohibition were ended, but it would no longer be a criminal problem, rather one of public health.


As for game theory, briefly, the most commonly (not universally) accepted theory in evolutionary science for how altruism evolved is based on extensive tests of game theory. Computer programs were written that adopted various strategies when set a task roughly as follows –

If I tell on you but you don't tell on me, I get off scott free, you go down long time; if we both tell on each other, we both go down long time; if neither of us tells, we go down short time.

The game was played again and again. It was found that the most successful strategy was to start by being nice. If other person was nice, you're nice again next go. If other person was not nice, you're not nice next go. However, periodically, you show forgiveness and are nice even after other person has been not nice – so that you're not locked in a spiral of not nice, you give them the chance to be nice.

That's a pretty good fit, broadly, with cooperative behaviour, I think. And interestingly, in the long term, sneaky programs that tried to exploit the niceness of the other did not win in the tests.