

Societal Security - cwb
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/02/societal_securi.html

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eneveu
"why we routinely trust non-kin (an evolutionary puzzle, to be sure), how the
majority of us are honest, and that a minority of us are dishonest. That
dishonest minority are the free riders of societal systems, and security is
how we protect society from them. I will model the fundamental trade-off of
societal security -- individual self-interest vs. societal group interest --
as a group prisoner's dilemma problem, and use that metaphor to examine the
basic mechanics of societal security."

Some of these ideas remind me of a book I read recently: "The Selfish Gene".
In it, Richard Dawkins approaches these same questions from the gene
standpoint, and uses game theory to explain how good / bad behavior evolves in
an ecosystem, and why free-riding is not always the evolutionarily stable
strategy.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy>

