The People Who Bet on You

All our lives, we try to figure out the best possible way to live. We are constantly caught in the conundrum of whether to betray a friend to rise to the top or to remain true to our ethics. We struggle to answer whether being ethical has any real benefit at all. There is no divine reward for being ethical throughout your life. There is no afterlife where you will be judged by how you lived, how many people you helped, or how much love you spread. These are religious notions handed down through generations for the good of society. Game theory revolutionised our thinking. The prisoner’s dilemma highlighted that betrayal can often be the stronger strategy. Tit for tat is supposedly the right way to play the game of life. What they never told you is that game theory works only when everyone’s responses are sufficiently predictable for you to calculate the possible outcomes and determine the optimal strategy—the point of equilibrium. Reality doesn’t work that way. So does that mean…