Pat, thanks for the thoughtful response. Responding separately to your general note and then to the list specifically.
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On TFT: I didn't say TFT was the most successful strategy in conflict theory. I said it was the most successful strategy in Repeated Iteration Prisoner's Dilemmas. I'm referring to the fact TFT won both of Axelrod's Tournament for Repeated Iteration Prisoner's Dilemmas. I purposefully didn't get into anything deeper than that; my post was already quite long.
As far as I know, the Axelrod tournaments haven't been replicated since then, but I am happy to admit my knowledge on them comes from Axelrod's book, so perhaps he was self-serving about his own greatness. I just found a 2015 papers that argued against TFT being taken too far (
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0134128) but even that seems to agree that TFT is still considered the reigning champ of the Repeated Iteration Prisoner's Dilemma. Has Contrite TFT (from the paper you shared) been tested in an open tournament ? If it has and won I will accept correction... contritely.
If you were just making a broader point, I agree and no need to discuss further.
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As for the list itself, you say that it's a reddening if someone "transfers" a fight to a broader group - and I agree, it is. But why is it? I think it's because we (the list-supporters) believe no one should initiate aggression against those who have not aggressed against them. A "bystander" is someone who hasn't aggressed, that is, someone who is tolerating me while I tolerate them. But the corollary is that we can respond to those who do aggress against us without reddening.
For instance, let's say X tries to cancel Y for stupid personal reasons (Y killed X's favorite halfling thief). Y then responds by trying to cancel X, but also trying to cancel A, B, and C. A, B, and C are X's fans who post about his game on RPG.net. I think you and I would agree that X was wrong to try to cancel Y. But we'd also agree that Y was wrong to cancel A, B, and C, because they were innocent bystanders. This situation happened recently when one of the OSE-related Discords started banning fans of Venger even though the fans had done nothing to merit the ban.
Now let's change it up. After X tries to cancel Y for personal reasons, A, B, and C all join in trying to cancel Y. Only then does Y try to cancel X, A, B, and C. At that point, we cannot say that Y is wrong at all -- he is reacting only against those who have attacked him. A, B, and C are not innocent bystanders because they started fighting with Y before Y started fighting with them. In this example, Venger's fans would have started attacking the Discord mods, then been banned. Totally different.
So I think who starts the fight really does matter, because it justifies who you can be fighting with, without reddening. Where do we disagree?