> I think society today is insufficiently aggressive and vengeful.

I don't think vengefulness is the right thing to look at. I imagine large corporations with armies of lawyers might be glad to invest in winning enough lawsuits that other patent trolls are scared off. Small companies don't have the resources to do that.

Both the large companies and the small companies are making decisions on the basis of profit. Vengefulness isn't likely to be a motive in itself.

> Vengefulness isn't likely to be a motive in itself.

I know - I’m saying it should be. Vengeance is a critical social regulator in human societies, but it has been damped to the point of total dysfunction.

The biological instinct for vengeance solves a social coordination problem - namely, the stability of altruistic punishment, where you make a sacrifice (such as spending resources fighting someone who wronged you rather than capitulating and moving on) to protect other people.

Modern liberal capitalism has done too good a job of suppressing higher-order social optimization instincts like vengeance, while leaving first-order selfish optimization instincts like profit-seeking in place. I don’t think this is necessarily an inherent problem in capitalism, but the current implementation won’t let you do things like this in most cases. If you go after a patent troll instead of settling, your shareholders will sue you.

> I think society today is insufficiently aggressive and vengeful.

Sure, the society with one of the largest per capita prison populations in the world is insufficiently vengeful.

The government is not the same thing as society. The government is more than willing to burn money pursuing people who break its rules, to pretty significant effect, but individuals and private companies presently lack the requisite sense of pride/aggression/honor/whatever.

One obvious source of this problem is that n-tit-for-tat behavior in humans is moderated by testosterone levels, which have been declining precipitously. 100 years ago you had personal vendettas between CEOs driving corporate policy, which is unironically good for society because it encourages real non-kayfabeized competition and the punishment of antisocial corporate behavior.

> problem is that n-tit-for-tat behavior in humans is moderated by testosterone levels, which have been declining precipitously

sorry, what?

Could you clarify which part of that was confusing/unclear/you disagree with? Happy to expand on it.

n-tit-for-tat behavior is the family of game-theoretic strategies where you respond to a defection by defecting one or more times, but if the other participants don't defect then neither do you. Most societies encode this kind of behavior as some system of honor and propriety, where you don't transgress against another person unless they transgress against you, and then you are free to engage in various degrees of retaliation.

tit-for-tat would be proportional response, and then you have a whole continuum of disproportionate response up to grim trigger (infinity-tit-for-tat), which would correspond to a blood feud or something.

ntft strategies are known to be highly performant or even optimal in many settings, and are very easy to compute.

As testosterone levels decrease, the viable societal distribution of n goes down, at some point drifting into sub-1, which pushes you into a sub-optimal strategy domain.

The historical structures that lead to the US's incarceration rate are not based on vengeance. They are in place to preserve existing pre-Emancipation power structures and continue to provide a source of unpaid labor.

When you're directing vengeance at the wrong problems, then yes.

Yes, and there's no reason to think that if society was more aggressive and vengeful, vengeance would be directed towards anybody but the most vulnerable. Patent trolls would do just fine in that kind of world.