[MaxBarraclough]

> 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.

[wyager]

> 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.