Comment by dawnbreez | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dawnbreez | Hacker News Reader

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Actually, the assholes are winning because they're willing to cheat.

There's a thought experiment called the "Prisoner's Dilemma": two people are caught robbing a bank, and are taken to separate interrogation rooms; they can either rat their "friend" out or stay silent. If they both keep their mouths shut, they both take a short sentence; if one talks and the other doesn't, the rat goes free and the other guy gets a big sentence; if they both talk they both get a mid-range sentence.

The people who play this game can be neatly divided into the ones who play for the minimum jail time, and the ones who play to build trust with their friend.

Now imagine that, instead of reducing your jail time, screwing your neighbor nets you a few thousand dollars.

The article posits that the ideological system generates, reinforces, and imbues the social actors with the ideological rules you described.

“The focus on costs, profits, and economic success has pushed concerns of human well-being to the side. And this economic focus has apparently led to a belief, at least as reflected in choices about who and what to honour, that the ends surely justify the means, no matter how harsh.”

Defecting in a prisoners dilemma scenario is not necessarily unethical or greedy. Suppose you run a business and your main competitor proposes that you both form a cartel and raise your prices. This has the same payoff matrix as the conventional prisoners dilemma, but the "right" move is to defect.

So running a successful business means you are ’screwi ng your neighbor’ now?

Nah, more like screwing your neighbor makes running your business a bit easier.

Have you ever run a business?

No, but as I understand it, much of the "screw your neighbor" is things like "use low-end materials", "hold features out until the now iPhone release", or even "increase prices in current territory instead of expanding".

All of those, on some level, are affecting the consumer negatively for profit. They all fail in the long term, but are less expensive in the short term, making business easy for the people who can't run a business to save their life.

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