Hacker News Reader

Comment by linkmotif | Hacker News Reader

> "The difference is that in Argentine politics, if you're not corrupt you'll get destroyed." (This is kind of exaggerated but it gets the point across.) So while the cultures are similar,

Wouldn’t you characterize that as a significant cultural difference. Accepting corruption can be viewed as cultural. I would view it this way.

View on HN

You can define culture many ways obviously, but my point is that you can distinguish behaviors that move with the individual to other places and those that are part of stable equilibria, where one's choice only makes sense in light of others' choices. The latter are like n-player "Stag Hunt" games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stag_hunt

As an example, Singapore accepts a lot of Malays and Chinese every year (and most people are Chinese), but the country has "an obsession with queueing" (https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/no-time-wait-line-star...) and is very orderly w/r/t traffic laws and such.

The n-person subgame Nash equilibria come from simple environmental constraints - the sheer number of people in India or China and the number of available seats in your commuter subway. The cost of not cutting the line is proportional to the number of participants. I'd argue it's a very different experience in say, Newcastle, UK where trains are historically on time, predictable, not as crowded, as opposed to trains in China being unpredictable, late, etc.

And, re: culture, well game theory tells us that free-riding is a learned outcome of repeated games. Singapore gets its past learning from a hundred years of British colonialism.

This is an interesting perspective. Thank you.

> The cost of not cutting the line is proportional to the number of participants.

But if people en masse don't cut in line, there's no cost at any scale, right? Imagine a culture where no one cuts in line. Then you don't lose by not cutting in line.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com