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Comment by crimsonalucard | Hacker News Reader

If China childishly invades Taiwan then the US would have to childishly declare war.

Isn't the whole point of the united states to be inclusive of all principles and values.

I think the whole rivalry from both sides is more because China is projected to surpass the US economically. The US wants to keep its dominance out of pride and China wants to dethrone it, also out of pride.

It's more of childish pride thing but at the same time both countries can potentially burn everything down if they act on the urge.

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You should read "The Dictator's Handbook". Dictators may be driven to externally irrational behavior by what appear internally to be an entirely rational chain of decisions. And I mean rational in the Homo economus sense of the word.

https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...

Thanks I'll check it out. Sounds similar to the tragedy of the commons where the opposite phenomenon is in affect.

Rational decisions made by individual actors when measured in aggregate become irrational.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243

More about Hardin's essay:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-t...

> The Tragedy of the Tragedy of the Commons The man who wrote one of environmentalism’s most-cited essays was a racist, eugenicist, nativist and Islamaphobe—plus his argument was wrong

Hardin's thesis has nothing to do with his character. Please comment on the thesis and try to seperate facts away from the personality of the person saying it. As vile as this sounds, a person being racist does not automatically make all his observations false, it does not mean anything.

Either way, his essay is largely cited in academia from political science to anthropology. A blog post illustrating some factual anomalies (which in turn can also be debatable) does not render the heart of his essay wrong.

It's good to know the background of the author of an essay, but it is bad form and borderline propaganda to use that to discount an insightful observation about the world as we know it.

People reference the essay, and in so doing they are referencing the whole essay, including the nasty parts.

People doing this need to be aware of that; I suspect many are not.

Being cited doesn't make anything true, so I'm not sure what that has to do with it being correct or not.

There does exist scholarly work disputing Hardin's conjecture. For example, the work of Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University.

"Ostrom received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for her groundbreaking research demonstrating that ordinary people are capable of creating rules and institutions that allow for the sustainable and equitable management of shared resources. She shared the prize with Oliver Williamson, a University of California economist."

http://elinorostrom.indiana.edu/

>Being cited doesn't make anything true, so I'm not sure what that has to do with it being correct or not.

Being cited lends more legitimacy to it being true. Think of it like a vote. One person cited it because he thinks it's true. A vote from academia is worth more than a vote from a popular science magazine.

>"Ostrom received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for her groundbreaking research demonstrating that ordinary people are capable of creating rules and institutions that allow for the sustainable and equitable management of shared resources. She shared the prize with Oliver Williamson, a University of California economist."

I think you missed the point. No one is saying that humans can't change their behavior. The article is describing a phenomenon that happens when people act rationally in a certain context. Of course with higher level knowledge of higher level contexts like how shared commons can be destroyed with rational individualistic behavior people can change.

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