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> politicians, corporations, etc have real conflicts over zero sum games. Of course, there are situations where there's are incentives to cooperate.

I have a great example, called the ‘mating call of the banks’ (in Australia, don’t know if there’s something similar elsewhere).

We only have four major banks here, and sometimes one or more of them wants to raise interest rates out of cycle (ie without the Australian Reserve bank changing official rates).

Of course, if only one of them raises rates, they’ll lose business.

And ultimately, they all want higher rates.

So one of them will book some media spots (easy if you’re a big advertiser) and start talking about the state of the economy and how it’s out of step with fiscal policy, etc etc.

That’s a mating call.

If some other bank’s talking head turns up saying the same thing, then that’s another one. That’s a signal that at least two banks will raise rates together.

Once they’ve done that, the other two will surely follow.

Publicly executed conspiracy to fix prices.

This is an interesting concept -- I would assume "mating call of the airlines" is a similar phenomenon that exists in the US airline industry (pre-corona of course) -- all want to raise fees / stuff planes, so there's this pantomime of whatever ails the industry covered in the media, before one (and then all) change policies that are pro-airline-profit but net-negative-passenger.

All this is possible of course due to the consolidation allowed over the past 15 years, but separate topic for a separate thread.

I guess it kind of depends on how much you believe in the conspiracy of elites.

But even in the weak form of that conspiracy, it seems to me the exchange of people and ideas between think tanks, journalism, lobbyists, campaigns, consultancies and financial imstitutions does operate a lot according to this concept.

I guess regardless I think the idea is not to try to find exact examples of this but to understand that wrestling is a just a dramatic example of systems that operate more on fake information than real. I think the difference between this and economic models that incorporate misinformation is that those models tend to see misinformation as something distortionary and unwelcome in the system where this is considering systems that are basically predicated on false information.

But I guess that's still a bit banal and wouldn't be my first answer to the question what scientific concept should people internalize to be better thinkers.

What would help me is more illustration of the line between kayfabe and decency.

It seems like the line is "The audience is misled about the actual social norms". When olympic wrestlers refuse to stab each other, it is not kayfabe because the audience doesn't expect that. The Christmas Truce and various anti-latrine-bombing truces were kayfabe because the audience was British and German high command and these were done behind their backs.

If thats the right interpretation, then in this example:

> Perhaps confusing battles between "freshwater" Chicago macro economists and Ivy league "Saltwater" theorists could be best understood as happening within a single "orthodox promotion" given that both groups suffered no injury from failing (equally) to predict the recent financial crisis.

What injury would the audience expect?

Who even is "the audience"?

I think you're a little too hung up on the audience metaphor.

> Perhaps confusing battles between "freshwater" Chicago macro economists and Ivy league "Saltwater" theorists could be best understood as happening within a single "orthodox promotion" given that both groups suffered no injury from failing (equally) to predict the recent financial crisis.

The Kayfabe element is that two "competing" schools of thought are primarily concerned with protecting the shared status of "orthodox" economics over outside theories.

The subtlety is that kayfabe has elements of gradient to it.

In some sense, everything competes with everything else. I could claim the gravity of Jupiter competes with my sense of justice and I can probably invent some convoluted chain of nonsense that justifies it. But to give some meaning to the word, there has to be some threshold of sustained competition before we call two things 'competitors'.

Kayfabe is a state of entities presenting as competitors when they are really cooperators.

In many senses politicians aren't competitors. They only compete on things that they think will win election - that isn't most things that pass through the political realm.

Political dysfunction seems to be when politicians manufacture divisions between them and their opponents over issues that ought not to be divisive.

A particularly painful example for me was the way Trump said during his campaign that Obamas (and Hillary’s) policy of threatening to bomb Syria if they used chemical weapons was wrong because the US could not afford to police the world, and it was nothing to do with the US. Within weeks of becoming president Assad used chemical weapons on a civilian area, including a maternity clinic, and a Trump ordered air strikes. Clearly in reality he knew he had to do it, but during his campaign the priority was to distance himself from his opponents even on issues where he actually agreed with them.

I worry that we’re seeing similar effects over the response to the virus. The Labour opposition here in the UK seems to be unable to stop criticising the government even when they are following policies driven by a professional medical consensus, and broadly supported by the population. I think this is backfiring on them quite badly.

> Within weeks of becoming president Assad used chemical weapons on a civilian area, including a maternity clinic, and a Trump ordered air strikes. Clearly in reality he knew he had to do it

You know that during this strike, all that was hit was an empty airfield, right? It was deliberately a pointless attack that minimized harm. He only "had to do it" in the sense that he has to kowtow to powerful neoconservative influences.

A group of elites/privilege/whatever competing within a specific domain.

Even if you lose, you're still in the group and get certain privileges.

Keeping the wealth in the group is key.

I'm not a Bernie Bro, but he's not a bad example in this case - he represents interests outside the monied/corporate group, which although it competes across Democrat/Republican political lines, shows class solidarity when people want to, say, regulate Wall Street more, or enact universal healthcare which would hurt the bottom line of healthcare companies.

I'm sure my explanation above has its flaws but I hope it shares the gist of what I was trying to express.

I think it depends on the relative power of the audience and the effectiveness of cooperation within the promotion.

When the audience turning on you is a stronger threat than that of losing to a rival, kayfabe situations are likelier to develop. But vice versa. In a lot of modern arenas, such as business between banks or competition between democracies where war is nigh impossible, kayfabe is highly likely to be present. There's not much room for major victories over your nominal rivals so you stop trying and instead focus on looking good rather than actually moving forward.

If you think it’s complicated, you’re overthinking it. Using Kayfabe as a lens on the world doesn't mean assuming mass collaboration of seeming opponents, it means assuming self-centered organizations are working an audience for their own gain (and that interpretation checks out with Occam's razor better than many publicly accepted narratives of events).

This might be a better description than the linked article: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/magazine/is-everything-wr...

>Pro wrestling, unexpectedly, gave me a real insight into how the public is "worked" by celebrities, politicians, and so on. I often find myself being the first to see through these facades and explaining them to others, pointing out how individuals benefit from portraying a "character" of sorts. For instance, MMA fans that were never involved in pro wrestling are baffled by individuals like Chael Sonnen and Connor McGregor, when to us it is very clear what these individuals are doing months and years in advance of them simply being labeled as "liars and exaggerators" by the community at large.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/comments/4laat6/is_ev...

>Politics and Public Relations certainly correlate with booking in wrestling. Anything does when you have to "work a crowd". During the 2012 election, the group of people I was with was amused when I was able to correctly "book" the Democratic Convention, predicting some "spots and promos" from the speakers, who was coming out when and why.

>After President Obama gave his speech, I said, "Obama is struggling to get over with the liberals this cycle and his convention speech had to play to the center, so they're going to send Bill out there to give him the rub." Right on cue, out walks Bill and the crowd pops.

>I couldn't help it. The convention felt booked like a WWE PPV. I spoke like I would gathered around the sofa watching WWE with some friends. That wasn't a reassuring feeling, realizing the world is a work, booked to pop a crowd. Since then, the correlation is only more apparent, just like this article describes. The next time someone criticizes wrestling for being fake, I want them to show me something that isn't.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/comments/4laat6/is_ev...

> Unlike in professional wrestling politicians, corporations, etc have real conflicts over zero sum games.

That's where wrestling can be so brilliant though. Often much of that heat and intrigue was more than a little informed by what was actually going on back stage.

> have real conflicts over zero sum games

No. Neither side wants the world to crumble tomorrow (I hope). Therefore it is not zero sum

Similarly, energy from the sun isn't going to happen or not, so there's plenty of wealth being left on the table so that entropy isn't a good argument for zero sum

"zero sum" is a hateful philosophy. It means I'd kill your children because if that's terrible for you it must be oppositely great for me

aside: realized that "competing for survival where only one can get out" isn't even enough to be zero-sum if both can die. Here's a "Gladiator's Dilemma": if both choose to fight, both die. If neither chooses to fight, both die. If only one chooses to fight, the other dies. This game is not zero-sum, as neither side necessarily gains anything by the other's death

> "zero sum" is a hateful philosophy. It means I'd kill your children because if that's terrible for you it must be oppositely great for me

If you managed to simplify the equation down to "kill their children or die yourself" through some desert-island scenario, then yeah, sure. Normally problems involve more variables than this.

Zero sum means there is only one apple, and either your kid gets it or mine does. Not everything is zero sum.

Not only that, but it means the apple can't be destroyed. Zero sum excludes both win-win & lose-lose. There's no concept of waste