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Comment by tekromancr | Hacker News Reader

> I like to keep business and charity separated.

I don't know if that really tracks, tho. You still have ethical obligations in your day-to-day business. As an extreme example; if your business is "I sell fentinyl laced heroin to elementary school children" isn't really something you can make up with any amount charitable giving.

But aside from that, I was making the self-interested argument that even complete sociopaths wouldn't necessarily want to work in an environment where "My coworkers can and will try to fuck me at the first opportunity" is a true statement.

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Using these false equivalences and “you’re for us or against us” type reasoning might rule up people who’re already convinced, but it likely makes those who aren’t on a side more suspicious of what you’re pushing, because it feels like you’re trying to trick or coerce.

I recently saw a post (maybe here on HN?) about a study where participants had the ability to choose between a strict-no-cheating game environment and a mostly-cheating-allowed game environment. Cheaters self-selected into the latter because it allowed them to cheat, even though they knew that others were also trying to cheat.

Hopefully I'm paraphrasing/remembering correctly.

In business environment terms, I see anyone who takes a "you're either with us or against us" position as promoting a "mostly-cheating-allowed game." You're gonna let things slide for people on "your team" much more than you would if everyone is for themselves. That's one of the more convincing arguments against traditional unions, to me.

It works both ways. When management form an elite club focused on exploiting workers, this induces sides. Workers who didn't care about unionisation are provoked by management to collectivise. Then these workers learn that collective action actually produces results, so the polarisation between "sides" increases.

Concluding that you're "against traditional unions" just places you on one of the sides.

That's a good point and it definitely happens, but it's also somewhat of a whatabout argument and it's not relevant here IMO.

My point was supposed to be that a workplace full of selfish people would not necessarily be a deterrent to other selfish people, because the opportunity to be freely selfish might be worth more than the (estimated) risk due to being surrounded by selfish people.

Game environments usually means there aren't significant real-life consequences, so it's totally plausible that most people would pick the cheating-allowed game for just more fun and entertainment.

When actual jobs and lives are on the line, and the penalty for losing requires most of the participants to give up your basic human needs (such as most of low-income wage workers, they don't have any fallbacks when they get scammed and go under), then things are going to be much different.

Very good point. I wish I knew the details of the study.

I do wonder if, at a certain extreme level of cheaterness/selfishness, there is a minimum level of self-confidence that causes a cheater to self-select into a cheating-OK environment.

It's an extension of the "survival of the fittest" mentality. If you believe you are one of the fittest, you might be willing to enter the survival scenario because you are confident that you will survive.

This perhaps explains the rationale you sometimes hear that more rules/regs will cause people to not even bother trying to start a business. If you set the business climate up in such a way that only permits fair participation and competition you're probably going to alienate a segment that would favor looser rules.

I'm having a hard time seeing the justification here. It's not that the cheaters refused to play if they couldn't cheat, it's that when given influence, they prefered to have things be worse for everyone so that they could cheat more freely.

>If you set the business climate up in such a way that only permits fair participation and competition you're probably going to alienate a segment that would favor looser rules.

The converse, that rules which allow profitable unethical behavior (and therefore prefer such unethical behavior, since profit is the measure of success) are going to alienate people who want to play fair, is exactly as well supported by that observation. And all other things being equal, it seems better to alienate the cheaters than the fair players, which in turn argues for stronger regulation.

It just highlights that the people who want to cheat and make such arguments aren't arguing in good faith, they just want to cheat more easily.

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