We Become What We Behold (2017)
ncase.itch.io
ncase.itch.io
The punch line of this game is probably the most painful lesson to see play out in society again and again: In the game of prisoners dilemma, if you let defectors win, then you will end up with more defectors. It is not enough that you "win," defectors must lose. Defection must be a losing strategy.
The results that this game displays so eloquently are so central to living in a high trust society that I think it should be mandatory curriculum for all schools.
Crime or corruption gone unpunished will breed more crime or corruption.
Causes:
Money is an abstraction of reputation and honor, and we have made it an (almost) total replacement. The problem with money is it does not have a record of how it was earned, unlike reputation.
Extreme individualism. Almost no sense of community or commons. Everything is about the ego.
Cars. Driving has become our main (and almost only) form of social interaction with our community. And it is all about "winning" as an individual, not about working together to get through a difficult situation. See all the HN comments about rude driving as the norm.
Could go on, won't.
Not in every part of the world. In many places, the dominant culture assumes people got rich by cheating and stealing. Which doesn't mean rich people aren't courted -- money's attractive in and of itself; but they don't get much true respect by default.
I strongly disagree with the characterization that New York City is “the furthest thing from high trust I can think of“
I have interacted with thousands of strangers there with near perfect shared understanding of basic city etiquette. That etiquette does not include warmth, and in fact the way that we have all learned it is someone being quite rude to us when we break the etiquette, but that the city functions at all suggests they are doing something right.
The United States has only been legally multicultural and non-apartheit since .. the 1970s?
New York is notorious for its historical crime problems, but it also has enough trust to support a global financial centre.
That's only legally; socially, multicultural acceptance was lagging by decades. The majority of Americans disapproved of black/white marriages well into the 1990s[1]
1. https://news.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-...
Germany today and in the 1800s. You know why we have delivery services (Amazon etc, prior to that catalog companies like Sears etc)? It started as mail order, which started in Germany. Because the society had enough trust that you could mail money to a stranger and expect them to send you the product.
Also, the German post was a marvel of civic engineering. Government run projects at its best.
This is how high trust societies break down: cynicism. By objective standards things are no less than they were at the height of trust, but people's expectations have shifted and so subjectively people feel things are worse and begin withholding their trust.
This is why wealth inequality can create such a dilemma, because even if everybody continues to become better off, if you feel relatively worse off, than from a social cohesion standpoint it's just as bad. As overall wealth increases, because of the power law (or whatever curve), you see an acceleration of absolute differences in wealth as the high end of the curve grows steeper. This dynamic makes for a quite difficult sociological problem, which perhaps can be categorized under the rubric, "mo' money, mo' problems".
I don't believe that nothing has changed, but it's hard to point to individual events that prove how they've changed, because they're small things that lead to changes, which lead to more changes. It's still very different between the cities and the more rural suburbs and fully rural villages, and you can see it very clearly when you watch for the small things, e.g. can you leave your bike outside a small store without locking it up. It is what it is, it's not coming back once it's lost.
Today, crime that abuses the remains of Trust is rampant. Old people are tricked out of money by abusing their trust in authorities and their general trust that when somebody calls and says their daughter had an accident, that their daughter had an accident, because nobody would do such a cruel thing. And yet they do, happily laughing about it on TikTok, killing trust.
It makes sense if you squint hard, and understand that "culture" in such arguments, is being used as a proxy of something else that is no longer acceptable to say out loud in polite company. So it was a bunch of disparate states with different traditions, but the same European "culture" (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).
But not saying it out loud, of course. Just "the implications"...
>> I don't understand how that could be a high-trust monocultural society in the 1800s.
And it goes the other way, if you want to play that game.
If what you were saying were true then "whiteness" couldn't possibly refer to things such as purely abstract cultural-norms (either don't exist or is weasel-word according to you). So then what are they referring to?
They hawked a lot of stuff from Germany from that time period; Lots of loanwords, uniforms, civic systems copied. Germany really did lead the way. As did Anglos with the law.
WWII, "the greatest generation", almost all of society knew that if they united for a great purpose, they could achieve great things. Of course there were heros, but it was always the team/the group which mattered.
Are you including the soldiers who rioted in England due to the way black American soldiers were being treated by the host country? (That is, black soldiers were being treated as equals). Meanwhile back in the states, American citizens of Japanese descent were in internment camps.
I guess "all of society" uniting entirely depends on who you define "society"
What purpose do we share?
Democracy has nothing to do with what I've asked. We live in a world of various societies each composed of distinct histories, laws, ideologies, creeds, beliefs, cultures, etc. This is as true today as it was millennia ago, before the existence of modern democracy. None of these societies are or were interchangeable, whether across space or time, and many are mutually irreconcilable with respect to one another. Historically, these differences were "settled" with massacres and revolutions, where the victors stood righteous and the losers denounced as animals, barbarians, deviants, heretics, apostates, reactionaries, terrorists, and other terms of abuse. Today, these battles are waged in parliaments and on Internet forums, where the methods are less bloody the but rhetoric and reasoning (or lack thereof) remain relatively unchanged.
Societies, as they exist in the real world, aren't simply voluntary associations of rational individuals (as much as I would like that). They are, whether by accident or design, sets of historical decisions that have accumulated currency in a sufficiently large or sufficiently powerful group of people. These same people are willing to engage in violence or coercion to defend said decisions with little concern for truth.
Purges, torture, violence prisons and tanks kinda destroy trust, really.
Meanwhile supposedly high trust usa had blows of violence on their own. It was better country overall, sure, but plenty of violence due to unreconcillabke groups.
Sure we're all just trying to get to our next thing, or home, some happy about it, some sad about it, some just tired. But I don't think you'll find so many ages, religions, languages, classes, reasons or moods shoved into one little moving car as a subway and for the most part people not only use it just fine in trusting ways, but deep down, like being among the crush of just humans being human. At least if it's not 100 degrees and the train is running late again.
But even then sometimes, you suffer together, not because of each other.
Money is an abstraction of _perceived_ reputation and honor, and therein lies the problem.
I don't believe this to be true, or I suppose I would require evidence for this claim that I haven't yet encountered in my life. I find when someone claims that "America used to be so much better" they're completely discounting the experience of all the people who weren't born into or existing in privilege or within the US "in-group."
The US has always been distrustful of the indigenous people already inhabiting the North American continent, of newly arrived immigrants, of black people, of single men. Single women were sometimes witches and murdered for it and only recently trusted enough with their own personal freedom, which is being curtailed again. Atheists were never trusted.
I really don't think the US was ever a "high-trust" society and there doesn't seem to be any evidence or foundation to claim that it was.
That is not an excuse for racism. It's just saying your points have nothing to do with high trust or not high trust
A useful test imo is: would you feel comfortable leaving your expensive Macbook, unattended in public, confident nothing would happen to it?
In Tokyo? Sure. Chicago, Detroit, NYC... Maybe not.
People doing "the right thing" on their own, when nobody is watching.
The big American cities used to be more like Tokyo in that regard. Now, you get stolen from and everyone agrees you were stupid and its wholly your fault.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_trust_and_low_trust_soc...
The concept of the last man as an antithesis to what life should be about feels quite close to a description of some Extremely Online people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man
Whats that famous definition? Oh yes:
> There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
edit: and after playing the game, I agree it's a very good treatment of the subject and emphasises the real lesson of the prisoner's dilemma, change the game to make everyone better off.
This is completely absurd. Of course "turning the other cheek gets you slapped"!! How could it not? That's the whole point. If your primary objective is vengeance, and you don't want to ever be slapped, then don't turn the other cheek.
But then all your energy will be consumed by a vigilante and resentful dynamic, and you'll be sad and angry.
Another insight from the excellent book "Lying for Money" is that the optimal level of fraud outcomes may not be zero, because there's a cost to checking. Higher-trust societies can spend less on checking, while lower trust societies bear a cost both in terms of transactions that don't happen because of mistrust and because those that do happen are more expensive, even if legitimate.
Both the ability to read (ie look at other people's models and understand the underlying assumptions) and write (ie create your own simulations) is a 21st century need that is barely visible in the popular vision of computering for children (and adults). It's as if our current mathematics education focused on teaching the abacus instead of the much more powerful representation using Arabic numerals, which scales much better.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6988177...
> OP: We had our store get windows broken as soon as we fix them every single time, and organized theft rings hit up our store on regular for thousands of dollars worth of items, because they know out security legally cannot do much to physically stop them. Our employees do not feel safe at all, we are shutting down.
> Top replies: ok, but have you considered creating a welcoming community for those people instead of being upset at this situation? They must have good reasons for breaking the windows and stealing your stuff, only if you engaged more with the community and provided them support, things could have been different.
And I wish I was strawmanning those top replies or ignoring the nuance (which often happens when those matters get discussed).Unfortunately those are almost the exact top responses on the post. On Linkedin, of all places.
We are talking stuff that would be wild to see even on Facebook, which only gives it more edge as it is posted on LinkedIn. Some female executive makes a normal work-related LinkedIn post, and you see comments like "hey bby, u beautiful, wanna link? :)" (yes, with excessive emojis, posted in public comments by people using their real names and photos and resumes and colleagues). Or some "thought leader" writing a post about their "productive schedule" that is actually based on a 48-hour cycle and includes activities like doing yoga for multiple consecutive hours during business meetings, as well as multi-hour timeslots labeled as "hustling" (all while reading like a really good The Onion article).
In a weird "clown timeline" sort of a way, LinkedIn genuinely got more raw and edgy over time.
I believe, simple tools and explorables such as these can help understand human psyche much more than a volumes of monograph exploring human conditions. I think these game-based explorables will be big in the future for explaining deep and difficult concepts.
Shame, really, because it is very true and a great exercise for journalism students.
How to report mass murders - Charlie Brooker
What's the general point of this game?
At least that's my take.
He certainly looks from the neck down like the kind of person that would brazenly wear a hat, and if he isn't in this specific photo, that doesn't prove anything, even though there's a whole news story about this unsubstantiated claim.
What's the solution? Who knows...
Just following orders, right? Every snowflake thinks themselves innocent in an avalanche.
It needs to be solved, but a singel, regular journalist very likely cannot