Resilience requires helping each other out
surfingcomplexity.blog
surfingcomplexity.blog
A lot of people no longer seem to understand the implicit social contract behind such interactions and it can go bad places.
From religion to community development work to politics, there have been myriad attempts to educate people that if you don't understand that you are one figure in a larger equation where 1+1=3, then you are probably messing things up because that "3" isn't supposed to belong entirely to you as an individual and when other people get tired of being shafted, there will eventually be consequences.
You may be able to get away with claiming 1.75 of it and giving them 1.25 of it for a long damn time but if it becomes clear to them that all interactions between you and them benefit you at their expense, well, count on them eventually not being cool with that. (No, you don't get to keep shafting them and expecting something for nothing indefinitely, not even if you brainwash them into believing that being your victim is "The Christian thing to do" or some nonsense. If nothing else, it will eventually kill them, so this is simply not a sustainable model long-term.)
> you just pay for stuff with money and if someone is "nice" to you, you don't "owe" them anything
is kind of the whole point of money. More specifically, it allows you to trade with random strangers, without having to first develop and afterwards maintain social relationships with them. It's what, for better or worse, let humanity form groups larger than a small village.
> You may be able to get away with claiming 1.75 of it and giving them 1.25 of it for a long damn time but if it becomes clear to them that all interactions between you and them benefit you at their expense, well, count on them eventually not being cool with that.
This is always the case - but it takes longer for this process to settle, the larger the group is. Money is what allows you to even have this issue in the first place, by allowing societies to reach this size. And laws exist to compensate for our social intuitions and behaviors failing at this scale.
Upper class society seems to still honor those implicit social contracts, but only if you are already part of the in crowd and your disfavor could come back to bite them.
If you are poor, my firsthand experience suggests most people are all too happy to take advantage of you and then not let you walk away. That worked for them, they want more and at the same price: free.
Money is a wonderful thing but there is no excusing a common phenomenon of well-heeled individuals knowingly preying upon lower classes for what often amounts to free therapy and other free services with zero plans to in any way return the favor.
And this is exactly how "barter and <<mutual aid.>>" worked "Before we reliably had money"; this is exactly "the implicit social contract behind such interactions" that you refer to.
Upper class society is a small group, pretty close to the point of everyone in it knowing each other. The average degree of separation[0] is going to be less than 2; I'd bet excluding a few outliers and wannabes[1], the maximum degree of separation will be 2. Meaning, if you're upper class, everyone else in upper class is either your acquaintance, or an acquaintance of your acquaintance. At that scale, the informal social mechanisms reign supreme. They may be influenced or channeled by the formal system of laws, but they're not replaced by it.
(Note that this isn't the "lowest" / most implicit level of group mechanics. Upper classes tend to have codes of conduct, etiquette, honor codes, etc. That's the consequence of size and weak binding of the group. The average degree of separation is still greater than 1, and even those you know directly, you may not hang around with much - so you need some structure to boost the implicit, informal social self-regulation mechanism. In a way, those upper classes sit at the intermediate point between early, small human tribes, and organized societies that came later.)
Conversely, if you're poor, you're in a huge social class, and your social interactions are dominated by those with total strangers. Average degree of separation is above 2, probably above 3. You're almost always dealing with strangers who themselves are also almost always dealing with strangers, and most of the time those dealings are effectively one-off - you have one interaction with a random person, and then neither of you are likely to ever cross paths again[2].
The point I'm getting at is that most people in the modern world have a large amount of one-off, transactional interactions with others. Such interactions are too brief and too weak to allow for bonds to form - and without that, there's little in terms of mutual obligations, or mutual care. What you get is the baseline "stranger treatment".
This is not to justify the conduct of people taking advantage of others, knowingly or not. I'm just saying that at this scale, all most of us can expect is the baseline "stranger treatment". Money isn't the direct cause here - the scale of our societies is. Money is merely what allows societies to scale this far, and it shouldn't be blamed for problems that are problems of scale.
As for the "common phenomenon of well-heeled individuals knowingly preying upon lower classes" - that is indeed a challenge, because at this scale, implicit social defenses (like people having reputation and getting shunned if it gets too bad) don't work. The options we have instead are more difficult to use and slow-acting - teaching people empathy, promoting a more benevolent culture, and adjusting laws to discourage bad behavior. It works well for many things, not quite well for others, and takes a lot of time to adjust - but again, consequences of scale.
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation
[1] - And geography. E.g. the upper class in Poland and in Germany may know each other well, but they might have few direct connections to upper class in e.g. South Korea. But that's just because they rarely deal with each other, and thus doesn't impact the thrust of my argument.
[2] - To this, too, there are degrees. Consider us here specifically - you and me. We're both aware of each other, crossed paths on HN many times over the years - but those interactions are infrequent and inconsequential enough that we aren't much more than strangers to each other. We may be nice to each other, and I do consider you wise, but we aren't really taking each other into account during our daily lives.
IANAHistorian, but my current understanding is that this is the leading hypothesis for the rise of agriculture, and demise of hunter-gatherer groups - settling down to farm the land was, overall, a big quality of life downgrade compared to hunting and gathering, but it also could easily accommodate continued growth of population, wealth and knowledge. In contrast, hunting and gathering lifestyle was a scaling dead end. As a result, agricultural societies were quickly able to overtake and outcompete hunter-gatherers - where by "outcompete", I mean chase away, kill, absorb or even just outbreed them.
To understand that circle back to the original article. People have only recently got their hands on scaling tools (reserved for the upper classes in the past). And now everyone is waking up to the consequence of using the tools, without purpose. Defining purpose as groups get larger and larger, gets more and more complex as Needs diverge drastically. Yet it happens and happens naturally, when and where there is history of members helping each other out.
Nah. Being a jerk isn't a modern invention. By every objective measure, misbehavior/criminality/violence et. al. have been getting inexorably better over the past centuries.
If you have to make a pronouncement like this, it's more "In a world of excess and luxury, being pissed off about minor bullshit is an engaging hobby".
The modern world didn't invent selfish jerks. Maybe it invented Karens.
There might be more or less of this or that behavior and social behavior changes, but majority of "past was better" arguments are not born from historical knowledge.
It didn't, and for some reason this made me think about the biblical Parable of the Unjust Judge / Parable of the Persistent Woman[0]. The lesson usually taken from that story is about the value of persistence against unjust (but mostly indifferent) opposition. However, I can't help but imagine that, for everyone else witnessing the widow's repeated pleas to the judge, this was a Karen experience.
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Unjust_Judge
As far as i know there’s no evidence for this. No historical economy which worked primarily on barter has been discovered.
As i understand it, Adam Smith suggested this was the case and it’s now given as rote learning in economics but that historians have never found conclusive proof that this is the case.
The wiki entry for barter has this:
“No ethnographic studies have shown that any present or past society has used barter without any other medium of exchange or measurement, and anthropologists have found no evidence that money emerged from barter.”
Basically, either your proto-society develops ways to track balance of trade[0], or it'll grow a freeloader problem, which will keep it down and possibly even destroy the group. That point comes early enough that it's entirely likely the early societies that didn't develop money didn't grow large enough, and didn't survive long enough, to enter historical record.
--
[0] - Trading via a medium of exchange - that is, some form of money - is just one way to achieve it, but it has the useful property of being self-balancing, thus not requiring shared global state. That is, you don't have to keep official logs of every trade made by everyone in your group to keep things fair and balanced (or even define, update and defend what "fair" and "balanced" means, which is something everyone has slightly different view of) - you can just establish a common medium of exchange, give people freedom to individually negotiate the exchange rates, and you have a self-balancing system.
I remember reading on acoup that in agrarian societies, often they relied on favours and communal sharing in times of bounty. So say if I butchered a hog today, all my neighbours might get some. Not in exchange for something directly, but in the expectation that when I fall on hard times or they get a windfall, they'll do the same for me.
There's probably some potential for freeloading here, but these sorts of communities are likely often right on the edge of survival. If someone develops a reputation for being miserly, that might well result in them starving (or freezing) because they're rejected by their neighbours. So there's an incentive to at least appear generous and pay your fair share.
As parent suggests, this is a popular misconception. It’s a nice story, but its made up. Upon a more thorough historical analysis, evidence suggests that in fact, money came first. Not barter.
The author makes some solid arguments to support this.
That’s a reasonable supposition at the most primitive level, but there’s not really evidence for that especially the former, as attractive as the conjectured barter => money narrative is.
Its quite possible that the actual chain is non-exchange mutual support (“mutual aid” is a specific fairly modern concept that may not be a good model) => explicit quid-pro-quo with money => barter as a fallback when money fails and until a new currency is adopted by convention.
Cash is this wacky invention by which we cancel debt, specifically so we don't owe each other anything, relationship over, see you later, don't @ me.
We have a few dev-teams who are very responsive and cooperative. You see postgres complaining about queries from their application, you inform them, they realize the danger behind it and fix it. For these teams, we're perfectly fine providing prod analytics, adjusting parameters or sizing for a bit. Shitty queries happen, we compensate with some compute resources, you fix, we rescale. Entirely great, dev can move fast, we can be lean.
And then we have other teams. Some query executed twice for every user transaction has a high chance of resulting in unique key violations, which are logged as important errors. Fixes would be not too hard and have been communicated, but deemed "Not customer visible" and thus prioritized to death.
I'll let it up to guesses by the readers which project had sev-0 issues caught early by us and fixed by dev with almost no impact to customers, and which project ended up with a .3% increase in query error rates, which ended up as a sev-0 issue, with SLA discussions involved, and we were entirely blamed for being unable to do shit or at least detect it early.
I dislike growing into the operations team I don't want to be, but some teams demand doing so very, very hard.
The authors postulated that this was because furries and otherkin are more likely to enter into financial transactions with each other, giving and getting in exchange for commissions, ref sheets, profile pics, and other art requests. As a cultural expectation, members of furry communities are also more willing to lean on others in times of need, and are also more likely to help others with their own struggles as resources allow.
Fringe cliques (religious movements, homeless, musicians/fans, UFO conspiracy theorists, gays pre-DOMA, etc.) can't tolerate internal shenanigans and necessarily band together for survival. If you're Jewish/gay/homeless, other Jews/gays/homeless will help you out. The network is small enough that cheating gets you blackballed, and your community can't suffer losses because that's one less resource to rely on-- so people will have each other's backs.
There just always seems to come a threshold after which point the utility and trust afforded by inclusivity diminishes. If you can host a Pride parade without incident, you've crossed it. Like Catholics, LGBTs are everywhere these days so there's nothing unique about it-- hence the endless push for inclusion of additional subcliques (QIA+). "We're like you, but our rules are different, and don't you dare say we're the same." It's massive enough to have schisms. Welcome to the Gay Reformation.
Furry-ism hasn't become mainstream. That community will lose its magic the second they do.
Worked for me.
Everybody knows me as the 6’3 270lb dude pushing a tiny stroller or ‘spankys dad’!
I’d moved to coastal Oregon, knew no one in the neighborhood, I’m kinda scary to look at and not good at eye contact!
Since I adopted this stinky, on his last legs, probably gonna die in a year old pug mix I’ve spent a fortune at the vets but made many acquaintances some of whom are on the way to being friends.
Make a conscious effort to remember peoples names as you do it. I used to be very blasé about that but it made a big difference shouting ‘hey Sue!’ to the old lady who makes Spanky treats on the corner.
It would also work for a cat.
Everyone remembers the dude walking a cat!
Works for CrossFit too, often it's a great way to make friends.
Flexible contracts designed to perform when the "unknown unknowns" materialize are intuitively the "solution", except they dont mesh well will the more typical transactional arrangements that aim to decouple units.
There’s been a recent spate of celebrities in the US who’ve “succeeded” by staying arguably within the bounds of legality while well outside the bounds of the norms we ought to want. Too much of those conversations end up about the legality and not about the much more powerful and more precarious norms being attacked under the hood.
This also accurately describe a very large portion of silicon valley firms.
In these places there is a phenomena of scam businesses preying on customers - and getting law enforcement help to do it. An example is fake invoice companies that just spam out fake invoices and then get the sheriff to help them collect the money, since the recipient is obliged by law to contest any invoice in writing, no matter how fake. Customers are highly suspicious of doing business and making purchases in these places, since they've been screwed over so many times. In aggregate this has a huge economic impact.
In the end, there's nothing new under the sun.
https://ethglobal.com/talks/hackathon-kick-off-retroactive-p...
So, some nonzero number of people will screw you over if you are kind and give them a break. Add in a 10% emotional buffer and don’t give away what you can’t lose, as you know that this is going to happen.
I have been met mostly with derision here. Hope Y'all are reading this thread and article.
The concept of "mutual aid" as put forward by folks like Kropotkin is basically we should build communities that help one another, offering our communities excess when we have our, and gracefully accepting aid when we need it.
It's also the fundamental error that all of the "self reliant, self sufficient" doomsday prepper types make. When the apocalypse comes, your little homestead will be nothing but a supply cache for raiders. It doesn't matter how many guns you have. Without a functioning, hierarchical, tight knit community to aid in defense, you and your family will be sold off to the first band of roaming slavers that come through.
We choose to downplay our common dependencies and exaggerate the differences. Its a social game we have learned to play when the stakes for our collective survival were lower.
Imo it's naive to think that this is ever achievable given how powerful the human nature to find an in-group is.
this is true as a general behavior, but its practical relevance is highly variable and culture dependend. For the longest span of our existence tribes routinely attacked eachother, decapitating for fun, enslaving for profit, and it was deemed ok.
by and large we dont do that anymore, though this is the instictual behavior being tapped to support, e.g., organized large scale war.
anything as large scale as organized war, any form of economic and political organisation might be building on primal behaviors but is not equivalent to them. a lot of cold calculation, ideology and even trial-and-error is involved and the end result is highly variable.
education, factual information and candid discussions between people is what will help us ensure in and out-groups are confined to sports and games and do not put our collective welfare at risk
exactly that. but also, finding an in-group really just means that we want to have a social environment where we are recognized and supported. there need not be any out-group. the goal here is to develop relationships such that neighbors and the local community become that group (or one of them), which again, as the article suggests, can be achieved by helping each other out.
We clearly cant be "best buddies" across all 7bln x 7bln pairs sharing the planet at any given time. Nor is it needed.
The minimum common ground needed for long term sustainable survival is just that. A minimum. But it has not been reached and time is running out. Our numbers and techological progress are outgrowing our social adaptations for containing conflict at the fastest pace ever. Unless we address this imbalance things will not end well.
Plus, something like Mondragon exists with a large scale. It's less commune and more workers coop at the billion dollar scale, but it's nevertheless a useful reminder that we can scale up non traditional models.
some sort of reciprocal/mutual aid economy -> exchange (usually external) -> joining in with currency and capitalism
In my view the clear main factor is external disruption that forces groups into the market/currency based economy. That, plus the difficulties to control bad actors if you had a more informal system at huge scale (millions of people).
Without the external economic disruption you simply just don't get much diversity.
As far as specific events, things like disaster assistance volunteer operations in the West tend to be both religiously and ethnically diverse yet performed independently of expected remuneration. Otherwise it's not like we're observing huge samples if we restrict ourselves to looking just for communities that have both been religiously and ethnically diverse. Is the failure of any such alternate community to last for centuries - when the opportunity has barely even been there for that long - conclusive at all?
You just have to look at pretty much any disaster. Communities come together. They do not become cannibalistic hordes like peppers think. This has been proven again, again, and again. There's entire studies on it.
At least that was the experience in Chile in the most affected localities of the 2010 magnitude 8.8 earthquake.
We called down the breakdown of social order that happened "the social earthquake". Eventually the military had to instate curfews to restore public order, though it was taken to be a display of cracks existing in society that the looting happened in the first place rather than just taken for granted as what will happen in face of disruption of social order, which is the prepper view.
There needs to be some organizing principle for it to work though - some shared belief in a greater good everyone works towards. Similarly, this is how communism could work without bloodshed (some of those hippie communes are close to classical Marxism).
But they drank all the Western kool-aid they could, though and it slowly shows.
Do unto others how you want others to do unto you. If you want to judge strictly, you shouldn't ask to be judged with leniency.
For example see which political party gave handouts too banks, or which party created a cottage industry of fraud during a time of economical and existential chrisis (COVID) to the tune of trillions of dollars. It wasn't the "democrats".
You can judge me as you wish, I have no interest in controlling that.
The point of my reply was "this is how you deal with these people". You make it clear they have been sucked into propaganda, and you give them no quarters for their "views" because doing so legitimizes the sudden rise of fascism in the United States.
Fairness and tolerance is fine in civil society. When incivility reigns, well you can call a turd a turd. It's really the least you can do given what's at stake.
- Lots of examples from the regenerative world, including ideas like plant guilds in permaculture
- What would resource sharing like this look like in Kubernetes? Going beyond resource limits, but a way for pod to signal cpu/mem when it isn't using it, and can reclaim it during bursts
- What does this look like when viewed through Promise Theory? (Promise Theory has insights about voluntary cooperation among autonomous agents, human or AI)
Our behavior with the pandemic showed how untrue that is. Nothing shook my faith and trust in my fellow citizens more than that.
Nail salons for immigrants, the motel business, the Afghan tamale business. These all have massive graph interconnectedness in their social structure. You can have it, too, if you'd like.
Since I found it quite possible to do in the Bay Area, I'm going to say it's quite feasible and the problem is entirely down to what your inner self permits. You have to be very comfortable offering and accepting favours. And the second is as important as the first.
Glad the 10X geniuses here are finally catching on, only took them an age longer than everyone else to get the memo.