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Comment by nologic01 | Hacker News Reader

The question is how to organize reciprocity in large, complex and evolving systems. The canonical approach is through various contracts. But those can be too specific and poorly adapted and even worsen outcomes under stress.

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.

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Social norms are really good at this stuff as long as people do actually spurn people who violate them.

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.

> 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.

This also accurately describe a very large portion of silicon valley firms.

There are entire nations of people where this religion of "legality" has effectively replaced all previous social norms, culture and decency of the population. The result is that people will do any and every immoral thing imaginable to benefit themselves, as long as it is legal. And the only response is more and more and more laws and regulations.

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.

Social contracts are indeed the prime example. But its not clear how we can use them effectively going forward as everything seems to be working against them. E.g., rapid social evolution, urbanization and migration creates strangers that only adhere to minimal common norms. There is also the ambiguous role of social media. While frequently accused of inducing toxicity and polarization, this may actually promote a new set of norms, except not universally shared...

The solution is to become wise. People want to just follow rules on how what to do, but in interactions with other people there is no such thing. Learn about people, learn to read people, signs of who is not to be trusted, why they are saying what they are saying. Don't fall in to any web somebody has woven, no matter how much you yearn to let go of control. The last is the most important. Most people's highest desire is to shut off their mind and let somebody else take the reins, come what come will. Then they're scammed, exploited, enslaved, or sent off to die in a war.

In the end, there's nothing new under the sun.

Seems like you’re addressing why social norma failed and people had to adopt legal systems.

What's happening is that all of these rapid changes have left people with whiplash and feeling dislocated from the institutions that make up the societies they live in and play a large part in the establishing of norms. And FPTP voting systems inherently lead to a two-party system which breeds polarisation and turns into arguments about differences instead of searching for solutions to systemic problems.

An online tech community has been experimenting with retroactive public goods. It is fascinating to watch these efforts.

https://ethglobal.com/talks/hackathon-kick-off-retroactive-p...

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