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Comment by RangerScience | Hacker News Reader

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State has a whole bunch about how towns protect themselves from centralized authorities by being less comprehensible / requiring local knowledge to navigate. It’s one of the ways that power balances were maintained.

So the downside is “you can more effectively yield your power here”, or more specifically: “you can take more in taxes and conscription.”

Centralized time might be pretty small in the scheme of centralization - and come with numerous other benefits - but, that generalized resistance doesn’t come from nowhere, or irrationality, or stupidity.

IMHO it’s not that “don’t tell me what to do” is baked into the human condition, it’s that we bake into our condition that when people tell you what to do, it’s better for them and not necessarily better for you.

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Seeing Like A State seems interesting, Thank you for the reference.

From the Wikipedia article:

> A main theme of this book [...] is that states operate systems of power toward 'legibility' in order to see their subjects correctly in a top-down, modernist, model that is flawed, problematic, and often ends poorly for subjects. The goal of local legibility by the state is transparency from the top down, from the top of the tower or the center/seat of the government, so the state can effectively operate upon their subjects.

I can definitely see that happening with excessive reporting in corporate life. Also seems somewhat analogous to the corporate/state mass surveillance topic (à la Snowden).

I'm not against fighting the good fight, when one side wins and the other loses. But fighting "just because" the other side has a position seems counter-productive.

If we make decisions, to our own detriment, purely to be in opposition, then I think that's irrational.

It's hard to give an example that won't immediately derail this conversation, precisely because every topic seems to be judged on what position the other side has, but its not hard to see this play out every day.

Oh sure - call it “cognitive homeostasis” or something like that, as a baseline thing.

But I do think we socialize people to be obstinate, for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways, some of which are:

1) How often has someone told you what to do, and been more right, versus times they’ve been more wrong, or missing something about your situation, or lying about their motivations and goals, such that what they were telling you wasn’t actually what you should do?

2) Totally makes sense to me that towns, etc, would have a history of the central authority showing up and saying “change like this”, and only awhile later finding out why that was bad for them.

3) AFAIK, most of the time the experience a town would have with a central authority is that authority showing up to take something the town doesn’t want to give.

So you put all that together, and it makes sense to me that people would resist something like centralized time keeping “just because”.

Of course there are plenty of bad interactions. And yes, we'll remember and weight the bad long after we forget the good.

If you see life as a zero sum game, then you are primed to distrust everyone and everything. This mistrust is often well-placed. The inability to separate good suggestions from bad ones though is a flaw.

Some can be objectively good, perhaps more easily seen by a neutral outsider, and yet still be fought against. Because if we're not fighting then we're fools?

When I walk through a market and someone approaches me with conversation and suggestions, I don’t need to know what their angle is; I can safely assume that they have one, and that it ends in my pocket getting lighter if I follow them to it.

Resistance makes sense unless you have good reasons to trust the other party.

I read a comment on here a while back that explains a lot about the world. Essentially, research shows that a large fraction of the population don't believe one party can win without another party losing. Specifically, in order for them to win, someone else must lose. It's clear to see that when such a person is faced with a request that doesn't obviously benefit them, they will conclude that the other person will win and therefore they must be the loser.

When it comes to government (taxes, spending, elections, etc.), that is the usual case, which is why governments need the backing of law (and ultimately force) to get things done.

That is indeed what 'zero sum thinkers' tend to assume about government.

Government is, though, a solution to 'collective action' problems, which usually have prisoner's dilemma payoff matrices.

A problem could be solved if everyone acted. But individually, none of them have the incentive to act alone, so the default result is for nobody to act.

Government allows a group of people to agree that when there's a collective action benefit available, they'll take it, together.

That is explicitly not a zero sum outcome.

Government also takes many courses of action that aren’t positive sum.

Not intentionally, unless you are talking about corruption.

In your opinion, is the TSA positive sum, corruption, or an example of my thesis?

Yes, seeing the world as a zero sum game leads to detrimental behaviour.

There are of course lots of zero-sum situations. Equally there are lots of mutually beneficial opportunities. Ironically those who can't see those opportunities ultimately end up losing, which reinforces the zero-sum world-view.

This makes intuitive sense. Do you have a link/reference to that research?

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