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Comment by simpaticoder | Hacker News Reader

There are different kinds of scarcity. I remember a time when people would "charge what it's worth" instead of "what they could get". Decency imposed self-restraint on those who were in a position to take advantage of a buyer. It was also the tail-end of the American era of employer-employee loyalty that went both ways. Those who famously violated those norms were looked down on, not admired. The American medical industry has been most visibly effected by this cultural shift, but it's everywhere. Scarcity isn't always about the availability of material goods. By that measure, we're doing better than ever!

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There's a line in one of my kids' Bluey books that says "Do you want to win, or do you want the game to continue? Because sometimes you can't have both."

I feel like that's sorta where we are in America. In the glory days of the 50s-70s, people wanted the game to continue - they were willing to sacrifice a little bit of winning for the sake of keeping the system intact. Then starting in the 80s, people gradually started sacrificing the game for the win, doing things that they knew would eventually lead to the collapse of everything so that they could come out on top. This is corrosive. Once it starts becoming apparent, everybody will start sacrificing the system as a whole for their own personal gain, because the system is dead anyway.

I think we're right on the brink of everyone realizing that the system is now dead, and bad things will likely come of it.

I like this framing. There is an analogy with industrialization and pollution, in that the side-effects of industrial production can be safely ignored, unless those effects are cumulative. Social norms function in the same way. There is little harm in a professor kindly giving a passing grade to one undeserving student; when this becomes common, the cumulative effect undermines the value of a college education itself.

Perhaps a more mathematical framing looks to game theory, a la John Nash. In the prisoner's dilemma two equilibrium exist, the "good one" where the prisoners cooperate, and the "bad one" where they both defect. Good and bad is determined by summing the outcome value for both prisoners. Social norms help stay in the "good" equilibrium despite the occasional defection. Once the defectors learn how personally profitable it is to defect, it becomes common practice, the norm changes, and the society as a whole has switched from one equilibrium to the other, and society is, overall, much worse off. The path from good to bad equilibrium is incremental, cumulative, just like pollution. It's less clear to me what the incremental, cumulative path is going the opposite direction.

Game theory is exactly it. A bunch of simulations have shown that in a repeated prisoner's dilemma, the optimal strategy is tit-for-tat, sometimes adding forgiveness. The fact that you will play again incentivizes players to cooperate. But as soon as the game becomes finite (i.e. you can see the end in sight), the optimal strategy becomes "defect", because your opponent also has the same incentives and whoever defects first gets the payoff.

Incidentally this also points to the path from a bad to good equilibrium. You have to throw away the big system and start with a system small enough that the participants will interact repeatedly. This rebuilds trust. Then you have to defend that system from outside influences, or at least carefully control them so they play by the same rules as existing participants. The act of defending your local community also builds trust - arguably [1] post-WW2 U.S. social cohesion was actually generated by the experience of defeating the Axis powers and then getting enmeshed in the Cold War. Finally you can gradually expand the system through carefully controlled immigration and naturalization.

Unfortunately, this probably means that the Internet, globalization, and likely large states like the US/China/Russia are all toast. And as Terence Tao's post here points out, large organizations are usually more efficient than small organizations. That means that as large organizations have outcompeted small organizations, the transition as those large organizations themselves become dysfunctional and disintegrate is going to be wrenching. We're going to lose access to several material conveniences that we take for granted.

[1] https://www.paulgraham.com/re.html

It's interesting to wonder about why norms degrade at scale. Intuition tells me it's because stink-eye doesn't scale. Defectors in a small org pay a price external to the game, aka "reputational damage". But members of large organizations rarely suffer this, because they are strangers, and because "they are just doing their job". A half-formed thought, but perhaps it's half-useful.

When you are the 900 pound gorilla, "reputational damage" is no longer an effective check against bad behavior. This is the exact motivation for the trust-busting movement in the early 20th century. Now the US has regressed and we are in another gilded age.

In the book "The Logic of Collective Action" that's recognized as one of the reasons for why large organizations are unable to produce public goods without setting up some separate, selective incentives for the individuals. When society is composed of mostly large organizations, nothing can be done without either forcing people to do it (government) or using money as an incentive (corporations). In small groups it's possible for the group to act in the best interest of everyone (produce public good) without having any other incentives for the individual, and a part of the reason is the effect on reputation for non-participants.

Maybe this transition to large groups means that it's harder to produce public goods, since producing them now always requires setting up a separate system of incentives, which is hard and can be gamed.

I think this is what you're saying but in different words - larger scale makes people more anonymous which purely benefits selfish behavior (or specifically those who naturally employ it whenever possible).

And by stink-eye people who did this a long time ago I'm sure were just gotten rid of because there are many types of people (though individually rare) the only way to deal with them is to not deal with them.

My personal belief is society is far too naive of extreme selfish personalities and they have infested every aspect of modern society and are actively making others more selfish.

Thank you for your half formed thought :)

This is exactly the main lesson of Finite and Infinite Games. There are finite games, in which the goal is to win, and there are infinite games, in which the goal is to continue playing the game. Using this framing, one can account for quite a large amount of long-term, large-scale problems as breakdowns wherein some participants choose to play formerly infinite games as finite ones, thus crushing their competition but destroying the game itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games

Were you born pre-industrial revolution?

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