Modeling cycles of grift with evolutionary game theory | Hacker News Reader

Modeling cycles of grift with evolutionary game theory

oranlooney.com

98 pointsibobev44 comments

I think a missing piece of this analysis for the present is the way that hyper-skepticism can come back around and make you just a different type of mark. Sovereign citizens, for example.

People that don't buy insurance because they think it's a scam, then end up impoverished after a foreseeable accident or theft, as a more common one.

Foreseeable accident?

Not buying flood insurance while living in a flood plain is an example I've seen in my city

How many renters have a useful amount of renter's insurance?

Probably a lot? I've moved around a bunch over the past 20 years, so have had several landlords. I think all of them for the past decade have required proof of insurance when signing the lease. I don't think anyone I rented from required it before 2018ish

Echoing a sibling comment, lots of landlords require it now, and the basic packages that insurers offer you as a bundle with auto or other forms of insurance are pretty decent, depending on state.

Typically seems like $100-200 per year for coverage that would handle the loss of most of one's possessions, provided you don't get screwed by "well, you don't have the receipt" or "we only cover water ingress, not floods or leaks".

What do you consider useful? While I do not know how easy it is to make a claim, but my policy is a bit over $100 annual and covers some $20-30k loss. Which feels more than sufficient.

Hopefully, I never have to use it, and it is just a tax I pay.

To add on to this, if you are in a "special flood zone", traditional renters insurance does not cover floods.

I'm talking about people buying houses near a river that floods regularly and not purchasing flood insurance. Someone else brought up renter's insurance in response to my comment about flood insurance. Renter's insurance is cheap, btw. I have something like $300k coverage for less than $10/month bundled with my car insurance.

I thought you can't even get that if you are in an area that is often flooded.

The flood-risk zones requiring flood insurance are insufficient to rely solely upon being forced to get insurance. Some floods extend past those zones or hit areas not covered by them.

Sovereign citizenry is such a strange thing to me. It’s all the parts of a conspiracy theory with none of the interesting things like aliens or lizard people. No those are replaced with strange interpretations of laws and ordinances.

It's not strange really, it's tax evasion with an addition of larping to not feel bad. Oppressive government is in fact out there, but you feel that you can neither challenge nor escape it, so it's just that -- sublimation of sorts

What exactly is hyper-skeptical about them?

I think this makes sense as part of the existing 'skeptic cost'

I don't [think] there is some threshold of extreme skepticism at which someone suddenly reverses polarity under skeptical duress and flips over into a mark. Rather, you just have a mark trying to be good at skepticism and failing horribly.

Hyper-skepticism is quite selective, driven by ideology and partisanship. Some of the most successful grifters become the heads of political parties, governments, etc.

A population of Marks is a highly efficient one. At the speed of trust.

In a company you will want to cultivate this, since interactions within the company are far more frequent than with the outside world.

The same applies to the country population -- it's always them others who are up to something.

To this model I would add the transaction costs for vetting a transaction, the cost of identifying and engaging transaction partners, and the relative sensitivity to a negative outcome (the stake as a percentage of total stake).

I believe that would enable you to identify more or less corrupt industries.

Unfortunately, both stakes and information costs make governance prone to abuse. To see why it’s not nearly as corrupt as one might expect from this model, you’d need reputation cost and benefit, where trusted governments and leaders attract higher functioning citizens and industries.

This is old wine in new bottles. Read: https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Cooperation-Robert-Axelrod-...

From 1984!

And of course 2017 :) https://ncase.me/trust/

Maybe, but… the cycle can be very long. Everyone in Russia is a skeptic or a grifter, and it’s been that way for decades with no sign of grift being on its way out.

The vast majority have justified skepticism from long history of abuse. But very few people are grifters, because that would require an expensive roof. missing from my transactional analysis is a general goodwill, the likelihood that someone would help if it didn’t cost much. In Russia, the skepticism is so high that one only helps one’s close friends.

Sounds like they've reached an evolutionarily stable equilibrium and the conditions that sustain it are stable too.

Birth rates are the evidence against this, and this is true for all industrialized nations.

What I said doesn’t mean that every aspect of their society is stable.

>Grift is cyclical, and any period of high grift will soon give way to a period of high skepticism

so how do you explain the immediate jump from crypto grift straight into AI grift? i'm not saying all crypto or all AI is pure grift, but both of those industries have had higher than average levels of grift, without any skepticism in between them. The NFT crash did not seem to be followed by any period of skepticism at all.

What is the location of the (clearly unstable) equilibrium/fixed point there?

The obvious trick of computing the eigenvectors didn't seem to work (I got 20%/40%/40%, which does not look right) and I'm out of time for this particular nerd snipe.

This is a great post. It's even got useful ternary diagrams, and it gives an explanation of why the NFT grift disappeared. Too bad cryptocurrency in general is only mentioned in the context of rug pulls. This theory must not extend as far as whatever powers crypto.

I am going to steal this code and run a different analysis. The author mentions that skeptics avoid grifters without punishing them. I am curious how things play out in the Seven Samurai model, where instead of marks you have peasants and instead of grifters you have bandits. What happens if you have samurai not skeptics? Who both take rice from the peasants and protect them from greater exploitation by bandits.

This would be a simple governance model, and you could predict something like “revolution” when the cost of samurai exceeds their benefit.

What about grifters who are also marks? Grifters aren't immune from grift.

I think a further development is that skeptics are, in many contexts, losing the tools and leverage needed to reject the grifters.

For example, if you need cell phone service, and all the options have converged on requiring binding arbitration, being a skeptic about binding arbitration will not help you.

Maybe more on point, if you want to be an AI skeptic, but are also aware that AI can work, how can you establish a plausible level of skepticism accurately? Laypeople probably can't.

So the rise of grift might also be seen as a sign of the systemic frustration of effective skepticism.

The meta strategy seems clear: if the world seems full of grifters, stop being a Mark, and start being a Skeptic.

Or, I suppose, go on thinking this time is different.

Don't believe the latest fashion on social media, including the latest thing it's fashionable to be sceptical about. That rule of thumb performed well the last 10 years.

The simple version: get off social media.

The dilemma for me is that aspects of social media (namely information sharing and learning) are incredibly useful, while others (contrarian argumentation, propaganda, attention black holes) are very harmful.

I go through cycles of abstaining from online interaction because I’ve sunk into the dark side too much but then return with a stronger intention in order to feed my hobbies and mind. I’ve found that it’s not so simple to just “not believe” what you see and read as being constantly bombarded with political messaging necessarily pushes you to one side or the other unconsciously.

So yeah, for me the best way is to cut that feed off entirely, instead of pretending I have any kind of effective fire wall against its deeper mental effects.

I'd like a product/UI that uses an LLM to filter social media to get rid of "contrarian argumentation, propaganda, attention black holes". Basically a sovereign recommendation engine.

The easiest way to do that is to block the social media sites at your firewall. You may have a few false positive (maybe 1% or so?) but that should be minor compared to the time savings.

> Don't believe the latest fashion on social media, including the latest thing it's fashionable to be sceptical about.

I don't think choosing to believe in something just because other people are piling on being skeptical of it is a viable strategy. If you hear a lot of people pointing out "X is a scam" you shouldn't refuse to believe them on principle.

Agreed, the refined view would be to treat it as noise, or at most a reason to explore further.

I don't think that's a viable strategy.

If you're a Mark (=trusting person) I don't think you can just decide to become a Skeptic.

I admit I skimmed the article and even if I would read more closely I don't think I would understand it better.

I'll use my intuition for how individuals transition between the roles.

Mark -> Skeptic: requires to be have been grifted and possibly having the grift explained by a Skeptic. Or possibly having someone close to you get grifted.

Mark -> Grifter: I'm not sure it's possible, but maybe the corruption pdf posted[0] is a clue.

Skeptic -> Grifter: desillusion about the point of not grifting since everyone else is doing it too. So maybe late stage corruption[0] or just nihilism based on seeing grifts succeed so much.

Skeptic -> Mark: honestly... Shrooms maybe? Or finding and being chosen into a trusting community.

Grifter -> Skeptic: I think realising that you've hurt someone in an unexpectedly harsh way could help this transition. Otherwise I don't really know besides being short of Marks.

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[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47177186

Every skeptic was once a trusting babe-in-arms, as was every grifter. People have more agency, more ability to choose their fate than you're giving them credit for here.

this "The start of a slide into a new post-truth dark age?"

Not sure we'll evolutionarily get out of the loop this time.

From 2016 to 2026. That is 10 years for Republicans to realize they are being grifted, scammed, etc... Not sure they will ever be realizing it. Will take another generation. Which I guess is the point, another generation of evolution cycles might break the loop.

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