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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

  > You could make this statement about any group at all.

Yes, that's the point

  > And then once you realize people are in multiple groups, the whole thing devolves into chaos.

You have bad priors. That would only happen if groups could only have singular and simple goals. It requires those goals to be mutually exclusive. Because as soon as they overlap, even just a little, cooperation becomes an effective strategy.

Hell, history shows us enemies often cooperate. Mostly to defeat a mutual enemy, so they can go back to fighting each other, but that's still cooperation

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Nobody is suggesting nobody or group cooperates on anything ever. This comment could go in the definition section of "strawman". My comment was in response to the idea that there is "a conspiracy of the elite". It's just an absurd idea to anyone who has spent time in the world working with people, both "elite" and non "elite".

In the bay area you'll find thousands and thousands of people who have worked at a company run by a billionaire founder. They will tell you said billionaire founder can't even get everyone in the company to conspire to row in the same direction.

But the comment above wasn't about an explicit conspiracy, with billionaires meeting in dark rooms colluding. It was about implicit, uncoordinated conspiracy, where objectives align. My comment is defending the latter

Maybe I'm overindexing on "they steer" and "effective strategy" - it still reads that this group has way more control and deliberate planning than they do.

And, "implicit, uncoordinated conspiracy" is an oxymoron. The word "conspiracy" has a definition.

If all you are saying is "sometimes billionaires are aligned" - sure. Sometimes politicians are aligned. Sometimes teammates are aligned. If one wants a platitude with some predictive power "people are self interested" is going to work more often.

“People are self interested” works fine as long as you extend the analysis to include the class dimension. People in a specific class are generally going to advocate on behalf of that class, because it benefits them to do so. No conspiracy needed.

Exactly, there is no conspiracy, there’s just multiple actors moving predictably in the same direction, and sometimes coordinating weakly. I don’t know how my comments could have been read otherwise.

Except there are also explicit conspiracies like Jobs calling around to stop "poaching" or Zuck leaning over to Trump and asking how much.

True, but these are generally limited agreements among a few individuals (at most a small handful at the top). Pulling off a big conspiracy between many powerful competing actors carries too much risk of defection. It may be possible but it’s certainly rare.

I do think that these limited agreements may be copied by other people in similar contexts, for instance there were other tech firms who made similar agreements with their own competitors. And the big tech anti-poaching agreements may have themselves been copied from similar agreements made in other industries, such as finance and fast food. The illegal conduct probably spread organically through word of mouth, as execs and board members informally exchange this sort of “best practice” with each other.

It’s likely that big shareholders or board members could hold private meetings to advise the CEOs of their companies on how to pull off this sort of trick, if they think it would help the stock price. Given how many people sit on multiple boards, this could be seen as a sort of conspiracy. It’s still very informal and of course it’s nearly impossible to prove.

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