Lots of interesting insights, but their affirmative action take is a miss.
> Critics of affirmative action often commit the fallacy of letting a failure in one area doom the entire enterprise. This ignores the interdependent nature of affirmative action. [1]
Affirmative action sets up a zero-sum game where fixed resources like university admissions and employment offers are redistributed to people with the "correct" demographics. The conflict is not a disagreement over effectiveness. It's a misalignment between meritocracy and equity.
This website is a good resource to show other people to mislead them so that they can be exploited.
I think a major flaw of all these models is that they underestimate:
1. How easy it is to start fresh and shed your past reputation if you get caught doing something bad.
2. How forgiving people are and how tolerant they are to deception, abuse and immorality. I hate to say it but a lot of people are attracted to abusers. They keep going back to the same kinds of people who will abuse them over and over. These same people may even show disrespect and look down on good, honest people. I cannot overstate how powerful this effect is; and it seems to be getting worse over time! And these people keep coming up with narratives to gaslight themselves about their abusers "they're not so bad"... People will especially do this when their abuser has power over them (Stockholm Syndrome).
Once you factor these two things, cheating is the clear winning strategy. By a mile... It's objectively a superior strategy. If we just follow game theory; it will take us somewhere really dark. Game theory isn't what's keeping the world civilized. Society literally all rests on people's irrational emotions and fickle moral principles.
The desire to do the right thing is completely irrational and is a net loss to the individual. If we continue with the current system and current assumptions, all moral individuals will be wiped out because they are at a HUGE disadvantage. To solve our social problems, we need to be more moral; we need to learn to judge ourselves and other people through the lens of morality.
This doesn't make sense to me, our current prosperity is founded on an enormous mountain of collaboration and shared beliefs. Usually not out of selflessness of course, often guided and forced by strong leadership and/or strong institutional structures to bend selfishness into selflessness (like capitalism to a degree).
Poor countries tend to stay poor not due to fundamental resource constraints but due to self-reinforcing loops of desperate crab-bucket like behavior, where everyone is cheating one another out of necessity (or culture). Broad collaboration and institution building is always the only way out of the hole, although the hole can be very deep and collaboration can be very costly until you get out.
You are right though, that for an individual living in a good collaborative system, often cheating is very effective, it's just that the system can only handle a certain amount of that behavior before it collapses.
As is discussed in the first scene of Plato's The Republic (surprisingly entertaining to modern tastes), the best play tends to be "to be unjust while seeming just". If people are going to be assholes, it is actually much better if they are discrete about it and keep a pretense of civilization. When people start acting conspicuously like assholes, out of a weird sense of honesty, that's when it propagates and the whole thing collapses, like a bank-run. It's an ancient story that we are still living.
> Poor countries tend to stay poor not due to fundamental resource constraints
Sometimes highly shrewd rich countries infiltrate the power structure of poor countries through N-pronged strategy to keep them stuck in a rut so that they don't become future threat, also extract their resources in the meantime.
Indeed, the way out of that is also broad collaboration, sometimes not peaceful or clean.
And the last century showed that this also works at a large scale, we all got a lot richer as a global community by letting poor countries develop and doing business with them, instead of exploiting them to death.
Cooperation has been "invented" in evolution many times independently and is long term stable in many species.
If your comment was true that fact wouldn't exist.
We may consider the world we live in today competitive, but at the end of the day, humanity is a globe spanning machine that exists due to cooperative behavior at all scales.
Comments such as yours are really missing the forest for the trees.
I suspect that it's really the fact that cooperation is so powerful and pervasive that makes it normal to the point where any deviation from it feels outrageous.
So you focus on the outrageous due to availability bias (seeing the trees rather than the forest).
Lots of interesting insights, but their affirmative action take is a miss.
> Critics of affirmative action often commit the fallacy of letting a failure in one area doom the entire enterprise. This ignores the interdependent nature of affirmative action. [1]
Affirmative action sets up a zero-sum game where fixed resources like university admissions and employment offers are redistributed to people with the "correct" demographics. The conflict is not a disagreement over effectiveness. It's a misalignment between meritocracy and equity.
[1]: https://nonzerosum.games/unlockingsolutions.html
The 3D tetris is genius
This website seems really well made, and the posts are interesting, thanks for sharing!
I'm still exploring the content, but that website is very pretty. It's nice to see something that stands out between all the copy-and-paste AI slop.
Personally I clicked off because the fonts appear to be something like comic sans, it is a chore to read.
This website is a good resource to show other people to mislead them so that they can be exploited.
I think a major flaw of all these models is that they underestimate:
1. How easy it is to start fresh and shed your past reputation if you get caught doing something bad.
2. How forgiving people are and how tolerant they are to deception, abuse and immorality. I hate to say it but a lot of people are attracted to abusers. They keep going back to the same kinds of people who will abuse them over and over. These same people may even show disrespect and look down on good, honest people. I cannot overstate how powerful this effect is; and it seems to be getting worse over time! And these people keep coming up with narratives to gaslight themselves about their abusers "they're not so bad"... People will especially do this when their abuser has power over them (Stockholm Syndrome).
Once you factor these two things, cheating is the clear winning strategy. By a mile... It's objectively a superior strategy. If we just follow game theory; it will take us somewhere really dark. Game theory isn't what's keeping the world civilized. Society literally all rests on people's irrational emotions and fickle moral principles.
The desire to do the right thing is completely irrational and is a net loss to the individual. If we continue with the current system and current assumptions, all moral individuals will be wiped out because they are at a HUGE disadvantage. To solve our social problems, we need to be more moral; we need to learn to judge ourselves and other people through the lens of morality.
This doesn't make sense to me, our current prosperity is founded on an enormous mountain of collaboration and shared beliefs. Usually not out of selflessness of course, often guided and forced by strong leadership and/or strong institutional structures to bend selfishness into selflessness (like capitalism to a degree).
Poor countries tend to stay poor not due to fundamental resource constraints but due to self-reinforcing loops of desperate crab-bucket like behavior, where everyone is cheating one another out of necessity (or culture). Broad collaboration and institution building is always the only way out of the hole, although the hole can be very deep and collaboration can be very costly until you get out.
You are right though, that for an individual living in a good collaborative system, often cheating is very effective, it's just that the system can only handle a certain amount of that behavior before it collapses.
As is discussed in the first scene of Plato's The Republic (surprisingly entertaining to modern tastes), the best play tends to be "to be unjust while seeming just". If people are going to be assholes, it is actually much better if they are discrete about it and keep a pretense of civilization. When people start acting conspicuously like assholes, out of a weird sense of honesty, that's when it propagates and the whole thing collapses, like a bank-run. It's an ancient story that we are still living.
> Poor countries tend to stay poor not due to fundamental resource constraints
Sometimes highly shrewd rich countries infiltrate the power structure of poor countries through N-pronged strategy to keep them stuck in a rut so that they don't become future threat, also extract their resources in the meantime.
Indeed, the way out of that is also broad collaboration, sometimes not peaceful or clean.
And the last century showed that this also works at a large scale, we all got a lot richer as a global community by letting poor countries develop and doing business with them, instead of exploiting them to death.
Cooperation has been "invented" in evolution many times independently and is long term stable in many species.
If your comment was true that fact wouldn't exist.
We may consider the world we live in today competitive, but at the end of the day, humanity is a globe spanning machine that exists due to cooperative behavior at all scales.
Comments such as yours are really missing the forest for the trees.
I suspect that it's really the fact that cooperation is so powerful and pervasive that makes it normal to the point where any deviation from it feels outrageous.
So you focus on the outrageous due to availability bias (seeing the trees rather than the forest).