Whilst I agree with the general thesis of the article, this paragraph seemed very distasteful to me:
> There is no reason to trust people you will not interact with again in the future. There’s no incentive not to defect. At the end of my last relationship, our interactions became significantly less pleasant as it became more obvious that it was over – I would not have to deal with this person in the future, so why bother going through the motions of kindness?
Without meaning to be rude or make an attack on the author's character, the author does sound like a bit of an asshole there.
How about being nice to people because you're a nice person, rather than because you want to get something out of it? If you could murder someone and get away with it, would you? I wouldn't, because in abhor the idea of killing people. Similarly, I would act decently towards another human being even when I have no incentive to do so, simply because I am a decent human being and I don't like the idea of causing unnecessary pain and suffering to others.
As they say, a gentleman remains a gentleman even in the gutter. If you need to be surrounded by other decent human beings to be decent, if being surrounded by jerks automatically reverts you to jerk behaviour, perhaps you're not a decent human being after all, only a chameleon sort of person who will do whatever they think they can get away with.
I hope a majority of people here would behave the same way as me - decently, irrespective of the surroundings and likelihood of "getting caught". And there's the rub I guess - a community composed mostly of decent human beings will be less vulnerable to this effect than one composed mostly of selfish people who only act decently when they can see a tangible payoff.
That may be another path to survival: find the assholes and keep them out, and then perhaps you can deal with growth more easily.
Game theory is just an explanation; people don't use it explicitly to make decisions, they just follow their gut, and evolution has caused our guts to produce rational decisions most of the time. It's the same as the theories of attractiveness based on symmetry and secondary sex characteristics: you don't look at a potential partner and think, "He/she looks so symmetric, I bet if I were to have kids with him/her they'd have a higher chance of survival." You just intuitively find the person attractive.
Lots of people use game theory to rationalize behaving in a selfish way.
This rhetoric of such-and-such an idea being natural, and therefore inevitable, is always used as a core justification for any ideology, whether feudalism, monarchy, communism or social darwinism. They are not all correct.
It's pretty obvious that humans are not exclusively rational machines designed for 'winning', we have all sorts of other mechanisms which act to make us function well as part of a unit, and these mechanisms have secondary consequences which mean that we are perfectly capable of acting against our own interests, or against the interests of our genes. We should be embracing that, not trying to cut it out. We shouldn't attempt to use the evolutionary process as a moral guide.
I think this article is meant to be addressing communities at the large scale, which really means humans at the large scale. And the tough part about humans at the large scale is that basic economics kicks in: humans respond to incentives.
Sure it might be tasteless or sad to observe, and yes there are people that defy this. It's still going to happen though.
Only in dealing with the realities of this is there actually a shot at mitigating it.
Yes, I also felt very strongly about that. In my own life, I find kindness and compassion to be an intrinsic good; I am not kind because I am using game theory to attempt to maximize the returned kindness, I am kind because I get more pleasure out of being kind than the alternative. Even if I never interact with the person again, I feel happier after being kind to someone than if I am a jerk.
I do worry for people who feel like the author of this article. I can't imagine how miserable it must be to only feel joy when other people are kind to you, and not the other way around. I guess I am lucky in that way, that I feel so much happiness when I share my kindness with someone else, even more so than when someone is kind to me; I am actually in control of my own kindness, so I am therefore also in control of my own happiness.
Also, his argument is more or less a seat-of-the-pants assertion with a bit of ad-hoc logic thrown. The game theory doesn't sound bad but human behavior often defies single simple or clever explanations.
I'd like to see data backing this up. But I'm pretty sure he's not using any data because there's little data supporting any blanket assertions; HN is different than Facebook is different from discussion board X - even at scale.
> There is no reason to trust people you will not interact with again in the future. There’s no incentive not to defect. At the end of my last relationship, our interactions became significantly less pleasant as it became more obvious that it was over – I would not have to deal with this person in the future, so why bother going through the motions of kindness?
Without meaning to be rude or make an attack on the author's character, the author does sound like a bit of an asshole there.
How about being nice to people because you're a nice person, rather than because you want to get something out of it? If you could murder someone and get away with it, would you? I wouldn't, because in abhor the idea of killing people. Similarly, I would act decently towards another human being even when I have no incentive to do so, simply because I am a decent human being and I don't like the idea of causing unnecessary pain and suffering to others.
As they say, a gentleman remains a gentleman even in the gutter. If you need to be surrounded by other decent human beings to be decent, if being surrounded by jerks automatically reverts you to jerk behaviour, perhaps you're not a decent human being after all, only a chameleon sort of person who will do whatever they think they can get away with.
I hope a majority of people here would behave the same way as me - decently, irrespective of the surroundings and likelihood of "getting caught". And there's the rub I guess - a community composed mostly of decent human beings will be less vulnerable to this effect than one composed mostly of selfish people who only act decently when they can see a tangible payoff.
That may be another path to survival: find the assholes and keep them out, and then perhaps you can deal with growth more easily.