SUNDAY, OCT 8, 2017

Copykittens and Trust

Without trust, it's a man eat man SYSTEM

Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS

TOPICS: TO TRUST OR NOT, FROM THE WIRES, PEACE, COOPERATION

Abstract: Our ancestors lived in bands typically 20-50 with a range of 5 to 85 others they interacted with daily whom they trusted with their lives, likely all of them. More recently humans living in industrial society have approached zero trust in anyone, including family members. The SYSTEM selects for the outcome. The contingencies of interaction, largely out of any intentional control based on understanding the nature of things, determine the "rules of the game" which selects for the outcome that we are and are becoming. If we understood the relentless dynamic we are all part of, that understanding could deliver us from the outcome by informing us about how to change the rules of the game.

TUCSON (A-P) — Our ancestors, since adapting to life on the savanna, have become increasingly cooperative compared to other primates living the less open life away from climbable trees. Aside from the complexity of our verbal behavior, humans can claim to have achieved high levels of cooperation enabling tribal life and,more recently, complex empire-building societies up to one hundred million times larger (for a time) than worked for our hominid ancestors as the millennia passed.

Social systems that self-organize to opportunistically exploit resources for the taking (environmental and human), will collapse or 'fade away' when abundance declines (fall off the Seneca Cliff). Scarcity engenders conflict which increases overall scarcity even if the 'winner' is temporarily enriched. Increased scarcity leads to conflict, greater entropy/scarcity/conflict, and so on in a downward spiraling race to the bottom to see who inherits the rubble. Peace as cooperative coexistence during descent would be alternative. Peaceful coexistence of hominids working cooperatively to survive and prosper (i.e. have enough) during hard times while living within a functioning complex society requires trust.

  1. Trust requires repeated interactions between individuals with knowledge that future repeat interactions are likely. The interactions need to involve actual hadronic relationships, not virtual online ones. Trust, the giving and receiving of social approbation via online liking and sharing feels good, gives each interactor a dopamine hit that can lead to addiction and denial, but virtual relationships are merely feel-good illusions that will vanish when hard times roll. Trusting in virtual 'friends' while implacably opposing imagined 'enemies' may feel deliriously good for the price of an unquestioning trust, but will fail to lead to an individual or collective grasp of hadronic reality. No one will survive or iterate towards real solutions in a complex society via online virtual or mass-media based relationships that come and go as passing leptons. 'The mind clings to its image of the world; we call it real only because of our ignorance'. —Jianzhi Sengcan

  2. Trust requires playing non-zero-sum games where each can win in relationship with cooperative humans that matter who are mutually interdependent for biophysical survival and a prosperity of enough. If society and survival are viewed as a zero-sum game, then it is every man, every competitive male or female, for themselves. Competition works and may even be celebrated during meteoric growth, but not during descent or steady-state sustainable life. Cooperative alliances during empire-building may develop in a Machiavellian SYSTEM followed by betrayal, but cooperatively living together with mutual commitment to a common good mutually agreed upon, as distinct from amygdala-based self interest, is not forthcoming without an evolution of trust. In a 'business-as-usual' SYSTEM there may be a 'winner', if extinction is not the outcome, but a cooperatively functional complex society will not survive without trust as precondition for cooperative peace. Information generated during a complex society's growth phase, perhaps recorded in writing, will be largely or wholly lost per history of the past ten thousand years of empire-building.

  3. Trust requires on-going clear communication. If the level of miscommunication/error is too high, trust breaks down. But when there's a little bit of miscommunication, despite an endeavor by all to communicate/cooperate, it pays to be more forgiving since error in complex systems is a given despite every intent and endeavor to minimize miscommunication or failures of intent. The spreading of misinformation or disinformation, however feel-good doing so may be, is fatal to our collective grasp of reality and our potential for evolving functional complex societies.

Fabricating lies and spreading them is universally condemned in hadronic society. Spreading misinformation online is universally celebrated by those participating in it. For the Romans it came down to bread and circuses. For those living in the Euro-Sino Empire it may come down to bread and smartphones. Per a recent citizen science study, 60% of those walking outside on a major university campus were 'festooned with technology' in the form of 'smart' phones in hand with or without earbuds dangling from auditory canals.

H.G. Wells' concerns about the 'race between education and catastrophe' may be updated to a concern for the current race between our collective PFC (prefrontal cortex) and our shared amygdalas. Mass movements pander to the common ground of inflammable amygdala concerns. Executive functions involve thought and can be influenced by beliefs which are amygdala-based and empowered. Finding common ground apart from shared belief and emotion is problematic for humans who do not 'think about it' in terms of being engaged in a determined endeavor to inquire into and listen to 'Nature who has all the answers'. Nature can serve as a common ground, but all ideologues are decoupled from Nature.

Complex societies that find common ground, whether in political, economic, or religious shared belief (spontaneously shared or forced by decree) do so only for a time and fail, or have so far. Decoupling from Nature may not work long-term. Alternative would be a PFC-based managed descent while preserving a functional complex society based on cooperation and the precondition of trust. The problem with amygdala-based 'solutions' is that the amygdala is a Copycat by nature, utterly devoid of a capacity for forgiveness. Our reptile brains, singly or collectively, always do the tit for tat thing, always retaliate and 'believe' in mistrust. It's a deeply held feeling thing. The fatal Copycat strategy flaw of being subject to a downward spiral unto dissolution is, well, fatal, as in has no good outcome until, against all amygdala urgings, peace breaks out, someone 'inherits the rubble' and comes to repeat the pattern, or the pattern finally ends in extinction.

Humanity, those preferring to get through the coming descent with functioning elements of culture/imemes/information intact, need to embrace and preserve their inner Copykittens and cooperate during a managed descent. This involves a 'just say no' to amygdala urgings and preserving a capacity to listen to Nature via our collective PFC. Never been done before, may not be collectively possible on a global scale in the near future, but pockets of PFC culture may persist and 'inherit the earth' or what is left of it, to finally become a majority 'that really does understand it and can live with it properly'. That techno-industrial humans haven't learned to 'live with it properly' yet doesn't mean that complex society is impossible. Maybe a low-power maximally long-term empowered Kogi-like society with information technology maintained within limits, along with everything else managed within limits (perhaps other than love and understanding) is alternative. Develop a workable OS now and prepare for a clean install.

Before writing a new OS, the old one needs to be understood, not merely disliked or opposed. Understanding geobiophysical reality will help. Some understanding of environment, power, and society is involved. As for society, current events cannot be understood (as distinct from being for or against) without developing an 'ecolate' view inclusive of at least humanity's past few million years on the planet, before endeavoring to understand the prior decade or century of the amygdala within the context of all prior societies that have come and gone during the recent past millennia.

 

 

Play the Game

If the above concerns seem dismissable, play The Game of Trust, online of course, based on game theory. We are playing a global endgame. Think carefully about how you play the game. All reason and evidence is dismissible, for a time, but reality doesn't go away because it is not believed in. Playing the online game has no effect on the hadronic world unless you learn something about the largely ignored real-life-thing. How we play the global endgame is a non-trivial concern, so playing reality-based simulation games may be of value if we 'think about it', i.e. the real world. Spend a few hours playing in the online Game of Trust's sandbox as children play in preparation for their hadronic future that matters. Winning online games isn't what matters as no genes or memes are passed onto future generations though some memes that merit passing on could be learned using information technology (e.g. some TV, some Internet content) if its content is not based on misinformation (e.g. most TV, Internet).

'Cheaters' are those who always favor self interest and short-term payoffs, who lack foresight intelligence. Many interactions in urban populations are in passing, not often repeated, and Cheaters are favored when repeated interactions with the same person are less than five as would never have been the case among our hunter-gatherer ancestors. If a simulation ends with all cheaters, don't think they all live happily together cheating each other forever as the simulation implies. Think collapse of complex society or any society (as in Zombie Apocalypse chaotic collapse as usual). The society simulated in the game contains 25 individuals, a size of society that simulates typical bands of hunter-gather humans, 20 to 50 individuals, mostly of extended family members who, for exogamous inclinations, take in not closely related individuals to avoid incest. Within such groups, cooperators tend to prevail over cheaters provided they do not always turn the other cheek.

Agriculture allowed for a non-nomadic life and empowered large complex societies that typically grow/breakdown/collapse/descend to be replaced by other empire builders who repeat the pattern. An abundance of resources for the taking rewards cheaters, is a game changer, but abundance, growth, is only for a time. Scarcity, real or perceived, is a game changer. Conflict decreases the rewards for cooperating and favors a negative feedback loop unto dissolution.

If there's one big takeaway from all of game theory, it's this: 

What the game is, defines what the players do, it's a contingencies of reinforcement thing. Our problem today isn't just that people are losing trust, it's that our social environment, increasingly virtual, acts against the evolution of real relationship trust. Redefining the social control system, rebooting our brains by installing a foundationally different operating system (as distinct from upgrading to Windows 22) that could actually work long-run is possible, would not break any biophysical laws.

That we collectively are defined by the SYSTEM/GAME may seem cynical or naive — that we're "merely" products of our environment — but we are the environment, both social and geobiophysical. As game theory reminds us, we are each others' social environment which is a subset of planetary environment. In the short run, the game defines the players. But in the long run, it's us players who have the potential to define the game so as to mold individual behavior into 'actions or avoidances that are oriented toward the maintenance of a viable equilibrium between Man’s demands and Nature’s resources'. We can 'think about it' or listen to and trust those who listen to Nature. Or not. There is no hadronic life (which leptonic life depends on) without ecolate thought about real solutions that might actually work.

So, do what you can do to create the conditions necessary to evolve trust. Build relationships. Find win-wins. Communicate clearly without falsehood or obfuscation as is the current norm. Maybe then we can stop firing at each other, like those involved in trench warfare during WWI, get out of our own trenches/silos and cross No Man's Land to come together in the hadronic world that matters....

And let us all endeavor to learn...to live and let live during a cooperative descent, given the alternative of man eat man will not be feel-good. Lepton mediated information may be vital, but leptonic feel-good for a time relationships may be fatal to life in a hadronic world. Choose to use technology wisely, within limits, or not as failure is an option. Humans are not the only life on Earth. Get right with reality or go extinct, bitches.


 

 

What works, bitches
(aka true believers/ideologues, tavern talkers, social media addicts).—xkcd.

 

 

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 9/20/2022

Protecting Our Cultural Commons from Opportunism.

David C. Rose

In 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin wrote a famous essay titled The Tragedy of the Commons. Borrowing from an example first employed by William Forster Lloyd in 1883, Hardin explained why a common pasture is prone to being ruined from overgrazing. His goal was to lay out the basic logic of what is now known in game theory as the commons dilemma. In doing so, he hoped to demonstrate why the problem of overpopulation is so daunting and would therefore likely require the exercise of government power to solve it.

These kinds of problems are prevalent in large societies and they are hard to solve. They are not the result of stupidity or irrationality. Most cannot be solved by creating rules against socially ruinous behavior even if everyone endorses the rules and agrees to obey them.

The reason why commons-dilemma problems are so hard to solve is that they are the result of perfectly rational behavior. A central tenet of economics is that individually rational behavior is normally consistent with promoting the common good. But when the benefits and the costs of actions are not realized by the same decision-maker, a wedge is driven between the common good and that which most benefits the individual.

Consider Hardin’s common pasture. Suppose there is an amount of total grazing that best promotes the common good, so the village establishes a rule limiting grazing to achieve that result. If we set aside morality, then the problem is that in all but the smallest villages, such a level of grazing will not be achieved because such a rule will not be followed. This is true even if everyone agrees with the wisdom of the rule. This is because each individual knows he can do even better if he overgrazes a little while everyone else follows the rule.

The crux of the problem is that the benefit of breaking the rule is enjoyed solely by the opportunist, while the cost of doing so is shared by the entire village. In this case, the benefit to the opportunistic farmer is that his cows get to eat an additional bushel of grass. The cost is that this leaves one fewer bushels of grass in the common to be shared by all farmers tomorrow.

This strong incentive to renege on an agreed level of grazing produces a paradoxical result. If morality is ignored—that is, if the rational promotion of self interest is all that drives decision-making—then each farmer will rationally act to improve his welfare by breaking the rule if he thinks it very unlikely that he will be caught. But when they all do so, they all end up worse off because the common pasture is then ruined. This is called a dilemma because the behavior involved is perfectly rational for the decision-makers involved, so there appears to be no rational way out of the problem.

We naturally suspect that a small common pasture shared by only a few farmers is not likely to be ruined by overgrazing. Three farmers can easily devise the kind of communal solution that scholar Elinor Ostrom documented in her work. It’s easy to keep an eye on just two other farmers who use the same 150-acre common pasture. Even if one could get away with cheating, the benefit derived from doing so would likely harm the other two enough to arouse suspicion. And since actual farmers are not likely to be completely amoral, their innate moral reluctance to harm others would also likely arouse feelings of guilt for having harmed their neighbors noticeably.

But what about a 10,000-acre common used by 200 farmers? This is the same number of acres per farmer, but sheer size produces an important difference. Sheer size drives the effect of a little more grazing by one farmer on the whole commons to essentially zero. It is almost certain no one will even notice if a little more grass is eaten, so the innate moral reluctance to harm others will be rendered moot. But this is true for all farmers from the village, so they all do it, and because they all do it, the common pasture is slowly but surely ruined. As we consider ever larger villages and common pastures, the wedge between individual welfare and the common good widens, so the problem worsens.

How does Hardin’s common pasture relate to the cultural commons? In the cultural commons, each untrustworthy act amounts to taking advantage of the high-trust society that has been built up over the years. The benefit of doing so for any citizen might be great, but the harm done to a large, high-trust society is often imperceptible. Just as one more bushel of grass does not noticeably degrade a large common pasture, one more act of untrustworthiness does not destroy a large, high-trust society’s trust conventions or noticeably change its level of total output.

Suppose you discover a chance to exaggerate a tax deduction with no chance of being caught to get an additional refund of $500. The benefit to you is having another $500 to spend. In a society of 25 persons, this act would cost each individual $20. This might be noticed, and even if it wasn’t, your innate moral reluctance to harm others would likely lead you to expect to feel guilty.

But things are very different for a large society like the United States. In the United States the cost to other individuals is $500 divided by 325 million people. This is obviously too small to be noticed, and will not produce guilt due to harming another person. So the cultural commons of a large society is far more likely to suffer from trust-eroding opportunism than the cultural commons of a small society.

More generally, if the rational promotion of self interest is unbridled by moral restraint, then everyone will act on all golden opportunities. This is the very definition of an untrustworthy person. In large societies especially, this ruins the cultural commons because when individuals behave in an untrustworthy way, they enjoy all of the benefit from doing so while bearing little or no cost. And even if individuals possess a measure of moral restraint due to their innate moral reluctance to harm others, the cost of experiencing feelings of guilt will be driven to nearly zero because there will be little or no harm done to those with whom these individuals can empathize.

This is devastating because such completely rational opportunism makes it irrational for people to presume that others are trustworthy. This destroys the high-trust society, which drives up transaction costs directly because we can’t trust each other. It also drives up transaction costs indirectly by making it impossible to sustain highly trust-dependent institutions.

For some time, the effect of group size on trust was largely overlooked in theoretical and empirical work because trust was typically framed in small-group terms. Even when using large samples of anonymous subjects, trust was still modeled in bilateral fashion. This meant the harm done to B from A’s taking advantage of B is fully or mostly borne by B, so the guilt A would expect to feel from harming B would be significant even if B were a stranger, because our ability to empathize makes us think of even strangers as individual persons whose lives matter.

More recent work considers the effect of group size on trust, and some of it takes care not to model trust in bilateral fashion. Broadly, the evidence shows that trust behavior weakens with group size, which obviously presents a problem for societies that hope to benefit from large-group cooperation. People appear to prefer limiting trust to small groups where they can most rationally count on others’ unwillingness to harm them. This suggests that overcoming the commons dilemma is likely to be very hard for large societies.

The most obvious example of how a common pasture’s upkeep might be neglected would be failing to adequately fertilize it. Similarly, a high-trust society’s upkeep might be neglected by failing to adequately cultivate pro-social behaviors and moral values, since individuals who possess these qualities are more likely to be good people who will provide a better start for building a good society, all else the same. But as concerning as this form of neglect is for a high-trust society, it pales in comparison to neglecting to invest adequate resources into combating the abuse problem.

Fertilizing to increase the productivity of a common pasture is futile if overgrazing is out of control. A village cannot spread enough fertilizer to beat an overgrazing problem any more than an individual can earn enough money to beat an overspending problem. A farmer who is willing to break the rules will just graze more cattle when increased fertilizing produces more grass per acre. Similarly, making better people by cultivating pro-social behaviors and moral values is equally futile if opportunism in general and untrustworthy behavior in particular are not strongly suppressed.

Suppose a firm has expensive machine tools that are frequently stolen. Buying better machine tools or buying them at a faster rate will not solve the problem; it will likely make it worse. What is needed is investment of resources into combating theft, in addressing the abuse directly by, for example, investing resources into security personnel. No amount of investment into machine tools that can increase the productivity of the firm will actually increase the productivity of the firm if the abuse problem is not addressed.

Analogously, no amount of investment into the cultural commons to cultivate pro-social behaviors and moral values will produce a high-trust society if the abuse problem is not adequately addressed. Lots of nice people can try to create a high-trust society by example, but if more than a small proportion of the population always acts on golden opportunities to benefit themselves at the expense of the common good, this approach cannot work. Rational people, even very nice rational people, will not extend trust to strangers if it is irrational to do so.

A large society that aspires to be a high-trust society therefore needs to address the abuse problem above all else. How can this be done? One way to produce this result is through a moral belief that behaving in an opportunistic way is inherently wrong (not from a moral belief that requires a calculation of what is morally best at the point of decision). For persons who have such beliefs, it is irrelevant that a forbidden act might bring great personal reward and noticeably harm no one.

Actually achieving this condition is difficult. It requires investment into the inculcation of moral beliefs that have little reason to come naturally to us, because in the small-group environment we evolved in, harm-based moral restraint was normally sufficient to produce adequate trust. Large-group trust is superfluous in small groups, so ideas pertinent to large-group trust but not small-group trust have had no reason to be reinforced by cultural natural selection.

Only once the abuse problem is addressed—by investing adequately into the inculcation of moral beliefs that can produce trustworthiness in large-group contexts—does it becomes worthwhile for a society to invest in pro-social behaviors and moral values (as well as building up the kind of virtues discussed by Aristotle, Max Weber and Deirdre McCloskey). The societies that adequately address the abuse problem and also invest heavily in such prosocial behaviors, moral values and virtues are the societies that flourish the most.

Excerpted from Why Culture Matters Most by David C. Rose, without permission from Oxford University Press, Inc. Copyright © 2019 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

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As for real solutions, start with normalizable humans and make a rule that all are to live in groups of 20 to 50 others that selects for trust. The rule is imposed as a new norm (mutual coercion mutually agreed to) to limit the size of human groupings until evidence that larger group size is viable, i.e. does not select for a group's own failure, as evidenced by groups pushing population density size/complexity and make doing so demonstrably work long term, e.g. more than two thousand years, and showing that there is a benefit to doing so (that 20-50 works is evidenced by 375k years of human evolution).

Envision a rule: maximum community size 50, no exceptions. There are 125 communities in a watershed area who agree (those who don't, leave). The area occupied by each community easily supports 50 forager-farmers consuming enough. Each manages their area. Overconsumption of environmental productivity hams everyone, and if maximized, reduces carrying capacity to <50 such that some starve. Another rule is that a community cannot export surplus population, nor take from the environmental productivity of another community's area. Doing so results in 10 unhappy members of each community (1,240 mostly angry men with pitchforks) coming to the community in violation and doing what they have to.

If a group of 50, pushing the limit (and so repeated warned what would have to happen if they added one more), unintentionally adds one baby to make 51, then 1,240 mothers come to help by, with all due sorrow, euthanizing the baby so members of the community don't have to, and without having to say a word, remind the members whose management failure was responsible for the newborn's death (and if 50 angry members insisted it was their right to have as many children as they wanted, then 1,240 solemn (mostly) men would come to kill them all, or at least those over the age of seven). Such a socioeconomic-political system would select for its continuance, solving the tragedy of the commons dilemma. Other rules of the game may have a viable outcome. Name ten new rules of the game. A rule of no rules has been tried. We are living in the past's future.

 

 

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