Good post, but I am curious about your thinking for :
> when you expect that you’re going to run into the same people over and over again for a long time to come, it’s wise to be consistently trustworthy and helpful even if you could get an advantage in the short run by betraying someone; the long-term costs to your reputation, and the costs of making a habit of doing something that’s usually destructive, vastly outweigh any short-term advantage you could gain this one time.
Isn’t this the small world case? Following the pattern, my big world example would be: “when there are so many people around that you rarely meet the same person twice, you should scam people as much as you can”. Or do I have a different interpretation of small/big world?
Interesting, your small/big-world point reminds me of the mean-field footnote in OP that I felt confused by:
There are zones where the best move is non-consequentialist, in the sense that you do best by following heuristics (or principles, or virtues) that are good regardless of the exact specifics of the situation you’re in. You can neglect your (immediate) action’s (immediate and specific) effect on the environment.[1]
[1]: This intro to mean field theory seems to be pointing to a similar concept of a “foreground” particle and a “background”, where the background is made of the interaction of lots of little “foreground” particles, but each particle has negligible impact on the background; you can just model the particle’s behavior as some function of the (assumed approximately fixed) background. But I don’t really know mean field theory in physics so I can’t be sure the analogy is apt.
Here, assuming that I have no effect on the environment is not quite what mean field theory does (at least not in the places where I encountered it in physics): mean field theory assumes “everyone behaves like me. If I follow a principle, the world does too.” From that assumption, a natural next step is Kant’s ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’.
This does seem related to “the best move is non-consequentialist”.
If I had zero effect on the big world (also in the sense that the big world does not treat me any differently if I misbehave) there would be no force that pushes me to cooperate.
But with the mean-field worldview, I will assume that there is an effect even if I am not tracking the causality – whether there are repeated interactions or not.
the “world” i was thinking of was the iterated “game” of interacting with people. This world is “big” in time because you expect it to go on for a long time in future. So the immediate impact of your next move in the game is tiny in comparison to long run effects like your reputation or your habits.
Good post, but I am curious about your thinking for :
> when you expect that you’re going to run into the same people over and over again for a long time to come, it’s wise to be consistently trustworthy and helpful even if you could get an advantage in the short run by betraying someone; the long-term costs to your reputation, and the costs of making a habit of doing something that’s usually destructive, vastly outweigh any short-term advantage you could gain this one time.
Isn’t this the small world case? Following the pattern, my big world example would be: “when there are so many people around that you rarely meet the same person twice, you should scam people as much as you can”. Or do I have a different interpretation of small/big world?
Interesting, your small/big-world point reminds me of the mean-field footnote in OP that I felt confused by:
Here, assuming that I have no effect on the environment is not quite what mean field theory does (at least not in the places where I encountered it in physics): mean field theory assumes “everyone behaves like me. If I follow a principle, the world does too.” From that assumption, a natural next step is Kant’s ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’. This does seem related to “the best move is non-consequentialist”.
If I had zero effect on the big world (also in the sense that the big world does not treat me any differently if I misbehave) there would be no force that pushes me to cooperate. But with the mean-field worldview, I will assume that there is an effect even if I am not tracking the causality – whether there are repeated interactions or not.
thanks, that actually improves on what i was thinking!
the “world” i was thinking of was the iterated “game” of interacting with people. This world is “big” in time because you expect it to go on for a long time in future. So the immediate impact of your next move in the game is tiny in comparison to long run effects like your reputation or your habits.
Right, big cities are usually lower trust than small towns for this reason