As I understand your Smart Losers toy model, there’s an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, and on some rounds knowable only to “smart” players pairings and results are not published afterwards. There’s no other functional meaning of “smart” here, non-adversarial uses of intelligence don’t exist. So non-”smart” players start with grim trigger, but “smart” players grim trigger in published rounds and defect in unpublished rounds, which can push everyone into a defect-defect equilibrium.
It should be obvious from my characterization what I think the main weakness in this model is. I wrote Civil Law and Political Drama to try to characterize the difference and relation between adversarial and nonadversarial consciousness more precisely.
But that’s something of a timeless description, and doesn’t explain why one or the other would win at some particular time. An important contingent factor is the balance between external performance pressure, and the opportunity for central allocation of patronage. Systems with a large stable extracted surplus like tax revenue select, in the absence of specific countermeasures, for courtiers seeking patronage. Without specific countermeasures, this blows up catastrophically. The countermeasure that seems to work is an anti-norm: patronage-seekers only manage problems for the short-term benefit of the class as a whole, rather than either solving them or increasing them unboundedly to maximize their own share of the rents. I think rent-seeking classes that manage this coordinate through perverted shame.
So we see functionally oriented cognition more in cases where groups are under strong external performance pressure, or in the rare punctuating cases where pronormative actors developed enough awareness of themselves as a class to take collective action against their enemies. (Norman Gottwald’s The Tribes of Yahweh argues that the ancient Israelites did something similar, though I’m still making sense of that situation, and it’s harder to evaluate because records are much worse.)
This isn’t a complete model, and it would be helpful for others to check it against alternative explanations, check it for coherence, and develop the connections between different parts.
Much of this overlaps strongly with James Camacho’s comment thread, I think it would be better for the three of us to be discussing this jointly rather than separately; I’d like to see where you find either of us unpersuasive and why.
As I understand your Smart Losers toy model, there’s an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, and on some rounds knowable only to “smart” players pairings and results are not published afterwards. There’s no other functional meaning of “smart” here, non-adversarial uses of intelligence don’t exist. So non-”smart” players start with grim trigger, but “smart” players grim trigger in published rounds and defect in unpublished rounds, which can push everyone into a defect-defect equilibrium.
It should be obvious from my characterization what I think the main weakness in this model is. I wrote Civil Law and Political Drama to try to characterize the difference and relation between adversarial and nonadversarial consciousness more precisely.
But that’s something of a timeless description, and doesn’t explain why one or the other would win at some particular time. An important contingent factor is the balance between external performance pressure, and the opportunity for central allocation of patronage. Systems with a large stable extracted surplus like tax revenue select, in the absence of specific countermeasures, for courtiers seeking patronage. Without specific countermeasures, this blows up catastrophically. The countermeasure that seems to work is an anti-norm: patronage-seekers only manage problems for the short-term benefit of the class as a whole, rather than either solving them or increasing them unboundedly to maximize their own share of the rents. I think rent-seeking classes that manage this coordinate through perverted shame.
So we see functionally oriented cognition more in cases where groups are under strong external performance pressure, or in the rare punctuating cases where pronormative actors developed enough awareness of themselves as a class to take collective action against their enemies. (Norman Gottwald’s The Tribes of Yahweh argues that the ancient Israelites did something similar, though I’m still making sense of that situation, and it’s harder to evaluate because records are much worse.)
This isn’t a complete model, and it would be helpful for others to check it against alternative explanations, check it for coherence, and develop the connections between different parts.
Much of this overlaps strongly with James Camacho’s comment thread, I think it would be better for the three of us to be discussing this jointly rather than separately; I’d like to see where you find either of us unpersuasive and why.