Martin Sustrik
Karma: 630
NewTop
Update on Structured Concurrency
Thanks for fixing that!
I had reposting from my site turned on recently. But this article haven’t made it through (maybe because it contained tables?) So I’ve posted it by hand. Then the reposting pipeline caught up and posted it again. I would delete one of the two but there seems to be no delete button.
Which one specifically? I can look up the references for you.
Coordination Problems in Evolution: The Rise of Eukaryotes
Coordination Problems in Evolution: Eigen’s Paradox
One-person Universe
Sorry, I’ve replied to a wrong thread.
I am based in Zurich, won’t be able to come next week :/ But you are right, this topic could get toxic if discussed among strangers.
I think the main point in that regard is that the study doesn’t distinguish between punishing cooperators because they are cooperators and punishing cooperators as a proxy for punishing punishers.
I, as well as some commenters on this thread, feel that the former phenomenon may exist, but yeah, it’s based on feelings and folk wisdom. It may also well be that if given identity of punishers the players would punish punishers and leave non-punishing cooperators alone.
The original study has something to say about ingroups/outgroups. It’s not exactly the same thing as the one we are discussing here but still:
Punishment may be also related to in-group–out-group distinctions (37) because people might retaliate if punished by an out-group member (38). Societies also differ in the extent to which their social structures are governed by in-group–out-group distinctions. For instance, according to some cross-cultural psychologists (15, 39) in “collectivist” societies many interactions are confined to close-knit social networks, whereas in “individualistic” societies interactions are more permeable across social groups. Because in our experiment all participants were strangers to one another, people in collectivist societies might be more inclined than people in individualistic societies to perceive other participants as out-group members. Therefore, antisocial punishment might be stronger in collectivist than in individualistic societies. Our evidence is consistent with this possibility because in regressions similar to those of Table 2 antisocial punishment is highly significantly correlated with a widely used societal level measure of individualism-collectivism (15) (table S10).
You are living in Soviet Union. Your father was sent to gulag, your mother was fired from her job in academia and sent to plow the tselina. You are being harrassed by the secret police. Then you meet a stachanovite who fulfilled the government plan to 200%. That guy is clearly a cooperator, producing more stuff you could benefit from, but you suddenly feel an irresistible urge to punch him in the nose.
I don’t fully understand the mechanism on the theoretical level myself, but it seems to have something to do with the assumptions about authority. If you assume that authority is naturally malevolent you are going to try to oppose it. “This is not my game. This is a game set up by the authorities. By those scientist guys. What can I possibly do to disrupt it?” Punishing cooperators seems to be an obvious way to do that.
Possibly related phenomena:
Lizardmen syndrome.
Boaty McBoatface syndrome.
Some kids being disruptive in school, just for disruption’s sake.
I’ve seen you are planning a meetup in Bratislava. Maybe it would be worth discussing the topic. Maybe people would come up with possible motivations we haven’t even thought of.
If there are any readers from Middle East or Greece I would also appreciate their thoughts on the phenomenon. It may be that the mechanism differs between regions.
Not a native speaker. I wanted it to be offensive but not to the extent where you would have to kill the offender and whole his family to restore the honor. Changed to “moron”.
I like the framing of the problem here: If a bureaucrat (or lawyer) acts on fully specified set of rules and exercises no personal judgement then they can be replaced by a machine. If they don’t want to be replaced by a machine they should be able to prove that their personal judgement is indispensable.
That changes incentives for bureaucrats in quite a dramatic fashion.
So we have two different explanations here:
You are saying that the participants considered the experiment to be a private pro-social activity and as such, one opposed to the state. By punishing cooperators they were signalling their loyalty to the state.
I am saying that participants considered the experiment to be a state-run enterprise and the pro-social punishment to mean complicity with the (unfair) state. By punishing cooperators they were trying to disable state’s coercive mechanisms.
Those are almost exactly opposite explanations. I wonder if me can think of an experiment that would distinguish between the two?
I guess it would require to somehow trick the subjects into believing that they can form a coalition against the researchers. A kind of anti-Milgram experiment.
If you mean in game theory, there’s the ” common knowledge” concept.
If you mean in sociology, there was a ton of research done on the “social capital” some of which you would probably consider to be about the network effects.
Interesting point about the attitude to games. However, I guess the boundary between a game and reality may be fuzzy. People trading on stock exchange may treat it as a game. People planning a war may treat it as a game.
You may be right about the norms of social norms though. If you look how the authors measured civic cooperation it looks more like “trust in the state” metric. From the paper: “social norms are norms of civic cooperation as they are expressed in people’s attitudes to tax evasion, abuse of the welfare state, or dodging fares on public transport”.
Nice idea. Maybe all the tokens should start in the pool and the players should have an option to withdraw them. I guess that would make people feel more explicitly “anti-social” if they did so.