Martin Sustrik

Re­search: Res­cuers dur­ing the Holocaust

• Martin Sustrik 30 Apr 2018 12:54 UTC

  2 points

  on: Re­search: Res­cuers dur­ing the Holocaust

  I guess if cognitive dissonance would stop effecting people, they would start following different incentives, those that are currently drowned out by the dissonance, whatever they may be.

• Martin Sustrik 1 May 2018 5:13 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Re­search: Res­cuers dur­ing the Holocaust

  Here’s the entire story, as recorder by Yad Vashem, nothing about food/​money though:

  The carpenter Jonas Paulavičius lived in Panemune, a suburb of Kaunas, just across the Niemon River, with his wife, Antanina Paulavičienė, and their children, 16-year-old Danutė and 14-year-old Kęstutis. An ardent opponent of the Nazi regime, Jonas Paulavičius had developed close ties with Lithuanian communists before the war. When a Lithuanian friend approached him one day and asked him to shelter a four-year-old Jewish boy, Paulavičius willingly agreed. After consulting his wife, Paulavičius took the child, Shimele Shames, into his home and later decided also to give shelter to his parents, Yitzhak and Lena Shames and his grandmother. Together with his son Kęstutis, Paulavičius dug a hiding place under the floor of his home, where the Shameses hid. Aware of the distress of the Jews interned in the Kaunas ghetto, Paulavičius decided to save as many as possible. He began arranging meetings with Jews in the ghetto and inviting them to hide in his home. At the same time, the Paulavičiuses expanded the room under their home, and towards the end of the German occupation, they prepared an additional hiding place. Among the 12 Jews hiding there were the four members of the Shames family, including grandmother Feinsilver; the doctors Tania and Chaim Ipp; Aharon Neimark and his wife, Mania (later Gershenman); David Rubin; Yohanan Fein; as well as Miriam Krakinowski, and Riva Katavushnik, whom Paulavičius managed to save from a labor camp just before it was liquidated. Even after the war, Paulavičius managed to obtain a large sum of money for the Neimarks, to enable them to leave Lithuania and immigrate to Israel. In 1952, Paulavičius was murdered by his antisemitic neighbor, who never forgave him helping Jews during the occupation.

Soviet-era Jokes, Com­mon Knowl­edge, Irony

Inad­e­quate Equil­ibria vs. Gover­nance of the Commons

• Martin Sustrik 25 May 2018 20:12 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Inad­e­quate Equil­ibria vs. Gover­nance of the Commons

  Thanks! Fixed.

• Martin Sustrik 27 May 2018 6:41 UTC

  1 point

  on: De­cou­pling vs Con­tex­tu­al­is­ing Norms

  Isn’t it just the distinction between how facts are used in scientific discourse (you state a fact, expect it to be confirmed or challenged) vs. how they are used in political discourse (carefully select other fact to augment it and suit your political narrative)? I guess Umberto Eco would have had something to say about that.

• Martin Sustrik 24 Jun 2018 2:30 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: Inad­e­quate Equil­ibria vs. Gover­nance of the Commons

  There was a relatively long chapter on that, but not much quantitative data. In many cases policing was done by the stakeholders themselves, for instance, by rotating duty for the young men from the village who could then keep the fines they’ve collected.

• Martin Sustrik 24 Jun 2018 14:31 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Inad­e­quate Equil­ibria vs. Gover­nance of the Commons

  As for the accuracy of the book: There’s not much quantitative data overall. The mode that Ostrom operates in is rather to show a lot of examples, then try to make some (pretty lightweight) generalizations. The last chapter introduces a model for researching coordination problems, but once again, it’s nothing quantitative, more like a set of hints about what things and relationships to look at.

  All in all, the book may not be very useful to get exact numbers but it may help to generate more conceptual surface area, give more structure to the problem of coordination failures beyond the naive “tragedy of the commons” parables.

• Martin Sustrik 24 Jun 2018 17:03 UTC

  3 points

  on: Pri­son­ers’ Dilemma with Costs to Modeling

  That reminded me of a paper where they evaluate bots with with memory (that comes at a cost): https://​​cse.msu.edu/​​~dolsonem/​​pdfs/​​prisoners_dilemma_memory.pdf

  The interesting intersection here is that memory can be used as a cache, thus avoiding need for re-modeling.

• Martin Sustrik 12 Jul 2018 19:39 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: DrAlta’s comment on: Inad­e­quate Equil­ibria vs. Gover­nance of the Commons

  I don’t want to put words in Ostrom’s mouth but my understanding is that this has to do with scaling.

  The system works if it’s not too big or volatile, in other words, if everyone knows each other. You can easily imagine how the resource would be depleted if random people just showed up and started extracting it.

  To scale, there’s a different rule (the last one) which calls for hierarchical organization. In case of the irrigation system there’s a group of people using the same distributory canal. That’s a closed group, no stragers allowed. However, for problems they can’t solve themselves they can coordinate with groups in control of other distributory canals.

• Martin Sustrik 18 Aug 2018 9:22 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: runner.julie’s comment on: Inad­e­quate Equil­ibria vs. Gover­nance of the Commons

  Any tips on other literature on the subject?

• Martin Sustrik 18 Aug 2018 9:31 UTC

  3 points

  on: How Ro­man Em­per­ors Han­dled The Suc­ces­sion Problem

  One thought that comes to mind is that the monarch has not only to appoint a credible successor, but also discredit any other potential successors. Check the story of the son of Peter the Great, who was effectively killed by his father to prevent potential succession conflicts in the future: https://​​en.wikipedia.org/​​wiki/​​Alexei_Petrovich,_Tsarevich_of_Russia

  Another related topic is preferential cross-cousin marriage which is well known from anthropology. I’ve written about it here, albeit in a bit different context: http://​​250bpm.com/​​blog:92

• Martin Sustrik 27 Aug 2018 15:34 UTC

  12 points

  on: Zetetic explanation

  Programmers are often advised to write comments in the code about the intent, what they wanted the code to do, rather than about what the code does.

  When you think about it, it makes sense. The code already does what it does, no need to write about that. However, what is the code supposed to do is often unclear, especially when the code is buggy.

  This is kind of similar to the yeast example above. The rule is to explain why not how.

  To give another example, I am trying to learn statistical mechanics. Not to memorize it but to actually grok it. And it turns out that staring at the equations doesn’t help much. I am planning to look into its history to understand what kinds of problems were fathers of thermodynamics trying to solve (something to do with steam engines, I guess) to understand why that specific kind of thinking about the topic is useful.

Anti-so­cial Punishment

• Martin Sustrik 27 Sep 2018 20:13 UTC

  10 points

  on: Anti-so­cial Punishment

  I’ve just noticed that Dnipropetrovsk, Muscat, Minsk and Riyadh did better than Western countries in the public goods game without punishment. It may be a statistical fluke, but may it be that those societies are optimized for getting cooperative behaviour in the absence of enforcement mechanisms?

• Martin Sustrik 27 Sep 2018 20:15 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Anti-so­cial Punishment

  Would that reasoning apply to all societies around the world, including those in the West? If it does, it’s unlikely to explain the differences between the societies.

• Martin Sustrik 28 Sep 2018 6:34 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: ryan_b’s comment on: Anti-so­cial Punishment

  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”.

• Martin Sustrik 28 Sep 2018 12:28 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: jmh’s comment on: Anti-so­cial Punishment

  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.

• Martin Sustrik 30 Sep 2018 5:50 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Anti-so­cial Punishment

  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.