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I appreciate the words of kindness. It's surprising that my shitty posting has any impact at all, but well take that.
As for how far gone society is, I think I need to work towards a model of integrity and its utility. Given I am not a hard deontologist, I don't think integrity is infinitely valuable. I do think it is very valuable, purely from a game theoretic point of view at the very least. And of course there is some value in sleeping at night knowing you are not a fraud, or at least didn't actively work towards becoming one.
However, I think in modern society we run into some failure modes of assigning it far too much weight. Integrity is something that can be accumulated, this is great because you can leverage it in the long term and incentivizes good citizenry. In modern society, there are just so many people that you might be able to live like a "psychopath" without ever needing to play enough iterated games where people can catch up to your tricks. Think of this thought experiment, why even drive politely at all? These are all strangers and you defecting only yields you benefits at their cost, the mechanism to punish you by tarnishing your trust lever is nonexistent, you will always get to your destination faster, given so many people exist it effectively just resets all the time. It's straightforwardly Molochian, but with a prolonged early adopter advantage. (Which is why I think given enough time large sufficiently large cities will always converge to being terrible places to live if you are not psychopathic)
Similarly, imagine I studied for the exam AND cheated. This is the nash equilibrium. Because everyone is defecting. At one point post-critical mass, you just need to defect to survive. Personally, I don't need to defect to survive, but I do think I need to defect to thrive, in the short term. So why wouldn't be defecting your way and securing a future trajectory and then stopping the defecting once you enter iterated game territory not the best option?
I think the meme of integrity is a beautiful meme, it's literally convincing people to not fall for multi-polar traps to people who can't even comprehend what a payoff matrix is without breaking their head. But being a lagged copycat is the universal optimal game theoretic strategy, I just don't need the need to cooperate when everyone is choosing defect against me. I get cut off in roads repeatedly, I lose my line in the grocery checkout if I move 6 feet to the left, I have to compete with people who cheated for graduate school spots, I have to compete with people who lie on their CV's or list programming languages they know how to say hello word in their CV or claim credit for group projects where they contributed nothing; Why should I have any sympathy for these bastards? Why should I make society good for them?
Literally, not a single person I know told me my insistence to not cheat online was a good call, and these are "good people", maybe if I go to a temple and ask the priest he might say otherwise, but priests don't drive BMW's. I'm here for a good time there is no afterlife, and I don't see why I shouldn't get that BMW. Should I feel bad for wanting to take a potential girlfriend to a high-end restaurant, to buy my mom vacations, to one day buy my dad his dream car? To not have to split the bill when eating out with my younger bro and just cover his bill because that's what big bro does? And all of these without thinking twice about it? All those things would be possible 10 years sooner with a little bit of lying. Why do the lairs and cheaters get to experience those beautiful things earlier than me? What's my reward or not doing it? Peace at the deathbed? I can't sleep peacefully at night anyways.
It's a value divergence at its core. But I think post knowing what I know, I really wouldn't lose any sleep at all for having lied or cheated, the job of society is to do everything it can to make sure no one ever finds out that you can actually lie and cheat to win, it's the entire point of religion. But once God is dead, I don't see any reason to pretend he is still alive when no one else is.
In my estimation, once society has failed at that task, it has sealed its fate, now its time to make right with might and eat the cake before it runs out.
Doesn’t look to me like you think integrity is valuable, most of your examples provide trivial advantages, like driving aggressively (and that increases the chance of an incident, too). Even the test, the real dilemma is not terrible grade vs cheating, it’s a few hours to learn the material vs cheating. So we’re talking 200 dollars here. Or the classic wallet test, how often does that happen.
So by my calculations total lifetime earnings from having no small-i integrity has a present value of about 1000 dollars. Of course if you go work for the mob, we're talking about something else.
And for that measly sum, you break the covenant and lose the friendship of the good. You can never again say ‘when no one’s looking, I do the right thing’. Which is not only nice, but saves time you would have spent asking yourself what the correct course is, in trivial matters.
I think you have it backward. The small inconveniences point to a larger rot. The rot works its way down the incentive/reward ratio chain. The lie is that "if you cheat the small things, you will cheat the big ones", it's like no wheres the incentive to cheat in the small things? There big cheating is already happening you just don't see it.
I've already explained in detail why "doing the right thing" is not so appealing to me right now. So I'll hold out until I get more criticism before amending this comment further.
I just find it interesting that the small invisible defections people get into in daily life generally do not pay off at all. When I was 12 I stole a trading card from a friend and commited various other pecadillos without getting caught, I can’t say they’ve improved my life more than an infinitesimal amount, even at the time. Net negative outcome on those decisions. Maybe I just suck at crime.
Bottom line, I don’t think there’s two kinds of people in the world; the assholes with great lives and bmws, and the schmucks who believe in integrity. Reality points more the other way, as in germans (hallo, bmws!) vs greeks, or the correlation between criminality and poverty.
For sure, it’s more complicated than that, like when you declare that others defected, and therefore you can. Which in theory is valid, one must punish defectors, so cooperating alone, or past a certain point of general defection, is not just poor strategy, but immoral. I dispute that we are past that point of general defection. And people will take the opportunity to be evil-dumb far too early, as the low-stakes examples show.
I don't think I need to be convinced of any of this. Yes living in Germany is better than living in Greece. Obviously, grand-scale cooperation is better when you integrate the plot over time, and it is self-reinforcing just like how mass defection can create a negative feedback loop. Of course, it would be better if everyone acted like German than the Greeks or worse the Arabs.
But what if you literally live among Arabs like me? What if you find yourself in a job market where openings have 2000 applications in a day or two (I wish I was exaggerating, oh btw there are an order of magnitude less job openings per capita than NA and EU), what if you lived in a country with open borders such that wages for skilled entry-level technical work are depressed to less than 10k USD a year, once again this is true! What if you could drastically improve the station of you life with just a little bit of funny business? You are telling me you would rather take a job for 10k after 6 months of looking instead of lie a little and double or triple your salary to a grand 30k USD?
(Personally, I have gotten out my recent slump and have a good job lined up because I actually know what I am doing, this will take me well into the upper middle class, so there is some irony in what I am saying, but the experience of eating shit until I got this opportunity is still fresh in my mind (and always will be, not going to forget where I came from), I hate to be dramatic but it was positively traumatizing )
To Americans, cherish your fucking Economy where you can afford to have integrity.
I'm german, a good "hajnalbrain cooperatebot". I assumed you were talking about defecting, cheating, in the west. I have never lived in the arab world, if you exclude Köln. So I don't know. Maybe try to cooperate in some circles, on the margin?
Cooperating «in some circles» to survive the free-for-all defection equilibrium is exactly how they (and we Eastern Slavs, and frankly most everyone else) have got into that mess. Clannishness and familism are the other side of corruption.
I was thinking more of creating your own clan of sorts based on moral criteria. And generally cooperating when the proportion of defectors is less clear/more favourable than usual.
Oh, that's how they can start too... First protecting the garden of idealism, then naked clannish power struggle. The assabiyah route is inherently treacherous.
But ofc this is a natural idea. This, or more realistically moving to the West.
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