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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38207 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Footnote to post here https://www.themotte.org/post/53/the-motte-and-the-future/5620?context=8#context

I believe that "the progressive actors are acting with the earnestly held belief that they are making the world a better place" is more true than false, but because of a couple of edge cases I prefer the weaker "the core SJ movement >99.9% believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil". This felt off-topic there and is long-ish (it could be shortened, but only by abandoning my motte) so I'm putting it here.

Edge case 1: There exists a minority of SJers who like dunking on people enough and believe conservatives are evil enough that they will adopt a hostile approach to conservatives even when this is net-negative for the SJ movement. This is separate from SJers who honestly believe that being hostile and censorious is the most effective way to advance the movement's goals; those people (a majority of SJers TTBOMK) do believe they are making the world a better place. Obviously, this is not especially unique to SJ (any moralistic ideology will attract these sorts) and this definitely is a relatively-small minority, but I'm a pedant.

[Citation: I have a tab open of a forum discussion in which I told someone that a non-hostile approach would be better at converting people and he replied "Yeah, but on the other hand, fuck 'em". He honestly believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil, but he is acting in a way that he admits is suboptimal for making a better world due to spite.]

Edge case 2: There are non-SJers who say or do SJ things because they are incentivised to do so in some way by SJers. These people by definition do not believe that saying/doing SJ things makes the world a better place, or that SJ is good and conservatives are evil, but they are not core members of SJ. Again, not unique to SJ (this is almost definitionally true of any powerful paradigm) but I'm a pedant.

[Citation: I turned down being a dorm RA at my university (a paid role insofar as RAs are not charged rent, and a role I was already somewhat fulfilling unpaid because our dorm had no RA) because I would have been required to recite SJ ideology to my dorm. I can imagine that another non-SJer less committed to honesty than I might have taken the job.]

There exists a minority of SJers who like dunking on people enough and believe conservatives are evil enough that they will adopt a hostile approach to conservatives even when this is net-negative for the SJ movement

The evolution of fairness through spite:

Given the sacrificial nature of making fair offers and rejecting unfair offers, the evolution of fair behaviour is naturally linked to altruism [11,12]. By contrast, our study shows that the connection is not so straightforward—fairness may have darker evolutionary roots.

Positive assortment facilitates the evolution of altruism; if altruists tend to interact more frequently with other altruists, then such behaviour can avoid subversion by free riders and evolve by natural selection [3,13–15]. Similarly, negative assortment facilitates the evolution of spite, social behaviour that inflicts harm with no direct benefit to the actor and often at some cost; if harm is more frequently inflicted on different types, then spite can evolve [16–18].

we focus on a simplified version of the ultimatum game where the proposer may make only one of two offers, fair (d = 0.5) or unfair (1 > d > 0.5), and the responder has two thresholds for acceptance, any offer or only fair offers (figure 1). Unfair offers (when accepted) mean that the proposer receives d of the resource and the responder receives 1 − d. Rejected offers result in both parties getting nothing. A strategy in the game specifies what choice to make when in the role of the proposer (fair, unfair) and what choice to make when in the role of the responder (accept, reject). There are four possible strategies in this game: S1 = (unfair, accept any), S2 = (unfair, reject unfair), S3 = (fair, accept any), S4 = (fair, reject unfair).

There are a number of mechanisms that can generate positive or negative assortment of strategies: spatial structure [29,30], population structure [31] and conditional strategies based on kinship [13], greenbeards [32] or co-evolving neutral markers [33]. Finite population size also generates some degree of negative assortment [34,35].

Positive assortment promotes the evolution of altruism. The best-known instance of this is Hamilton's rule.

Negative assortment, on the other hand, promotes spite. Suppose that some strategy pays a cost c to inflict a harm h on another individual. The condition for the spread of the spiteful strategy is r− > c/h. The ultimatum game, while a standard for modelling fairness, has a connection to spite: when the responder rejects any positive offer, she pays a cost to inflict a cost. For the responder in the mini-ultimatum game, the cost of spite is the amount rejected (1 − d), and the harm done to the proposer is the demand lost (d). Without negative assortment, S2 is eliminated by selection, and for this reason, it is often ignored in evolutionary analyses of the ultimatum game. However, S2 becomes increasingly important as negative assortment is introduced. This opens the door for spite to evolve, and has some unexpected effects on the evolution of fair behaviour in the game.

Seeing as each side considers itself fair and the other unfair, a political opponent can be likened to a player who has accumulated «unfair advantage» by repeatedly screwing the other side out of their fair share; this is literally what the progressives/sjws accuse the other party of doing. The rational or evolutionarily optimal purpose of «spite» is an attempt to suppress unfair behavior in the future, by rejecting not only new unfair offers but even fair (=equal; merit doesn't enter into it) ones that do not go towards rectification of the assumed standing imbalance. By much the same logic, political capital may be burned to punish people who defected in the past.

It needn't be 4D-chess-tier-strategically-reasonable, because the perceived worthiness of spite follows from heuristics and gut feeling. When people say «Yeah, but on the other hand, fuck 'em», they don't really mean they're being self-defeating, they just shoot down what they concede is plausible sophistry and concern trolling in defense of a bad actor who's about to get his due.

It's a bit similar how Europeans can accept some of Russian logic around energy policy and consequences of tanking their economy but don't find it sufficient grounds to stop punishing an aggressor. In bloodless terms of game theory, it can be defined as spite, but it's spite motivated by the sense of justice.

Then again, of course,

For most evolutionary outcomes, only partial fairness exists at equilibrium, because many individuals both make and reject unfair demands.

P.S. This may have interesting implications in scenarios of mixing low-trust/egoistic populations/cultures and high-trust/altruistic ones. Evolution of strategies is not only biological, too.

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