I can't put the article better than it puts itself. I'd recommend everyone read it top to bottom. tl;dr If everyone's playing tug of war, everyone has to spend

I can't put the article better than it puts itself. I'd recommend everyone read it top to bottom. tl;dr If everyone's playing tug of war, everyone has to spend all this effort pulling just to stay where we are. What I'll add is how this seems to show up in HN discussions. A frequent trope here is an article about someone or some company doing something that pisses people off, then the comments debating whether it's the incentive-maker's fault and it's not wrong for people to maximize according to the incentives provided. The whole thing is a microcosm of this lack of trust. It's like the prisoner's dilemma. What's lost isn't the decision to trust, it's the whole framing. In a perfect trust society, taking the compete option in a prisoner's dilemma would be seen as immoral. In a zero trust society, the whole choice reduces to analyzing the payoff matrix. That's what's lost. It's the change from a framing around 'cooperation is the moral action' towards a framing around payoff matrices. I'd argue that on HN, the general sentiment is on the payoff matrix end of the spectrum.