7 ms·
Resilience requires helping each other out
- mistermann 3y agoIt would be wild if this was also true when it comes to countries, cultures, and species.
- CatWChainsaw 3y agowouldn't it though??
- policepost 3y agoThis is sort of the fundamental building block of many socialist and anarchist movements. The concept of "mutual aid" as put forward by folks like Kropotkin is basically we should build communities that help one another, offering our communities excess when we have our, and gracefully accepting aid when we need it.
- high_5 3y agoThat was the way of life for any community before industrial revolution. It appears that all attempts at creating such communities have more or less failed, because they eventually become coopted either for or against capitalistic economy.
- getmeinrn 3y agoThey tend not to fail when religion is a pillar in the community. The Amish and Mennonites are great examples.
- willcipriano 3y agoI don't believe this behavior has ever been observed in a regliously and ethnically diverse population. People have to be basically related to one another, sharing a core common belief for it to work.
- majormajor 3y agoHistorically the progression has been (oversimplified): some sort of reciprocal/mutual aid economy -> exchange (usually external) -> joining in with currency and capitalism In my view the clear main factor is external disruption that forces groups into the market/currency based economy. That, plus the difficulties to control bad actors if you had a more informal system at huge scale (millions of people). Without the external economic disruption you simply just don't get much diversity. As far as specific events, things like disaster assistance volunteer operations in the West tend to be both religiously and ethnically diverse yet performed independently of expected remuneration. Otherwise it's not like we're observing huge samples if we restrict ourselves to looking just for communities that have both been religiously and ethnically diverse. Is the failure of any such alternate community to last for centuries - when the opportunity has barely even been there for that long - conclusive at all?
- nologic01 3y agoWe are all related to each other. A pandemic can wipe us out. A major climate event or a nuclear accident can wreak havoc, increasingly high tech wars can eliminate billions. We choose to downplay our common dependencies and exaggerate the differences. Its a social game we have learned to play when the stakes for our collective survival were lower.
- varjag 3y agoThis is an improperly low level of abstraction to the problem, akin to "we're all made of atoms". True and useless.
- em-bee 3y agoon the contrary, everyone of us needs to realize that we are part of a global community and that all of our actions accumulate to have an effect across the world. so instead of saying that this will never work because we are to diverse, instead we need to strive and MAKE IT WORK! put aside our differences, find common ground and build a global cooperative community that includes every human being on this planet.
- landemva 3y agoThose communities have mechanisms to censor mis-behaving persons. Participants must agree, when entering the group, to social rules including censure.
- licebmi__at__ 3y agoFeminist concerns aside, I don’t think mutual aid has really succeeded in a hard hierarchical society like these who are explicitly patriarchal, even if it appears like it does to external observers.
- high_5 3y agoYou mean like Japan or China? Or Koreas? No success there, nope /s But they drank all the Western kool-aid they could, though and it slowly shows.
- licebmi__at__ 3y agoI don’t say they don’t work. I’m saying that the concept of mutual aid as described by Kropotkin, has not succeeded there. Please refrain to engage in sarcasm if your reading and context understanding is that poor.
- squirtlebonflow 3y agoUnfortunately, the term mutual aid has been co-opted by democrats to mean "charity". Likely because there is a stigma in our society around accepting help...
- johnchristopher 3y agoDemocrats mean different things to an international audience. Which democrats are we talking about here ?
- thumbuddy 3y agoWho knows but what is evident is it's just an angry Republican who is struggling to see beyond duality...
- toolz 3y agoYou've just committed the same offense you're rebuking someone for. It's not evident that person is republican, it's only evident that they blame the democrats for a problem.
- thumbuddy 3y agoSomewhere between right and wrong there is a field. I will meet you there.
- toolz 3y agoI agree that gray area is optimal, but I don't think you can afford yourself that kind of charity while not providing it to someone else in the very same comment. Do unto others how you want others to do unto you. If you want to judge strictly, you shouldn't ask to be judged with leniency.
- thumbuddy 3y agoWhat I did and what they did were very different. They contorted a word in the title of an article to be a political statement, unironically an infactual and harmful one. For example see which political party gave handouts too banks, or which party created a cottage industry of fraud during a time of economical and existential chrisis (COVID) to the tune of trillions of dollars. It wasn't the "democrats". You can judge me as you wish, I have no interest in controlling that. The point of my reply was "this is how you deal with these people". You make it clear they have been sucked into propaganda, and you give them no quarters for their "views" because doing so legitimizes the sudden rise of fascism in the United States. Fairness and tolerance is fine in civil society. When incivility reigns, well you can call a turd a turd. It's really the least you can do given what's at stake.
- ramesh31 3y ago>This is sort of the fundamental building block of many socialist and anarchist movements. It's also the fundamental error that all of the "self reliant, self sufficient" doomsday prepper types make. When the apocalypse comes, your little homestead will be nothing but a supply cache for raiders. It doesn't matter how many guns you have. Without a functioning, hierarchical, tight knit community to aid in defense, you and your family will be sold off to the first band of roaming slavers that come through.
- nologic01 3y agoThe question is how to organize reciprocity in large, complex and evolving systems. The canonical approach is through various contracts. But those can be too specific and poorly adapted and even worsen outcomes under stress. Flexible contracts designed to perform when the "unknown unknowns" materialize are intuitively the "solution", except they dont mesh well will the more typical transactional arrangements that aim to decouple units.
- ethanbond 3y agoSocial norms are really good at this stuff as long as people do actually spurn people who violate them. There’s been a recent spate of celebrities in the US who’ve “succeeded” by staying arguably within the bounds of legality while well outside the bounds of the norms we ought to want. Too much of those conversations end up about the legality and not about the much more powerful and more precarious norms being attacked under the hood.
- nologic01 3y agoSocial contracts are indeed the prime example. But its not clear how we can use them effectively going forward as everything seems to be working against them. E.g., rapid social evolution, urbanization and migration creates strangers that only adhere to minimal common norms. There is also the ambiguous role of social media. While frequently accused of inducing toxicity and polarization, this may actually promote a new set of norms, except not universally shared...
- carlosjobim 3y agoThe solution is to become wise. People want to just follow rules on how what to do, but in interactions with other people there is no such thing. Learn about people, learn to read people, signs of who is not to be trusted, why they are saying what they are saying. Don't fall in to any web somebody has woven, no matter how much you yearn to let go of control. The last is the most important. Most people's highest desire is to shut off their mind and let somebody else take the reins, come what come will. Then they're scammed, exploited, enslaved, or sent off to die in a war. In the end, there's nothing new under the sun.
- tetha 3y agoI'm very much seeing this at work. We have a few dev-teams who are very responsive and cooperative. You see postgres complaining about queries from their application, you inform them, they realize the danger behind it and fix it. For these teams, we're perfectly fine providing prod analytics, adjusting parameters or sizing for a bit. Shitty queries happen, we compensate with some compute resources, you fix, we rescale. Entirely great, dev can move fast, we can be lean. And then we have other teams. Some query executed twice for every user transaction has a high chance of resulting in unique key violations, which are logged as important errors. Fixes would be not too hard and have been communicated, but deemed "Not customer visible" and thus prioritized to death. I'll let it up to guesses by the readers which project had sev-0 issues caught early by us and fixed by dev with almost no impact to customers, and which project ended up with a .3% increase in query error rates, which ended up as a sev-0 issue, with SLA discussions involved, and we were entirely blamed for being unable to do shit or at least detect it early. I dislike growing into the operations team I don't want to be, but some teams demand doing so very, very hard.
- gcr 3y agoI’m having trouble tracking down the source, but one study found that furry communities are abnormally resilient to financial stress (especially during the pandemic) compared to other communities with similar cohesion and structures. The authors postulated that this was because furries and otherkin are more likely to enter into financial transactions with each other, giving and getting in exchange for commissions, ref sheets, profile pics, and other art requests. As a cultural expectation, members of furry communities are also more willing to lean on others in times of need, and are also more likely to help others with their own struggles as resources allow.
- jstarfish 3y agoThere has to be a correlation with network size though, and it requires continuous struggle. Fringe cliques (religious movements, homeless, musicians/fans, UFO conspiracy theorists, gays pre-DOMA, etc.) can't tolerate internal shenanigans and necessarily band together for survival. If you're Jewish/gay/homeless, other Jews/gays/homeless will help you out. The network is small enough that cheating gets you blackballed, and your community can't suffer losses because that's one less resource to rely on-- so people will have each other's backs. There just always seems to come a threshold after which point the utility and trust afforded by inclusivity diminishes. If you can host a Pride parade without incident, you've crossed it. Like Catholics, LGBTs are everywhere these days so there's nothing unique about it-- hence the endless push for inclusion of additional subcliques (QIA+). "We're like you, but our rules are different, and don't you dare say we're the same." It's massive enough to have schisms. Welcome to the Gay Reformation. Furry-ism hasn't become mainstream. That community will lose its magic the second they do.
- DoreenMichele 3y agoBefore we reliably had money, we had barter and "mutual aid." Now, some people think you just pay for stuff with money and if someone is "nice" to you, you don't "owe" them anything. A lot of people no longer seem to understand the implicit social contract behind such interactions and it can go bad places. From religion to community development work to politics, there have been myriad attempts to educate people that if you don't understand that you are one figure in a larger equation where 1+1=3, then you are probably messing things up because that "3" isn't supposed to belong entirely to you as an individual and when other people get tired of being shafted, there will eventually be consequences. You may be able to get away with claiming 1.75 of it and giving them 1.25 of it for a long damn time but if it becomes clear to them that all interactions between you and them benefit you at their expense, well, count on them eventually not being cool with that. (No, you don't get to keep shafting them and expecting something for nothing indefinitely, not even if you brainwash them into believing that being your victim is "The Christian thing to do" or some nonsense. If nothing else, it will eventually kill them, so this is simply not a sustainable model long-term.)
- landemva 3y agoYet Americans vote for religion of government that preaches we will be taken care of by continuous deficit spending. Deficit spending of money/value created out of thin air will eventually reach a mathematical point of no return. Maybe USA is already at that point, and now we wait for the judgement day when money no longer has purchasing power.
- Teever 3y agoDeficit spending doesn't make matter out of thin air. The things that are bought on credit are real, tangible things that exist.
- landemva 3y agoUSA munitions, which were bought on credit deficit spending, are really being exploded in Ukraine. Financed by USA tax payers and future tax payers. Yes, this is real physical destruction overseas, monetary destruction of US dollar, and GDP number goes up for the headline news shows.
- majkinetor 3y agoIf only positive reciprocity wasn't so easily gamed way too frequently. Its basically given that somebody will use your kidness/help for its own benefit leaving your with nothing in return. There is number of people I personally know that just let it happen over and over again... Its almost like some good deeds are invisible to some people.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoThe solution I’ve come up with is to budget for this overage So, some nonzero number of people will screw you over if you are kind and give them a break. Add in a 10% emotional buffer and don’t give away what you can’t lose, as you know that this is going to happen.
- carlosjobim 3y agoThey are in the evil Yin-Yang system of victim/perpetrator that so many people are participating in. The perpetrator feels great about taking advantage of an idiot, and the victim takes pleasure in being the martyr. It's sickening. But it's also stupid and low on a spiritual level. Christianity tried to get rid of this garbage by saying: "We killed the son of God, now the ultimate and last sacrifice is already made". My advice is to steer clear of these people. They will never take any advice to stop being taken advantage of, but will enjoy tremendously complaining to you how bad they've been treated.
- renewiltord 3y agoThere's lots of communities where this is true and it doesn't require a full scale "end to capitalism" or whatever. Ultimately, you can get quite far with Coase's Theory of the Firm as a model. Nail salons for immigrants, the motel business, the Afghan tamale business. These all have massive graph interconnectedness in their social structure. You can have it, too, if you'd like. Since I found it quite possible to do in the Bay Area, I'm going to say it's quite feasible and the problem is entirely down to what your inner self permits. You have to be very comfortable offering and accepting favours. And the second is as important as the first.
- vorpalhex 3y agoThere are deep flaws to favour driven communities which often lead to bribery and coercion. Since a favour has opaque cost compared to transparent cost, bad actors can easily use them as a weapon of coercion.
- 23B1 3y agoThis is why I tell everyone who'll listen that if you want to prep for a disaster, step 0 is to hold a block party. Most people don't even know their neighbor's names!
- hosh 3y agoThere was a HN thread about this within the past three months. Sit outside regularly at the front yard and just start waving hi to everyone.
- sfink 3y agoGet a dog. Walk it. Worked for me.
- jamiek88 3y agoYes. This is key. Especially if like me your dog is ancient, has ALS and is in a stroller! Everybody knows me as the 6’3 270lb dude pushing a tiny stroller or ‘spankys dad’! I’d moved to coastal Oregon, knew no one in the neighborhood, I’m kinda scary to look at and not good at eye contact! Since I adopted this stinky, on his last legs, probably gonna die in a year old pug mix I’ve spent a fortune at the vets but made many acquaintances some of whom are on the way to being friends. Make a conscious effort to remember peoples names as you do it. I used to be very blasé about that but it made a big difference shouting ‘hey Sue!’ to the old lady who makes Spanky treats on the corner. It would also work for a cat. Everyone remembers the dude walking a cat!
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoBuild Communities not Bunkers
- NovaDudely 3y agoYes, yes, YES! I think you just summarized Douglas Rushkoff's last book in 4 words.
- 3y ago
- hosh 3y agoJust some initial thoughts: - Lots of examples from the regenerative world, including ideas like plant guilds in permaculture - What would resource sharing like this look like in Kubernetes? Going beyond resource limits, but a way for pod to signal cpu/mem when it isn't using it, and can reclaim it during bursts - What does this look like when viewed through Promise Theory? (Promise Theory has insights about voluntary cooperation among autonomous agents, human or AI)
- RajT88 3y agoI've advocated the helper style on here before, because taking time to help others out at work has worked really well for my career. I have been met mostly with derision here. Hope Y'all are reading this thread and article.
- JohnFen 3y agoHow people acted in the US during the pandemic made me aware of how broken a society we've become. I had always thought that despite our differences, we at least come together to help each other and overcome crises when they happen. Our behavior with the pandemic showed how untrue that is. Nothing shook my faith and trust in my fellow citizens more than that.
- JackMorgan 3y agoI think that's because it wasn't enough to actually scare more than about half the population. Most people got sick and then got better, so it felt "not that serious". In some of my circles by the time those people started to m feel a tiny bit spooked it was almost a year in.
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoAtlas shrugged, with no one to help him, and died alone in his billionaire bunker. Glad the 10X geniuses here are finally catching on, only took them an age longer than everyone else to get the memo.