4 ms·
Modeling cycles of grift with evolutionary game theory
- apothegm 8mo agoMaybe, but… the cycle can be very long. Everyone in Russia is a skeptic or a grifter, and it’s been that way for decades with no sign of grift being on its way out.
- w10-1 8mo agoThe vast majority have justified skepticism from long history of abuse. But very few people are grifters, because that would require an expensive roof. missing from my transactional analysis is a general goodwill, the likelihood that someone would help if it didn’t cost much. In Russia, the skepticism is so high that one only helps one’s close friends.
- lukas099 8mo agoSounds like they've reached an evolutionarily stable equilibrium and the conditions that sustain it are stable too.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- carlosjobim 8mo agoBirth rates are the evidence against this, and this is true for all industrialized nations.
- lukas099 8mo agoWhat I said doesn’t mean that every aspect of their society is stable.
- bediger4000 8mo agoThis is a great post. It's even got useful ternary diagrams, and it gives an explanation of why the NFT grift disappeared. Too bad cryptocurrency in general is only mentioned in the context of rug pulls. This theory must not extend as far as whatever powers crypto.
- MarkusQ 8mo agoThe meta strategy seems clear: if the world seems full of grifters, stop being a Mark, and start being a Skeptic. Or, I suppose, go on thinking this time is different.
- energy123 8mo agoDon't believe the latest fashion on social media, including the latest thing it's fashionable to be sceptical about. That rule of thumb performed well the last 10 years.
- allthetime 8mo agoThe simple version: get off social media. The dilemma for me is that aspects of social media (namely information sharing and learning) are incredibly useful, while others (contrarian argumentation, propaganda, attention black holes) are very harmful. I go through cycles of abstaining from online interaction because I’ve sunk into the dark side too much but then return with a stronger intention in order to feed my hobbies and mind. I’ve found that it’s not so simple to just “not believe” what you see and read as being constantly bombarded with political messaging necessarily pushes you to one side or the other unconsciously. So yeah, for me the best way is to cut that feed off entirely, instead of pretending I have any kind of effective fire wall against its deeper mental effects.
- energy123 8mo agoI'd like a product/UI that uses an LLM to filter social media to get rid of "contrarian argumentation, propaganda, attention black holes". Basically a sovereign recommendation engine.
- MarkusQ 8mo agoThe easiest way to do that is to block the social media sites at your firewall. You may have a few false positive (maybe 1% or so?) but that should be minor compared to the time savings.
- 8mo ago
- smogcutter 8mo agoI think a missing piece of this analysis for the present is the way that hyper-skepticism can come back around and make you just a different type of mark. Sovereign citizens, for example.
- jibal 8mo agoHyper-skepticism is quite selective, driven by ideology and partisanship. Some of the most successful grifters become the heads of political parties, governments, etc.
- Edman274 8mo agoPeople that don't buy insurance because they think it's a scam, then end up impoverished after a foreseeable accident or theft, as a more common one.
- carlosjobim 8mo agoForeseeable accident?
- zoklet-enjoyer 8mo agoNot buying flood insurance while living in a flood plain is an example I've seen in my city
- macintux 8mo agoHow many renters have a useful amount of renter's insurance?
- zoklet-enjoyer 8mo agoProbably a lot? I've moved around a bunch over the past 20 years, so have had several landlords. I think all of them for the past decade have required proof of insurance when signing the lease. I don't think anyone I rented from required it before 2018ish
- w10-1 8mo agoTo this model I would add the transaction costs for vetting a transaction, the cost of identifying and engaging transaction partners, and the relative sensitivity to a negative outcome (the stake as a percentage of total stake). I believe that would enable you to identify more or less corrupt industries. Unfortunately, both stakes and information costs make governance prone to abuse. To see why it’s not nearly as corrupt as one might expect from this model, you’d need reputation cost and benefit, where trusted governments and leaders attract higher functioning citizens and industries.
- jurschreuder 8mo agoA population of Marks is a highly efficient one. At the speed of trust. In a company you will want to cultivate this, since interactions within the company are far more frequent than with the outside world.
- Muromec 8mo agoThe same applies to the country population -- it's always them others who are up to something.
- intalentive 8mo agoI am going to steal this code and run a different analysis. The author mentions that skeptics avoid grifters without punishing them. I am curious how things play out in the Seven Samurai model, where instead of marks you have peasants and instead of grifters you have bandits. What happens if you have samurai not skeptics? Who both take rice from the peasants and protect them from greater exploitation by bandits. This would be a simple governance model, and you could predict something like “revolution” when the cost of samurai exceeds their benefit.
- retr0rocket 8mo ago[dead]
- FrustratedMonky 8mo agothis "The start of a slide into a new post-truth dark age?" Not sure we'll evolutionarily get out of the loop this time. From 2016 to 2026. That is 10 years for Republicans to realize they are being grifted, scammed, etc... Not sure they will ever be realizing it. Will take another generation. Which I guess is the point, another generation of evolution cycles might break the loop.
- UncleOxidant 8mo agoWhat about grifters who are also marks? Grifters aren't immune from grift.
- notatoad 8mo ago>Grift is cyclical, and any period of high grift will soon give way to a period of high skepticism so how do you explain the immediate jump from crypto grift straight into AI grift? i'm not saying all crypto or all AI is pure grift, but both of those industries have had higher than average levels of grift, without any skepticism in between them. The NFT crash did not seem to be followed by any period of skepticism at all.
- Glyptodon 8mo agoI think a further development is that skeptics are, in many contexts, losing the tools and leverage needed to reject the grifters. For example, if you need cell phone service, and all the options have converged on requiring binding arbitration, being a skeptic about binding arbitration will not help you. Maybe more on point, if you want to be an AI skeptic, but are also aware that AI can work, how can you establish a plausible level of skepticism accurately? Laypeople probably can't. So the rise of grift might also be seen as a sign of the systemic frustration of effective skepticism.
- georgeecollins 8mo agoThis is old wine in new bottles. Read: https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Cooperation-Robert-Axelrod-1984-04-15/dp/B01FIWUWIE/ref=pd_sbs_d_sccl_2_9/136-1454426-8699929?psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Cooperation-Robert-Axelrod-... From 1984!
- downboots 8mo agoAnd of course 2017 :) https://ncase.me/trust/ https://ncase.me/trust/
- newzino 8mo ago[flagged]
- exmadscientist 8mo agoWhat is the location of the (clearly unstable) equilibrium/fixed point there? The obvious trick of computing the eigenvectors didn't seem to work (I got 20%/40%/40%, which does not look right) and I'm out of time for this particular nerd snipe.