I second kilobug that democracy is far from a slam-dunk, quite the opposite. A benevolent dictatorship with an opt-out works just as well or better. Most online forums operate this way, and so do many social and commercial entities. Democracy is a way to patch things up (often poorly) in a situation where opt-out is impossible or not feasible. Voting and building consensus is nice, but often counterproductive. While community feedback is essential, communal governing is more often a mess than not.
The recommendation I saw was "accept the input of all members," which is the primary thing that separates a benevolent dictatorship from a malevolent ones (in the eyes of the ruled). Yes, doing things by vote often doesn't help and so shouldn't be part of that recommendation, but having open lines of communication upwards is an important feature.
My 9 year old came to me a few months ago after I told him to go brush his teeth. He said (without any acrimony or contempt, it was just an observation) that if he well and truly refused to brush his teeth, there'd be nothing I could do about it. He said 'When you tell me to do things, I instinctively do them, but I don't think you could actually make me do anything. You're in charge of me because of me, not you.' He noted, however, that the instinct is a good one because there's a lot he doesn't know.
Our house isn't a democracy either, but it's no kind of dictatorship. He's absolutely right: the guy with the biggest gun is him, and more and more everything is a negotiation. That's my experience anyway.
Our house isn't a democracy either, but it's no kind of dictatorship. He's absolutely right: the guy with the biggest gun is him, and more and more everything is a negotiation. That's my experience anyway.
If your family is fairly normal, there are lots of interventions you could implement to change his behavior.
1) Positive reinforcement ("Here's a dollar for brushing")
2) Negative reinforcement ("You are free from other chores since you brushed")
3) Positive punishment (SMACK)
4) Negative punishment ("No more video games for you.")
There are reasonable considerations about the ratio of parental effort to child compliance. But if it was important enough, you could cause your child to brush if you wanted to.
Are you fucking kidding me? I mean, if you're a rich Western man who can move out at a moment's notice, then yes, sure - literally everything caters to your comfort and convenience. If you're a migrant worker, run afoul of Saudi gender norms, or are otherwise in a marginalized and powerless group... it's hell. And a scary perspective for the 1st World's transhuman future, too.
Such flippant and callous observations from a position of great relative privliege is what gave traction to the "Glibertarian" label, y'know. Both for the sake of LW epistemic standards and to avoid sounding like an entitled aristocrat, please think before commenting.
I'm not even particularly pissed off about this one comment, it all just adds up when you... observe the persistence of certain ideological trends on the internet.
Here's some more links about how such glittering Cities Upon A Hill really function:
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7985361.stm
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/the-exploitation-of-immigrant-workers-in-the-middle-east/
And here's Will Self dissecting a book that...
Her'es a quote from Wikipedia about those Foxconn suicides:
The suicide rate at Foxconn during the suicide spate remained lower than that of the general Chinese population[8] as well as all 50 states in the United States.[9] Additionally the Foxconn deaths may have been a product of economic conditions external to the company.
I was pretty sure this had been debunked before, but the story keeps getting spread around for ideological reasons.
I'd also point out that just because a geek calls something Mordor doesn't mean he literally thinks it's as bad as Mordor. All it means is that he thinks it's worse than his current living conditions, which only amounts to "people in the US are better off than people in China". IBM and Microsoft get called the Evil Empire all the time, without killing anyone.
Downvoted for the initial flip out. You can present all the same evidence just as convincingly without it.
Multiheaded, you're taking the disutility of each torture caused by Pinochet and using their sum to declare his actions as a net evil. OrphanWilde seems to acknowledge that his actions were terrible, but makes the statement that the frequency of tortures, each with more or less equal disutility (whatever massive quantity that may be), were overall reduced by his actions.
You, however, appear to be looking at his actions, declaring them evil, and citing Allende as evidence that Pinochet's ruthlessness was unnecessary. This could be the foundation of a good argument, perhaps, but it's not made clear and is instead obscured behind an appeal to emotions, declaring OrphanWilde evil for thinking rationally about events that you think are too repulsive for a rational framework.
Interesting, but the point on "Democracy" seems a bit an applause light to me. We all like democracy so a community needs democracy, right ?
Well, if you look at communities, you'll see that "leader worship" is actually as least as efficient to build a strong community than democracy. I'm not saying it's the best option all things considered, but if in the purpose of crafting a community, having a strong, quasi-dictatorial leader that everyone respects tends to be a very efficient way. The "penguin" is a clear example of that : Linus, the "benevolent dictator for life" is a strong factor of the community cohesion. Democratic models can also work (to stay in the same domain, that's how Debian works, and it works very well) but they aren't the most likely path to success.
There probably are evolutionary psychology reasons behind the "strong leader" pattern, rooting into families (were the patriarch or the matriarch is the natural "strong leader") and tribes (which usually aren't very democratic), the two most primitive communities, but I won't enter the details because evopsy isn't my primary field.
Sometimes it is easier to remember what to do by also giving examples of what not to do. So let's try to describe some ways how to ruin a community.
Oppose moral pressures. Anyone using the word "should" is a hypocrite, or a wannabe dictator. (There is no objective morality, right?) Find moral excuses for all kinds of defection. (You can't reasonably expect someone to cooperate, if the person is hungry, angry, lonely, tired, bored, poor, opressed, etc.)
Oppose reputational pressures. Saying that some people are better and some people are worse is undemocratic elitism. (Also, it is obvious that you focus on criticizing X merely because X is a member of a group you hate.)
Oppose institutional pressures. We don't need any punishments, because punishments are evil, and only evil people want to punish other people. All problems should be resolved by love (and it that fails, we need even more love). Everyone deserves a second chance.
Oppose security pressures. If we don't trust each other, we are not a good community.
Somehow all these anti-patterns seem to me like: This is what many educated people around me use for signalling.
Oppose moral pressures. Anyone using the word "should" is a hypocrite, or a wannabe dictator. (There is no objective morality, right?)
When moral pressures have been co-opted, observant (but not necessarily rational) people might reasonably tend to take on the belief that all moral pressures are suspect. Reversed stupidity is not wisdom: the correct answer is not "enforce all moral pressures, regardless of how draconian"; nor is it "reject all moral pressures as draconian". The correct answer is "figure out what the RIGHT moral pressures are, in terms of which moral pressures ACTUALLY PRODUCE the amount of cooperation we want, and then ensure that those moral pressures are the ones being applied in this community."
Find moral excuses for all kinds of defection. (You can't reasonably expect someone to cooperate, if the person is hungry, angry, lonely, tired, bored, poor, opressed, etc.).
Alternatively, identify external factors that can be statistically shown to increase defection, and then lower the influence of those external factors rather than expect people to magically overcome them. If you can statistically demonstrate that hungry p...
Ban the sharing of emotions
''From the above evidence it can be concluded that exposure to the social sharing of an emotion is itself an emotion-eliciting event, it would follow that the listener too would later share that experience with other people. Christophe et Rimé called this subsequent phenomenon secondary social sharing of emotions.[31] In other words, the receiver of the social sharing will consequently experience some kind of emotion, so the receiver will then become a transmitter of the narration as a part of their emotional experience of hearin...
Are you fucking kidding me? I mean, if you're a rich Western man who can move out at a moment's notice, then yes, sure - literally everything caters to your comfort and convenience. If you're a migrant worker, run afoul of Saudi gender norms, or are otherwise in a marginalized and powerless group... it's hell. And a scary perspective for the 1st World's transhuman future, too.
Such flippant and callous observations from a position of great relative privliege is what gave traction to the "Glibertarian" label, y'know. Both for the sake of LW epistemic standards and to avoid sounding like an entitled aristocrat, please think before commenting.
I'm not even particularly pissed off about this one comment, it all just adds up when you... observe the persistence of certain ideological trends on the internet.
Here's some more links about how such glittering Cities Upon A Hill really function:
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7985361.stm
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/the-exploitation-of-immigrant-workers-in-the-middle-east/
And here's Will Self dissecting a book that self-consciously chooses to sing paeans to this neofeudal/corporate-fascist model:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n09/will-self/the-frowniest-spot-on-earth
There’s a disarming frankness to the way [Lindsay] recounts the poverty of Kenyan flower growers, simply in order to urge us to carry on buying their posies. His vision for the future of the African continent in the Age of the Aerotropolis seems to be as a vast latifundium sown with GM wheat. Equally brazen is his aside that Apple engineers refer to the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen – where the world’s iPhones and most of its iPads, iPods, Playstations, Nintendos and Kindles are assembled – as ‘Mordor’. Why the evil kingdom in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings? ‘At its peak,’ Lindsay writes, ‘some 320,000 workers toiled on its assembly lines and slept in its dormitories.’ A rash of suicides among its workers is part of the reason for Foxconn’s relocation to the still poorer and more immiserated interior of the Heavenly People’s Republic.
We might choose to see this as the frownie face that Kasarda’s smiley face tries to mask: an inverted curve where the greatest misery adds to a product’s value in the middle of its global traverse, while the greatest pleasure is accrued by innovators and consumers at either winsome end. Perhaps the frowniest spot on the face of the earth is the despotic principality of Dubai, where Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s vision coincides perfectly with Kasarda’s: this is an entire statelet conceived of as an aerotropolis – or, at least, as a transpark with attached office space and buy-to-flip real estate. On a trip to Dubai, Lindsay is typically disarming about the labour camps in the desert where the indentured workers sweat and half-starve; after all, he points out, they’re making better money than they would back home in Kerala, or Baluchistan, so that’s OK. He has read – and cites in his notes – the Human Rights Watch 2006 report Building Towers, Cheating Workers: Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the United Arab Emirates, but notwithstanding his admission that Dubai is ‘all dark side’ he remains … upbeat.
Lindsay even takes a walk in Dubai, and although he doesn’t tell us what distance he covered, my impression is he went only a few blocks. I, too, took a walk in Dubai a couple of years ago, but mine was a two-day traverse from the airport, clear across this great city of unbecoming and into the fringes of the Empty Quarter. Lindsay is told that ‘nobody walks in Dubai,’ but this should be modified: nobody white walks in Dubai. Everywhere I went – along the baking sidewalks of Sheikh Zayed Road, through the dust clouds boiling into the phantasm of Tiger Woods Design’s golf development – I encountered brown and black men, on foot, parted from their families for three, five, even ten years, and ekeing out an existence on $10 a day or less. When they weren’t too intimidated to talk to me, they had nothing positive to say about their situation: their faces were wreathed in frowns. My response to this Xanadu – powered by jet fuel and misted by the evaporation of desalinated water – was to stop flying altogether: I no longer wished to pick up any airmiles that contributed to such a future. Perhaps if frenetic flyers like Kasarda and Lindsay ever dared attempt a sustained hike through the wastelands of the postmodern ugliness they enthuse about, they might take a different view.
You accuse me of judging the country from the perspective of a privileged white person, but you're the one comparing it to countries a privileged white person would deem acceptable, rather than to the countries which it started off most similarly to. If you want to judge the efficacy of a dictator, you judge the changes that took place, and those -changes- have been quite good.
No. It's not -better- than the West, it's not even as -good- as the West - shit, just look at their sanitation issues. But look at how far it has come, and how much it has achieve...
I've noticed that quite a few people are interested in fostering communities -- both creating communities and improving them to make them work together. But how do we go about actually doing this? What's there to community that we can foster and build upon? What makes a community thrive, and how do we take advantage of this to make and/or improve communities?
To answer these questions, I turned to two books:
The first is The Penguin and The Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest by Yochai Benkler. Benkler, in writing about cooperative systems (Penguins, named after the Linux Penguin) and hierarchical systems (Leviathans, named after Thomas Hobbes's The Leviathan), studies the psychology, economics, and political science of cooperation and helps explain what makes communities stick.
The second is Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive by Bruce Schneier. Schneier studies trust and cooperation from a dizzying variety of sciences (psychology, biology, economics, anthropology, computer science, and political science). Schneier's ultimate game is figuring out what is preventing society from falling apart, and that can be applied to building communities.
Let's see what they got.
Schneier and Benkler both paint a view of human nature that is different than what is commonly thought, but what has emerged from the sciences: People are both self-interested and other-interested, different people will have different balances of each, and within each person these two goals can often conflict. Additionally, the "other-interested" aspect can be multiple and occasionally conflicting allegiances, such as to one's family, to one's neighborhood, to one's country, to one's venture philanthropy club, etc.
What's unique to all communities is that they involve people who have set aside some of their immediate self-interest to work together. For instance, when we work together in a group, I definitely don't beat you over the head and steal your lunch money, and I don't usually attempt to free ride and get you to do the group work for me, but we mutually work to solve communal problems and share in the benefits of community.
An example of how psychology has sought to simplify and simulate a community is through what's called "The Public Goods Game". In this game, a group of about ten participants are each sat down, and given $10 each to start with. The game is then played for several rounds, and in each round all participants get to put a certain secret amount of their money into a collective pot. The experimenters then look at the pot, double the amount of money inside it, and redistribute the result evenly to all the players. For added bonus, the experimenters inform all participants that they get to walk away with their winnings after the game is over.
If everyone went perfectly with the community, each player would see their money double each round. But the wrinkle is that if people don't contribute at all to the pot, then they stand to gain even more money from the results of everyone else's contributions. This is called the free rider problem: there is a tension between wanting to contribute to the pot for the good of yourself and the good of the group as a whole and refraining from contributing so that you benefit even more.
But the tension can result in further disaster, for imagine everyone decides to be a free rider and defect from the group -- now, no money goes in the pot at all, and everyone ends with the $10 they start with. This gets worse when we imagine some other real-life scenarios -- for instance, that of fishermen in a lake.
The fishermen can either choose to fish normally or overfish. If all the fishermen overfish, they stand to deplete the lake and all fishermen lose their jobs. However, if just a few fishermen overfish, they get the benefit of added fish to sell, and the lake can handle the slight increase in load. So this tension is to be the fisherman that wins most by personally overfishing, while not collectively depleting the entire lake. Such problems are called collective action problems -- people do well individually by defecting but do worse collectively if everyone defects. The result of a collective action problem ending in disaster is called the tragedy of the commons.
So what's the solution to these problems? Benkler proposes two models for dealing with them -- employing the Leviathan and placing lots of regulations on overfishing and enforcing them with strict punishments, or employing the Penguin and creating a community that deals with these problems collectively and in a self-policing way.
It turns out that certain problems are best dealt with differing combinations of Leviathan and Penguin models, but most problems need lots of community just because it can be difficult to figure out who is going against the community, and communities have more freedom for their participants. At the same time, if there are too many would-be defectors a community can never get off the ground.
Communities need cooperation to work. So how can we get this cooperation to fly?
Bruce Schneier notes that normally we don't think through these free rider problems and try to scheme our way through them -- we just cooperate, instinctively. We don't assume people will rip us off, and we usually don't rip other people off -- that's just how we are. But why? Schneier suggests that cooperation can be fostered and maintained through four different pressures, though differing kinds and amounts of pressure apply to different situations, and getting the balance of pressures right is a key part of his book:
1.) Moral Pressures: Many, but not all of us, have various moral feelings that lead us to want to cooperate. It could be as easy as feeling incredibly guilty when we defect against our friends, or as complex as subscribing to an abstract principle of justice. For most of us, it's a general feeling that cooperating is the "right thing to do" and defecting for our own personal self-interest is "wrong", and we just don't want to do it. Schneier and Benkler both find that moral pressures compel cooperation a surprising amount of the time.
2.) Reputational Pressures: Another part about living in a community for a long time is that you have a reputation to live by. Defect against the community and you may win a few times, but then people start to notice and start working to stop you. They might refuse you friendship or other things you want, or even kick you out of the community altogether! Benkler finds that many communities can thrive on reputation alone, like eBay, Amazon, or Reddit.
3.) Institutional Pressures: Morals and reputation aren't the end of it though; many communities make specific, codified norms and enforce them with specific, codified punishments. These pressures are laws, and the fear of breaking the law, being caught, and getting the punishment can often further spur cooperation. Best yet, the community can often get together and agree to these norms, realizing it is in their individual benefit to force themselves and the rest of the community to play along, as to avoid tragedies of the commons.
4.) Security Pressures: Lastly, there are always going to be a few people who put morals, reputation, and laws aside and try to defect anyway. For these, we hope to stop them in their tracks or make their jobs more difficult, by using complex security systems. It can be as simple as a security camera or anti-theft radio, or as complex as Fort Knox. Security is a double plan: it first attempts to raise the costs of defection; by making it physically harder to defect, one is less tempted to do so. It then attempts to better catch and apprehend those who still try.
Remember these pressures don't all work for the same problems -- it may be proper to use security and institutional pressures to stop someone from overfishing, but not from intentionally cutting the cake so they get to eat the bigger slice. Moral and reputational pressures seem to be more encompassing, but they are also more easily defeated -- people with less of a moral compass can often wander from community to community, wrecking small amounts of havoc and never getting caught or punished.
Benkler suggests another way to get people to buy into a community and not defect against it -- make it clear that being part of the community is something they really want. Whether your joining a community or forced into one (family, country, etc.), the community will be more likely to thrive.
But why might one want to join or stay in a community? For many, the answer is the intangibles -- they feel a sense of belonging, friendship, and group cohesion that creates an empathetic attachment and makes people want to play by the rules of the group. For others, the answer is the tangibles -- the group may have a stated mission statement that is important to the person, or belonging in the group might confer a specific benefit. People might even belong for a mix of tangibles and intangibles, plus a natural tendency to want to join groups.
But how do we foster these bonds? Benkler has his own set of four things, suggesting that group identity can be fostered through a combination of four means:
1.) Fairness: The community needs to be fair -- people need to all contribute more or less equally, or at least have genuine intentions to put in equal effort, and the benefits of the group need to be spread among all participants more or less evenly, or in a fair proportion to how much the participant puts in.
2.) Autonomy: The community needs to not demand too much, and make sure to compensate quickly and generously for special sacrifices. There are inherent costs to joining and staying with a group, and costs for cooperating with the group -- one doesn't just give up the self-interested benefits of defection, but rather must pay additional costs to maintain their group status. Being aware of and addressing these costs are important. In short, the group must respect their members as individuals.
3.) Democracy: The community also needs to accept (with fairness and autonomy) the input of all the members. Group norms should be developed by a vote, with weight given on building consensus as much as possible, and with understanding the reasons why people might not like the consensus. Not only does having input make it more likely people's preferences will be taken into account, lowering the costs of cooperation, but having input makes people feel more group cohesion and belonging.
4.) Communication: During times when formal votes aren't taken, the community also needs to be consistently (but not constantly) talking about how the group is doing, and checking in with members who might be feeling left out. Just like democracy, group cohesion is built through communication, and communication lowers the costs of cooperation. It's best when resolving disputes is not dictatorial, like in a court of law, but rather cooperative, like in an arbitration.
To demonstrate these four points, Benkler draws on many real-world examples, such as policies of various companies, and interactions on the internet. He also draws on returning back to our simple-community-in-the-lab, the Public Goods Game, for additional confirmation, and its worth seeing how these things play out.
In the original Public Goods game, contributions to the pot were made anonymously and no-one was allowed to talk or communicate. Typically, a fair amount of people would cooperate in the beginning (generally, people contribute about 70% of their share), but starts to drop as people see that others aren't contributing. They start to feel like suckers, and the fairness starts to kick in.
However, variants of the Public Goods game offer ways out. When participants were allowed to talk to each other, contributions rose (communication). Likewise, when participants were allowed to use some of their money to punish those who didn't contribute (say, pay $3 to prevent someone from getting their share this round if they didn't cooperate last round), people would do so.
Even the simple act of making the contributions public increased cooperation, drawing on reputation. Sometimes small fines were imposed on those who didn't cooperate (institutional pressures) which brought up cooperation, and these fines worked especially well when the group got to vote on how high they would be (democracy).
Lastly, helping frame the game would help -- those who were told they were taking place in a "Community Game" were far more likely to contribute to the pot and keep contributing than those who were told they were taking place in a "Wall Street Game". By reminding people they are in a community, people thought more about their community norms, and felt more group cohesion, and were more likely to trust others.
Ultimately, creating communities is all about fostering cooperation, and you foster cooperation by ensuring that there is mutual trust and some sort of way to prevent defectors from taking advantage of the system. People often naturally don't want to defect, but will do so if they think others will take advantage of them first.
But how do we foster this trust? The first step is to make use of our social pressures when and to the amount that's appropriate -- relying on empathetic and moral norms, reputation, institutionalized laws, and security systems -- and being sure to get the balance right. For small communities, this probably just needs to be a set of agreed norms, and ensuring that the norms are properly and responsibly enforced.
The second part is while implementing the first step, we should keep in mind why people are joining or staying in the first place, and make sure to provide a community where the benefits of joining -- both the tangibles and intangibles -- are present and apparent. We should acknowledge the costs of cooperating, and make sure the benefits are there to foster group loyalty and belonging.
While implementing, it's important to keep in mind that communities should also be fair, respect the autonomy and individuality of the members, give members input through democracy, and foster lots of communication about how things are going. We should also keep a keen eye to how things are framed, while not going overboard on it or lying.
But when we accomplish communities, the rewards are pretty great -- not only do we avoid free riders and the tragedy of the commons, but we ourselves get to take advantage of communities that are more productive than the individuals alone, and secure the feelings of belonging to a group we enjoy.
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Also cross-posted on my blog.