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All of thoughtfulmadison's Comments + Replies

Moloch and multi-level selection
thoughtfulmadison*20

Thanks for the link. Wish I'd read it earlier! That's a much better exposition of what I was trying to express here. :)

I do think that there's complication beyond even the two-layer model presented in "Studies on Slack". For example, maybe my company gives a lot of slack and looks at my value-add on a 5-year timeframe. At the same time, I have little personal slack around my annual bonus because I need to pay off loans. Perhaps the culture I live in has some different level of slack in its expectations for work. Although the two-layer model is a useful simplification, I'm not sure that the actual interactions are so neatly hierarchical.

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Social Interfaces
thoughtfulmadison30

Thanks for the thoughtful response. Great summary. I think this is missing something:

We don't seem to have good social interfaces for large groups, perhaps because we cannot simulate large groups.

Not exactly what I was going for. Many actors + game theoretic concerns -> complex simulation. Eventually good simulation becomes intractable. However, when a common set of rules is enforced strongly enough, each individual's utility function aligns with that set of rules. This simplifies the situation and creates a higher level interface. This is why... (read more)

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2gigahurt
Thank you for additional detail, I understand your point about conformity to rules, the way that increases predictability, and how that allows for larger groups to coordinate effectively. I think I am getting hung up on the word trust, as I tend to think of it as when I take for granted someone has good intentions towards me and basic shared values. (e.g. they can't think whats best for me is to kill me) I think I am pretty much on board with everything else about the article. I wonder if another productive way to think about all this would be (continuing to riff on interfaces, and largely restating what you have already said) something like: when people form relationships they understand how each other will behave, relationships enable coordination, humans can handle understanding and coordinating up to Dunbar's number, to work around this limit above 150 we begin grouping people- essentially abstracting them back down to a single person (named for example 'Sales' or 'The IT Department'), if that group of people follow rules/process then the group becomes understandable and we can have a relationship and coordinate with that group, and if we all follow shared rules, everyone can understand and coordinate with everyone else without having to know them. I think I am pretty much agreeing with the point you make about small groups being able to predict each other's behavior, and that being key. Instead of saying one person trusts another person, I'd favor one person understands another person. I think this language is compatible with your examples of sarcasm, lies, and the prisoner's dilemma. Anyway, I'll leave it at that. Thank you for the discussion.
Fantasy-Forbidding Expert Opinion
thoughtfulmadison60

Hueristical decision-making is quick and practical. Experts tend to have better hueristics, and are usually in a better position to speculate about unfamiliar or uncertain treatments than laypeople. One good reason to be a fantasy-forbidding expert is that there are massive asymmetries in unvalidated medicine. The potential upside of taking vitamin X is probably small and bounded. The potential downside is unbounded.

That said, given the long history of traditional medicine, there are probably some effective treatments in the alternative medicine canon that just aren't yet well understood. Intellectual modesty is important.

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