One of the most salient differences between groups that succeed and groups that fail is the group members’ ability to work well with one another.
A corollary: If you want a group to fail, undermine its members’ ability to work with each other. This was observed and practiced by intelligence agencies in Turing’s day, and well before then.
Better yet: Get them to undermine it themselves.
By using the zero-sum conversion trick, we can ask ourselves: What ideas do I possess that the Devil¹ approves of me possessing because they undermine my ability to accomplish my goals?
¹ “The Devil” is shorthand for a purely notional opponent whose values are the opposite of mine.
One Devil’s tool against cooperation is reminding people that cooperation is cultish, and if they cooperate, they are sheep.
But there is a big exception! If you work for a corporation, then you are expected to be a team player, and you have to participate in various team-building activities, which are like cult activities, just a bit less effective. You are expected to be a sheep, if you are asked to be one, and to enjoy it. -- It’s just somehow wrong to use the same winning strategy outside the corporation, for yourself or your friends.
So we get the interesting result that most people are willing to cooperate if it is for someone else’s benefit, but have an aversion against cooperation for their own. If I tried to brainwash people to become obedient masses, I would be proud to achieve this.
This said, I am not sure what exactly caused this. It could be a natural result of thousand small-scale interactions; people winning locally by undermining their nearest competitors’ agency, and losing globally by poluting the common meme-space. And the people who overcome this and become able to optimize for their own benefit probably find it much easier to find themselves followers than peers; thus they get out of the system, but don’t change the system.
The first example in my mind when I wrote that were the negative reactions about “rationalist rituals” (some comments were deleted). An alternative explanation is that it was mostly trolling.
At the recent LW meetup I organized, I tried to start the topic of becoming stronger: where would we individually want to become stronger, and how we could help each other with some specific goals. The whole topic was sabotaged (other sources later confirmed it was done intentionally) and turned to idle chatting by a participant, who happens to be a manager in a corporation. An alternative explanation is that the specific person simply has an aversion to the specific topic.
A few times happened to me that when I approached people with “we could do this as a group together”, I was refused, but when I said “I want to do this, and I need you to do this”, people complied. (Once it was about compiling a DVD with information from different sources; second time about making a computer application.) People are more willing to obey than to cooperate as equals, perhaps because this is what they are taught. Most likely, in other situation I react the same way. An alternative explanation is that people don’t want to be responsible for coordination, motivating others, etc.
I know a few people with hobbies that could be used together to make something greater. For example: writing stories + drawing pictures = making an illustrated story book. When I tried to contact them together, they refused (without seeing each other). Based on the previous experiences, I suspect that if I inserted myself as the boss, and told each person “I want to do this, and I need you to this”, they would be more likely to agree, although I am otherwise not needed in the process.
Uhm, perhaps other people can add more convincing examples?
Enigma comes to mind. IIRC, to camouflage it, the Brits specifically leaked messages claiming that it was due to some moles in Germany, not just explaining away how data kept leaking but actively impeding German operations. This was also seen in the Cold War where you had Soviet defectors who tried to discredit each other as agents sent to throw the CIA into confusion, and I’ve seen accusations that James Jesus Angleton was a spy or otherwise manipulated into his endless mole hunts by Russia specifically to destroy all agency effectiveness. For a more recent example, Assange’s Wikileaks was based on this theory, which he put forth in a short paper around that time: enabling easy leaking would sow distrust and dissension in networks that depended on secrecy, forcing compartmentalization and degrading efficiency compared to more ‘open’ organizations. EDIT: and appropriately, this is exactly what is happening in the NSA now—they are claiming that Snowden was leaking materials which had been made available to much of NSA, to assist in coordination, and they are locking down the material, adding more logging, and restricting sysadmins’ accesses, none of which is going to make the NSA more efficient than before… Similar to how State etc had to lock down and add friction to internal processes after Manning.
I don’t know if the tactic has any name or handy references, but certainly intelligence agencies are aware of the value of witch hunts and internal dissension.
The Assange paper in question: State and Terrorist Conspiracies. Written considerably prior to Wikileaks entering the spotlight (dated 2006 in that PDF).
Various leaks from Anonymous indicate the FBI (and probably local LEA) uses similar tactics against Occupy and other groups.
One of the most salient differences between groups that succeed and groups that fail is the group members’ ability to work well with one another.
A corollary: If you want a group to fail, undermine its members’ ability to work with each other. This was observed and practiced by intelligence agencies in Turing’s day, and well before then.
Better yet: Get them to undermine it themselves.
By using the zero-sum conversion trick, we can ask ourselves: What ideas do I possess that the Devil¹ approves of me possessing because they undermine my ability to accomplish my goals?
¹ “The Devil” is shorthand for a purely notional opponent whose values are the opposite of mine.
One Devil’s tool against cooperation is reminding people that cooperation is cultish, and if they cooperate, they are sheep.
But there is a big exception! If you work for a corporation, then you are expected to be a team player, and you have to participate in various team-building activities, which are like cult activities, just a bit less effective. You are expected to be a sheep, if you are asked to be one, and to enjoy it. -- It’s just somehow wrong to use the same winning strategy outside the corporation, for yourself or your friends.
So we get the interesting result that most people are willing to cooperate if it is for someone else’s benefit, but have an aversion against cooperation for their own. If I tried to brainwash people to become obedient masses, I would be proud to achieve this.
This said, I am not sure what exactly caused this. It could be a natural result of thousand small-scale interactions; people winning locally by undermining their nearest competitors’ agency, and losing globally by poluting the common meme-space. And the people who overcome this and become able to optimize for their own benefit probably find it much easier to find themselves followers than peers; thus they get out of the system, but don’t change the system.
Can you give an example of how people resist cooperation? I’m having difficulty identifying such a trend in my past interactions.
P.S. It seems I accidentally double-posted. Sorry about that.
The first example in my mind when I wrote that were the negative reactions about “rationalist rituals” (some comments were deleted). An alternative explanation is that it was mostly trolling.
At the recent LW meetup I organized, I tried to start the topic of becoming stronger: where would we individually want to become stronger, and how we could help each other with some specific goals. The whole topic was sabotaged (other sources later confirmed it was done intentionally) and turned to idle chatting by a participant, who happens to be a manager in a corporation. An alternative explanation is that the specific person simply has an aversion to the specific topic.
A few times happened to me that when I approached people with “we could do this as a group together”, I was refused, but when I said “I want to do this, and I need you to do this”, people complied. (Once it was about compiling a DVD with information from different sources; second time about making a computer application.) People are more willing to obey than to cooperate as equals, perhaps because this is what they are taught. Most likely, in other situation I react the same way. An alternative explanation is that people don’t want to be responsible for coordination, motivating others, etc.
I know a few people with hobbies that could be used together to make something greater. For example: writing stories + drawing pictures = making an illustrated story book. When I tried to contact them together, they refused (without seeing each other). Based on the previous experiences, I suspect that if I inserted myself as the boss, and told each person “I want to do this, and I need you to this”, they would be more likely to agree, although I am otherwise not needed in the process.
Uhm, perhaps other people can add more convincing examples?
Can you give an example of how people resist cooperation? I’m having difficulty identifying such a trend in my past interactions.
Source?
Enigma comes to mind. IIRC, to camouflage it, the Brits specifically leaked messages claiming that it was due to some moles in Germany, not just explaining away how data kept leaking but actively impeding German operations. This was also seen in the Cold War where you had Soviet defectors who tried to discredit each other as agents sent to throw the CIA into confusion, and I’ve seen accusations that James Jesus Angleton was a spy or otherwise manipulated into his endless mole hunts by Russia specifically to destroy all agency effectiveness. For a more recent example, Assange’s Wikileaks was based on this theory, which he put forth in a short paper around that time: enabling easy leaking would sow distrust and dissension in networks that depended on secrecy, forcing compartmentalization and degrading efficiency compared to more ‘open’ organizations. EDIT: and appropriately, this is exactly what is happening in the NSA now—they are claiming that Snowden was leaking materials which had been made available to much of NSA, to assist in coordination, and they are locking down the material, adding more logging, and restricting sysadmins’ accesses, none of which is going to make the NSA more efficient than before… Similar to how State etc had to lock down and add friction to internal processes after Manning.
I don’t know if the tactic has any name or handy references, but certainly intelligence agencies are aware of the value of witch hunts and internal dissension.
The Assange paper in question: State and Terrorist Conspiracies. Written considerably prior to Wikileaks entering the spotlight (dated 2006 in that PDF).
Various leaks from Anonymous indicate the FBI (and probably local LEA) uses similar tactics against Occupy and other groups.