If you live in a free society—not just technically following the letter of the law, but where most people will really not punish you in any way for having any kind of opinion—you can benefit socially from having “edgy” opinions. You get social rewards from people in the same subculture, without any costs imposed from outside. The society becomes the CooperateBot, and you can get lot of value by defecting against it. At least until a critical number of people starts following the same strategy, and then the system may suddenly fall apart.
Not sure if this has a solution, but even if there is one, it is probably too difficult for most people to follow. My first guess would be to increase intolerance proportionally to the benefits the “edgy” people get from rewarding each other… but that is difficult to estimate, difficult to do precisely, and most importantly does not distinguish between people who get social benefits from creating negative externalities (Nazis getting loyal Nazi friends) and people who simply get social benefits doing something neutral (chess players finding friends among chess players).
The only thing I can recommend is to notice when someone is trying to make you a CooperateBot. On the other hand, this is how intolerant people may genuinely feel when they hear about the idea of tolerance.
Funny, I just started reading The Open Society and Its Enemies to find some answers or at least threads to pull on.
One point that struct me, right in the introduction, is Popper saying that totalitarianism appeals to people because it absolves them of individual responsibility, a responsibility that we, humans, gained (became burdened by) because civilizational progress pull us out of tribes.
I understand your suggestion as being in line with this theme of personal responsibility—you cannot become any sort of -Bot and instead you have to evaluate every interaction separately and decide whether you want to cooperate or defect.
Also, I wonder if this problem exists in the type of uniform society we have now, but would become largely irrelevant in the type of society that Scott describes in Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism. If you lived on your own island full of edgy people like yourself, then the benefits of being edgy would cancel out as you wouldn’t have a larger society to defect against.
I know that right now this is just a theoretical exercise, but sometimes it does feel like society is fragmenting into smaller and smaller subcultures through a process fueled by globalization.
If no one had to suffer the consequences of other people’s bad decisions, there would be less need to worry about other people’s stupidity. Like, you could still feel sorry for them, but usually you would just shrug and tell them that if it starts hurting too much, they are free to change their minds.
Related: rational irrationality and paradox of tolerance.
If you live in a free society—not just technically following the letter of the law, but where most people will really not punish you in any way for having any kind of opinion—you can benefit socially from having “edgy” opinions. You get social rewards from people in the same subculture, without any costs imposed from outside. The society becomes the CooperateBot, and you can get lot of value by defecting against it. At least until a critical number of people starts following the same strategy, and then the system may suddenly fall apart.
Not sure if this has a solution, but even if there is one, it is probably too difficult for most people to follow. My first guess would be to increase intolerance proportionally to the benefits the “edgy” people get from rewarding each other… but that is difficult to estimate, difficult to do precisely, and most importantly does not distinguish between people who get social benefits from creating negative externalities (Nazis getting loyal Nazi friends) and people who simply get social benefits doing something neutral (chess players finding friends among chess players).
The only thing I can recommend is to notice when someone is trying to make you a CooperateBot. On the other hand, this is how intolerant people may genuinely feel when they hear about the idea of tolerance.
Funny, I just started reading The Open Society and Its Enemies to find some answers or at least threads to pull on.
One point that struct me, right in the introduction, is Popper saying that totalitarianism appeals to people because it absolves them of individual responsibility, a responsibility that we, humans, gained (became burdened by) because civilizational progress pull us out of tribes.
I understand your suggestion as being in line with this theme of personal responsibility—you cannot become any sort of -Bot and instead you have to evaluate every interaction separately and decide whether you want to cooperate or defect.
Also, I wonder if this problem exists in the type of uniform society we have now, but would become largely irrelevant in the type of society that Scott describes in Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism. If you lived on your own island full of edgy people like yourself, then the benefits of being edgy would cancel out as you wouldn’t have a larger society to defect against.
I know that right now this is just a theoretical exercise, but sometimes it does feel like society is fragmenting into smaller and smaller subcultures through a process fueled by globalization.
If no one had to suffer the consequences of other people’s bad decisions, there would be less need to worry about other people’s stupidity. Like, you could still feel sorry for them, but usually you would just shrug and tell them that if it starts hurting too much, they are free to change their minds.