Why do so many good things have horizontal transmission structures?
A free market isn’t a lawless jungle of arbitrary one-shot interactions. It’s an engineered game where participants can’t be forced into deals and should keep promises. That pushes the great mass of interactions away from “predatory” and toward “positive-sum”.
There are many ways to help create cooperative rather than competitive outcomes—vertical/horizontal is not the whole picture. Reputation networks achieve the same results as iteration, even if all interactions are basically one-shot. Enforcement mechanisms enable cooperation in one-shot scenarios. Many things which are apparently massively horizontal use these tools to mitigate virality.
1a. Information is almost as good as iteration.
In a reputation network, you get to know about a potential interaction partner before interacting with them. This is useful for predicting them. Also, you know that if the interaction goes sour, you can reduce their reputation. This gives them an incentive to keep everything cooperative. (And likewise, gives you a similar incentive.)
At least in America, such reputation networks have been formalized in the credit bureau, as well as various other institutions such as Amazon seller ratings.
We can also talk more generally about getting information, not necessarily through an overt reputation network. Background checks, consumer reports, product reviews, … (OK, you can technically think of all of that as reputation networks in a sense...)
In modern capitalism, you don’t just encounter random people trying to sell things you’ve never heard before. You have quite a bit of information about products. Granted, not really enough information. (It’s very difficult to evaluate what’s really healthy, since the state of the research is often poor and difficult to evaluate. Making a food product is a complex affair which can’t really be summarized by a list of ingredients and nutrition information. And so on.) But some information.
In science, obviously, information is the whole name of the game. Yes, there are problems. Serious problems. But a priori it’s not clear whether we should expect “virulent meme” type problems in a scientific environment. There’s a ton of horizontal transmission, but it’s in a context where carefully vetting ideas is the whole project.
Education is another matter. You do get some rough information in the form of graduate employment statistics. However, there’s a real information asymmetry problem. It’s difficult to evaluate the quality of education if you don’t know the stuff yet. You could rely on the assessment of experts, but this really doesn’t alleviate the horizontal transmission concern; it’s like asking smokers whether smoking is good.
1b. Enforcement mechanisms.
Free-market economies rely on a lot of enforceable contracts, as well as criminal law which disincentives general bad behavior.
Obviously, this only goes so far in eliminating “predatory” behavior.
Ad. “Information is almost as good as iteration.”—speculative
There is a correlation between intelligence and openness—and the causal link is that people with intelligence can do simulations of others and predict their behaviour better so evolution packs these two traits together.
Why do so many good things have horizontal transmission structures?
There are many ways to help create cooperative rather than competitive outcomes—vertical/horizontal is not the whole picture. Reputation networks achieve the same results as iteration, even if all interactions are basically one-shot. Enforcement mechanisms enable cooperation in one-shot scenarios. Many things which are apparently massively horizontal use these tools to mitigate virality.
1a. Information is almost as good as iteration.
In a reputation network, you get to know about a potential interaction partner before interacting with them. This is useful for predicting them. Also, you know that if the interaction goes sour, you can reduce their reputation. This gives them an incentive to keep everything cooperative. (And likewise, gives you a similar incentive.)
At least in America, such reputation networks have been formalized in the credit bureau, as well as various other institutions such as Amazon seller ratings.
We can also talk more generally about getting information, not necessarily through an overt reputation network. Background checks, consumer reports, product reviews, … (OK, you can technically think of all of that as reputation networks in a sense...)
In modern capitalism, you don’t just encounter random people trying to sell things you’ve never heard before. You have quite a bit of information about products. Granted, not really enough information. (It’s very difficult to evaluate what’s really healthy, since the state of the research is often poor and difficult to evaluate. Making a food product is a complex affair which can’t really be summarized by a list of ingredients and nutrition information. And so on.) But some information.
In science, obviously, information is the whole name of the game. Yes, there are problems. Serious problems. But a priori it’s not clear whether we should expect “virulent meme” type problems in a scientific environment. There’s a ton of horizontal transmission, but it’s in a context where carefully vetting ideas is the whole project.
Education is another matter. You do get some rough information in the form of graduate employment statistics. However, there’s a real information asymmetry problem. It’s difficult to evaluate the quality of education if you don’t know the stuff yet. You could rely on the assessment of experts, but this really doesn’t alleviate the horizontal transmission concern; it’s like asking smokers whether smoking is good.
1b. Enforcement mechanisms.
Free-market economies rely on a lot of enforceable contracts, as well as criminal law which disincentives general bad behavior.
Obviously, this only goes so far in eliminating “predatory” behavior.
Ad. “Information is almost as good as iteration.”—speculative There is a correlation between intelligence and openness—and the causal link is that people with intelligence can do simulations of others and predict their behaviour better so evolution packs these two traits together.