All equilibria are a balance of at least two forces. You’re laying out a case for the forces pushing toward privacy/lying/hypocrisy side of social interactions. What are the forces opposing them? Why is anyone trying to tell the truth in the first place?
Are there any advantages to playing the level 1 game, or does this all boil down to “human implies political, get good at it”?
Level 1 has a massive advantage in any sort of conflict where control over objective reality matters, such as shooting wars or ability to produce verifiable miracles. It also has a large enough survival advantage inside sufficiently harsh environments, since they produce “objective” feedback (e.g. marginal agricultural communities in cold areas, but also businesses under severe competitive pressure with tight margins, and armies fighting wars—incompetent people get weeded out fast when top level people see an overwhelming interest in achieving some difficult objective task).
The Elijah story is followed by the Elisha story where one dude outmaneuvers multiple heads of state, replacing them with puppets with varying levels of allegiance to him, by paying close attention to what’s going on. But you can only do this if you know about and can detect the other levels
Hmm, maybe I don’t understand the levels. I’d assumed that higher levels include lower ones, rather than denying their existence. It’s absolutely possible, in my world, to recognize that there is a reality, and to still weigh the social appearance against it.
It’s not that higher simulacrum level players can’t do level 1 internally, it’s that if people play higher levels inside an organization, that organization’s information processing is corrupted, and it gets worse at the sorts of things level 1 is good at. There are huge advantages to groups being able to coordinate on level 1, and there are advantages to individuals knowing about all four levels.
To some extent levels 3 and 4, if practiced commonly enough, erode the ability to talk in level 1 language.
The clearest issue with OP’s scenarios is that all the “accusations” portrayed involve cheap talk—thus, they are of no use other than as a pure “sunspot” or coordination mechanism. This is why you want privacy in such a world; there is no real information anyway, so not having “privacy” just makes you more vulnerable! Back in the real world, even the very act of accusing someone may be endowed with enough information that some truthful evidence is actually available to third parties. And this makes it feasible to coordinate around “telling the truth”—though truth-tellers still have to work hard at finding the best feasible signals and screening mechanisms! Yes, “human implies political”—but even useful truth-telling involves playing politics, of a sort. (This is something that the local OB/LW subculture is not always ready to acknowledge, of course. It’s why we have a deeper problem with politics here.)
All equilibria are a balance of at least two forces. You’re laying out a case for the forces pushing toward privacy/lying/hypocrisy side of social interactions. What are the forces opposing them? Why is anyone trying to tell the truth in the first place?
Are there any advantages to playing the level 1 game, or does this all boil down to “human implies political, get good at it”?
Level 1 has a massive advantage in any sort of conflict where control over objective reality matters, such as shooting wars or ability to produce verifiable miracles. It also has a large enough survival advantage inside sufficiently harsh environments, since they produce “objective” feedback (e.g. marginal agricultural communities in cold areas, but also businesses under severe competitive pressure with tight margins, and armies fighting wars—incompetent people get weeded out fast when top level people see an overwhelming interest in achieving some difficult objective task).
The Elijah story is followed by the Elisha story where one dude outmaneuvers multiple heads of state, replacing them with puppets with varying levels of allegiance to him, by paying close attention to what’s going on. But you can only do this if you know about and can detect the other levels
Hmm, maybe I don’t understand the levels. I’d assumed that higher levels include lower ones, rather than denying their existence. It’s absolutely possible, in my world, to recognize that there is a reality, and to still weigh the social appearance against it.
It’s not that higher simulacrum level players can’t do level 1 internally, it’s that if people play higher levels inside an organization, that organization’s information processing is corrupted, and it gets worse at the sorts of things level 1 is good at. There are huge advantages to groups being able to coordinate on level 1, and there are advantages to individuals knowing about all four levels.
To some extent levels 3 and 4, if practiced commonly enough, erode the ability to talk in level 1 language.
The clearest issue with OP’s scenarios is that all the “accusations” portrayed involve cheap talk—thus, they are of no use other than as a pure “sunspot” or coordination mechanism. This is why you want privacy in such a world; there is no real information anyway, so not having “privacy” just makes you more vulnerable! Back in the real world, even the very act of accusing someone may be endowed with enough information that some truthful evidence is actually available to third parties. And this makes it feasible to coordinate around “telling the truth”—though truth-tellers still have to work hard at finding the best feasible signals and screening mechanisms! Yes, “human implies political”—but even useful truth-telling involves playing politics, of a sort. (This is something that the local OB/LW subculture is not always ready to acknowledge, of course. It’s why we have a deeper problem with politics here.)