I think the main thing is I can’t think of many examples where it seems like the active-ingredient in the strategy is the conformity-that-would-be-ruined-by-information.
The most common sort of strategy I’m imagining is “we are a community that requires costly signals for group membership” (i.e. strict sexual norms, subscribing to and professing the latest dogma, giving to the poor), but costly signals are, well, costly, so there’s incentive for people to pretend to meet them without actually doing so.
If it became common knowledge that nobody or very few people were “really” doing the work, one thing that might happen is that the community’s bonds would weaken or disintegrate. But I think these sorts of social norms would mostly just adapt to the new environment, in one of a few ways:
come up with new norms that are more complicated, such that it’s harder to check (even given perfect information) whether someone is meeting them. I think this what often happened in academia. (See jokes about postmodernism, where people can review each other’s work, but the work is sort of deliberately inscrutable so it’s hard to see if it says anything meaningful)
people just develop a norm of not checking in on each other (cooperating for the sake of preserving the fiction), and scrutiny is only actually deployed against political opponents.
(The latter one at least creates an interesting mutually assured destruction thing that probably makes people less willing to attack each other openly, but humans also just seem pretty good at taking social games into whatever domain seems most plausibly deniable)
I think the main thing is I can’t think of many examples where it seems like the active-ingredient in the strategy is the conformity-that-would-be-ruined-by-information.
The most common sort of strategy I’m imagining is “we are a community that requires costly signals for group membership” (i.e. strict sexual norms, subscribing to and professing the latest dogma, giving to the poor), but costly signals are, well, costly, so there’s incentive for people to pretend to meet them without actually doing so.
If it became common knowledge that nobody or very few people were “really” doing the work, one thing that might happen is that the community’s bonds would weaken or disintegrate. But I think these sorts of social norms would mostly just adapt to the new environment, in one of a few ways:
come up with new norms that are more complicated, such that it’s harder to check (even given perfect information) whether someone is meeting them. I think this what often happened in academia. (See jokes about postmodernism, where people can review each other’s work, but the work is sort of deliberately inscrutable so it’s hard to see if it says anything meaningful)
people just develop a norm of not checking in on each other (cooperating for the sake of preserving the fiction), and scrutiny is only actually deployed against political opponents.
(The latter one at least creates an interesting mutually assured destruction thing that probably makes people less willing to attack each other openly, but humans also just seem pretty good at taking social games into whatever domain seems most plausibly deniable)