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Resilience requires helping each other out

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Re: Resilience requires helping each other out

#81

Post by llamama »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #71
CraigJPerry wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Before we reliably had money, we had barter As far as i know there’s no evidence for this. No historical economy which worked primarily on barter has been discovered. As i understand it, Adam Smith suggested this was the case and it’s now given as rote learning in economics but that historians have never found conclusive proof that this is the case. The wiki entry for barter has this: “No ethnographic studies have…

On the one hand, the proposition is kind of obvious and self-evident - "I'll trade you ${thing you want} for ${thing I want}" is the next step from "I'll beat you up and take ${thing I want} from you", and then basic money is just doing the trade in two steps. On the other hand, single-step trading - that is, barter - gets infeasible as the primary trading model very quickly . Not because of specialization (the "I wa…

I suggest taking a look at the book “Debt: The First 5000 Years” by David Graeber.

As parent suggests, this is a popular misconception. It’s a nice story, but its made up. Upon a more thorough historical analysis, evidence suggests that in fact, money came first. Not barter.

The author makes some solid arguments to support this.

Re: Resilience requires helping each other out

#82

Post by TeMPOraL »

gsatic wrote: post #78
TeMPOraL wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Upper class society seems to still honor those implicit social contracts, but only if you are already part of the in crowd and your disfavor could come back to bite them. And this is exactly how "barter and >" worked "Before we reliably had money"; this is exactly "the implicit social contract behind such interactions" that you refer to. Upper class society is a small group , pretty close to the point of everyone i…

Scale needs to have some purpose. We are not ants or weeds.

It has a purpose: survival. Bigger groups have a better chance of surviving all kinds of adversities - and especially conflicts with other groups. Once you have enough humans in an area that they start to compete for resources, being a part of the larger group suddenly becomes critical for survival. This makes for a very strong selection pressure for group size, and starts a scaling race. If you want your people to thrive, you need to scale up faster than your neighbors. People who didn't want to scale their group - perhaps saying to themselves things like "scale needs to have some purpose", or "we are not ants or weeds" - those people all got absorbed into or killed by groups that did care.

IANAHistorian, but my current understanding is that this is the leading hypothesis for the rise of agriculture, and demise of hunter-gatherer groups - settling down to farm the land was, overall, a big quality of life downgrade compared to hunting and gathering, but it also could easily accommodate continued growth of population, wealth and knowledge. In contrast, hunting and gathering lifestyle was a scaling dead end. As a result, agricultural societies were quickly able to overtake and outcompete hunter-gatherers - where by "outcompete", I mean chase away, kill, absorb or even just outbreed them.

Re: Resilience requires helping each other out

#83

Post by spiralx »

nologic01 wrote: post #18
ethanbond wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social norms are really good at this stuff as long as people do actually spurn people who violate them. There’s been a recent spate of celebrities in the US who’ve “succeeded” by staying arguably within the bounds of legality while well outside the bounds of the norms we ought to want. Too much of those conversations end up about the legality and not about the much more powerful and more precarious norms being attack…

Social contracts are indeed the prime example. But its not clear how we can use them effectively going forward as everything seems to be working against them. E.g., rapid social evolution, urbanization and migration creates strangers that only adhere to minimal common norms. There is also the ambiguous role of social media. While frequently accused of inducing toxicity and polarization, this may actually promote a ne…

What's happening is that all of these rapid changes have left people with whiplash and feeling dislocated from the institutions that make up the societies they live in and play a large part in the establishing of norms. And FPTP voting systems inherently lead to a two-party system which breeds polarisation and turns into arguments about differences instead of searching for solutions to systemic problems.

Re: Resilience requires helping each other out

#84

Post by jstarfish »

gcr wrote: post #17

I’m having trouble tracking down the source, but one study found that furry communities are abnormally resilient to financial stress (especially during the pandemic) compared to other communities with similar cohesion and structures. The authors postulated that this was because furries and otherkin are more likely to enter into financial transactions with each other, giving and getting in exchange for commissions, re…

There has to be a correlation with network size though, and it requires continuous struggle.

Fringe cliques (religious movements, homeless, musicians/fans, UFO conspiracy theorists, gays pre-DOMA, etc.) can't tolerate internal shenanigans and necessarily band together for survival. If you're Jewish/gay/homeless, other Jews/gays/homeless will help you out. The network is small enough that cheating gets you blackballed, and your community can't suffer losses because that's one less resource to rely on-- so people will have each other's backs.

There just always seems to come a threshold after which point the utility and trust afforded by inclusivity diminishes. If you can host a Pride parade without incident, you've crossed it. Like Catholics, LGBTs are everywhere these days so there's nothing unique about it-- hence the endless push for inclusion of additional subcliques (QIA+). "We're like you, but our rules are different, and don't you dare say we're the same." It's massive enough to have schisms. Welcome to the Gay Reformation.

Furry-ism hasn't become mainstream. That community will lose its magic the second they do.

Re: Resilience requires helping each other out

#86

Post by varjag »

nologic01 wrote: post #39
varjag wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an improperly low level of abstraction to the problem, akin to "we're all made of atoms". True and useless.

What would be the proper level of abstraction according to your view?

Acknowledging and operating with the group dynamics. Expecting consensus among billions is just as futile as waiting the entropy of a gas to spontaneously decrease.

Re: Resilience requires helping each other out

#87

Post by thumbuddy »

toolz wrote: post #79
thumbuddy wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhere between right and wrong there is a field. I will meet you there.

I agree that gray area is optimal, but I don't think you can afford yourself that kind of charity while not providing it to someone else in the very same comment. Do unto others how you want others to do unto you. If you want to judge strictly, you shouldn't ask to be judged with leniency.

What I did and what they did were very different. They contorted a word in the title of an article to be a political statement, unironically an infactual and harmful one.

For example see which political party gave handouts too banks, or which party created a cottage industry of fraud during a time of economical and existential chrisis (COVID) to the tune of trillions of dollars. It wasn't the "democrats".

You can judge me as you wish, I have no interest in controlling that.

The point of my reply was "this is how you deal with these people". You make it clear they have been sucked into propaganda, and you give them no quarters for their "views" because doing so legitimizes the sudden rise of fascism in the United States.

Fairness and tolerance is fine in civil society. When incivility reigns, well you can call a turd a turd. It's really the least you can do given what's at stake.

Re: Resilience requires helping each other out

#88

Post by em-bee »

varjag wrote: post #86
nologic01 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be the proper level of abstraction according to your view?

Acknowledging and operating with the group dynamics. Expecting consensus among billions is just as futile as waiting the entropy of a gas to spontaneously decrease.

we only need consensus on the big issues, like pollution and things like human rights. and we should agree to solve conflicts peacefully. trying to achieve consensus on everything would not just be futile but counterproductive. consensus is only needed by those that are affected by a decision. anyone not affected should not even get a say.

Re: Resilience requires helping each other out

#89

Post by gsatic »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #82
gsatic wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scale needs to have some purpose. We are not ants or weeds.

It has a purpose: survival. Bigger groups have a better chance of surviving all kinds of adversities - and especially conflicts with other groups . Once you have enough humans in an area that they start to compete for resources, being a part of the larger group suddenly becomes critical for survival. This makes for a very strong selection pressure for group size, and starts a scaling race. If you want your people to…

All this has been used historically to justify empire, monopolies and nation states. Yet empires, monopolies and nation states die out all the times. Cities on the other hand regularly outlive them all. Rome still stands. Thats an example of scale serving and not serving purpose.

To understand that circle back to the original article. People have only recently got their hands on scaling tools (reserved for the upper classes in the past). And now everyone is waking up to the consequence of using the tools, without purpose. Defining purpose as groups get larger and larger, gets more and more complex as Needs diverge drastically. Yet it happens and happens naturally, when and where there is history of members helping each other out.

Re: Resilience requires helping each other out

#90

Post by policepost »

toolz wrote: post #16
thumbuddy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who knows but what is evident is it's just an angry Republican who is struggling to see beyond duality...

You've just committed the same offense you're rebuking someone for. It's not evident that person is republican, it's only evident that they blame the democrats for a problem.

I actually read the critique of democrats are coming from the left. Left wing folks tend to hate the Dems (who are a center right party).
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