[HN Gopher] Resilience requires helping each other out
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Resilience requires helping each other out
 
Author : kiyanwang
Score  : 96 points
Date   : 2023-07-10 05:16 UTC (1 days ago)
 
web link (surfingcomplexity.blog)
w3m dump (surfingcomplexity.blog)
 
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Before we reliably had money, we had barter and "mutual aid."
| Now, some people think you just _pay_ for stuff with money and if
| someone is  "nice" to you, you don't "owe" them anything.
| 
| A lot of people no longer seem to understand the implicit social
| contract behind such interactions and it can go bad places.
| 
| From religion to community development work to politics, there
| have been myriad attempts to educate people that if you don't
| understand that you are one figure in a larger equation where
| 1+1=3, then you are probably messing things up because that "3"
| isn't supposed to belong entirely to you as an individual and
| when other people get tired of being shafted, there will
| eventually be consequences.
| 
| You may be able to get away with claiming 1.75 of it and giving
| them 1.25 of it for a long damn time but if it becomes clear to
| them that all interactions between you and them benefit you at
| their expense, well, count on them eventually not being cool with
| that. (No, you don't get to keep shafting them and expecting
| something for nothing indefinitely, not even if you brainwash
| them into believing that being your victim is "The Christian
| thing to do" or some nonsense. If nothing else, it will
| eventually kill them, so this is simply not a sustainable model
| long-term.)
 
  | landemva wrote:
  | Yet Americans vote for religion of government that preaches we
  | will be taken care of by continuous deficit spending. Deficit
  | spending of money/value created out of thin air will eventually
  | reach a mathematical point of no return. Maybe USA is already
  | at that point, and now we wait for the judgement day when money
  | no longer has purchasing power.
 
| mistermann wrote:
| It would be wild if this was also true when it comes to
| countries, cultures, and species.
 
  | CatWChainsaw wrote:
  | wouldn't it though??
 
| tetha wrote:
| I'm very much seeing this at work.
| 
| We have a few dev-teams who are very responsive and cooperative.
| You see postgres complaining about queries from their
| application, you inform them, they realize the danger behind it
| and fix it. For these teams, we're perfectly fine providing prod
| analytics, adjusting parameters or sizing for a bit. Shitty
| queries happen, we compensate with some compute resources, you
| fix, we rescale. Entirely great, dev can move fast, we can be
| lean.
| 
| And then we have other teams. Some query executed twice for every
| user transaction has a high chance of resulting in unique key
| violations, which are logged as important errors. Fixes would be
| not too hard and have been communicated, but deemed "Not customer
| visible" and thus prioritized to death.
| 
| I'll let it up to guesses by the readers which project had sev-0
| issues caught early by us and fixed by dev with almost no impact
| to customers, and which project ended up with a .3% increase in
| query error rates, which ended up as a sev-0 issue, with SLA
| discussions involved, and we were entirely blamed for being
| unable to do shit or at least detect it early.
| 
| I dislike growing into the operations team I don't want to be,
| but some teams demand doing so very, very hard.
 
| nologic01 wrote:
| The question is how to organize reciprocity in large, complex and
| evolving systems. The canonical approach is through various
| contracts. But those can be too specific and poorly adapted and
| even worsen outcomes under stress.
| 
| Flexible contracts designed to perform when the "unknown
| unknowns" materialize are intuitively the "solution", except they
| dont mesh well will the more typical transactional arrangements
| that aim to decouple units.
 
  | landemva wrote:
  | An online tech community has been experimenting with
  | retroactive public goods. It is fascinating to watch these
  | efforts.
  | 
  | https://ethglobal.com/talks/hackathon-kick-off-retroactive-p...
 
  | ethanbond wrote:
  | 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 attacked under the hood.
 
    | nologic01 wrote:
    | 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 new set of norms, except not universally
    | shared...
 
    | JohnFen wrote:
    | > 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.
    | 
    | This also accurately describe a very large portion of silicon
    | valley firms.
 
| gcr wrote:
| 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, ref
| sheets, profile pics, and other art requests. As a cultural
| expectation, members of furry communities are also more willing
| to lean on others in times of need, and are also more likely to
| help others with their own struggles as resources allow.
 
| majkinetor wrote:
| If only positive reciprocity wasn't so easily gamed way too
| frequently. Its basically given that somebody will use your
| kidness/help for its own benefit leaving your with nothing in
| return. There is number of people I personally know that just let
| it happen over and over again... Its almost like some good deeds
| are invisible to some people.
 
  | AndrewKemendo wrote:
  | The solution I've come up with is to budget for this overage
  | 
  | So, some nonzero number of people will screw you over if you
  | are kind and give them a break. Add in a 10% emotional buffer
  | and don't give away what you can't lose, as you know that this
  | is going to happen.
 
| policepost wrote:
| This is sort of the fundamental building block of many socialist
| and anarchist movements.
| 
| The concept of "mutual aid" as put forward by folks like
| Kropotkin is basically we should build communities that help one
| another, offering our communities excess when we have our, and
| gracefully accepting aid when we need it.
 
  | squirtlebonflow wrote:
  | Unfortunately, the term mutual aid has been co-opted by
  | democrats to mean "charity". Likely because there is a stigma
  | in our society around accepting help...
 
    | johnchristopher wrote:
    | Democrats mean different things to an international audience.
    | Which democrats are we talking about here ?
 
      | thumbuddy wrote:
      | Who knows but what is evident is it's just an angry
      | Republican who is struggling to see beyond duality...
 
        | toolz wrote:
        | 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.
 
  | high_5 wrote:
  | That was the way of life for any community before industrial
  | revolution. It appears that all attempts at creating such
  | communities have more or less failed, because they eventually
  | become coopted either for or against capitalistic economy.
 
    | getmeinrn wrote:
    | They tend not to fail when religion is a pillar in the
    | community. The Amish and Mennonites are great examples.
 
      | willcipriano wrote:
      | I don't believe this behavior has ever been observed in a
      | regliously and ethnically diverse population. People have
      | to be basically related to one another, sharing a core
      | common belief for it to work.
 
        | majormajor wrote:
        | Historically the progression has been (oversimplified):
        | 
        | some sort of reciprocal/mutual aid economy -> exchange
        | (usually external) -> joining in with currency and
        | capitalism
        | 
        | In my view the clear main factor is external disruption
        | that forces groups into the market/currency based
        | economy. That, plus the difficulties to control bad
        | actors if you had a more informal system at huge scale
        | (millions of people).
        | 
        | Without the external economic disruption you simply just
        | don't _get_ much diversity.
        | 
        | As far as specific events, things like disaster
        | assistance volunteer operations in the West tend to be
        | both religiously and ethnically diverse yet performed
        | independently of expected remuneration. Otherwise it's
        | not like we're observing huge samples if we restrict
        | ourselves to looking just for communities that have both
        | been religiously and ethnically diverse. Is the failure
        | of any such alternate community to last for centuries -
        | when the opportunity has barely even been there for that
        | long - conclusive at all?
 
        | jonathankoren wrote:
        | That's not true. That's common misinformation, but it's
        | not true. In fact it's not just wrong, but it's the exact
        | opposite of what happens.
        | 
        | You just have to look at pretty much any disaster.
        | Communities come together. They do not become
        | cannibalistic hordes like peppers think. This has been
        | proven again, again, and again. There's entire studies on
        | it.
 
        | MisterBastahrd wrote:
        | The Cajun navy, for example, is well documented as going
        | out to other communities including out of state
        | communities that do not share the same ethnicity and have
        | helped people for years in flood conditions. Only helping
        | people out because of the religion they follow is utterly
        | barbaric anyway.
 
        | [deleted]
 
        | forgetfulness wrote:
        | Both happen, you'll get both neighborhoods organizing as
        | tribes, and the roving gangs of looters and arsonists,
        | the former may spring up in response to the latter.
        | 
        | At least that was the experience in Chile in the most
        | affected localities of the 2010 magnitude 8.8 earthquake.
        | 
        | We called down the breakdown of social order that
        | happened "the social earthquake". Eventually the military
        | had to instate curfews to restore public order, though it
        | was taken to be a display of cracks existing in society
        | that the looting happened in the first place rather than
        | just taken for granted as what will happen in face of
        | disruption of social order, which is the prepper view.
 
        | nologic01 wrote:
        | We are all related to each other. A pandemic can wipe us
        | out. A major climate event or a nuclear accident can
        | wreak havoc, increasingly high tech wars can eliminate
        | billions.
        | 
        | We choose to downplay our common dependencies and
        | exaggerate the differences. Its a social game we have
        | learned to play when the stakes for our collective
        | survival were lower.
 
        | varjag wrote:
        | This is an improperly low level of abstraction to the
        | problem, akin to "we're all made of atoms". True and
        | useless.
 
        | em-bee wrote:
        | on the contrary, everyone of us needs to realize that we
        | are part of a global community and that all of our
        | actions accumulate to have an effect across the world. so
        | instead of saying that this will never work because we
        | are to diverse, instead we need to strive and MAKE IT
        | WORK! put aside our differences, find common ground and
        | build a global cooperative community that includes every
        | human being on this planet.
 
        | neolefty wrote:
        | I think the trick is to learn how to scale it up. One
        | view of human history is to see it as increasing scales
        | of fellow-feeling and practical cooperation.
 
      | landemva wrote:
      | Those communities have mechanisms to censor mis-behaving
      | persons. Participants must agree, when entering the group,
      | to social rules including censure.
 
  | ramesh31 wrote:
  | >This is sort of the fundamental building block of many
  | socialist and anarchist movements.
  | 
  | It's also the fundamental error that all of the "self reliant,
  | self sufficient" doomsday prepper types make. When the
  | apocalypse comes, your little homestead will be nothing but a
  | supply cache for raiders. It doesn't matter how many guns you
  | have. Without a functioning, hierarchical, tight knit community
  | to aid in defense, you and your family will be sold off to the
  | first band of roaming slavers that come through.
 
| renewiltord wrote:
| There's lots of communities where this is true and it doesn't
| require a full scale "end to capitalism" or whatever. Ultimately,
| you can get quite far with Coase's Theory of the Firm as a model.
| 
| Nail salons for immigrants, the motel business, the Afghan tamale
| business. These all have massive graph interconnectedness in
| their social structure. You can have it, too, if you'd like.
| 
| Since I found it quite possible to do in the Bay Area, I'm going
| to say it's quite feasible and the problem is entirely down to
| what your inner self permits. You have to be very comfortable
| offering and accepting favours. And the second is as important as
| the first.
 
  | vorpalhex wrote:
  | There are deep flaws to favour driven communities which often
  | lead to bribery and coercion. Since a favour has opaque cost
  | compared to transparent cost, bad actors can easily use them as
  | a weapon of coercion.
 
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