[HN Gopher] Resilience requires helping each other out
___________________________________________________________________
Resilience requires helping each other out
Author : kiyanwang
Score : 96 points
Date : 2023-07-10 05:16 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (surfingcomplexity.blog)
(TXT) 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-07-11 23:00 UTC)