Social Learning Links, 3/24/2025

Tove K on game theory and evolution; Brian Chau on nice people and power; Greg Lukianoff and Angel Eduardo on the betrayal of trust; Dan Williams on social media

Tove K writes,

with cooperative strategies comes strategies that prey on cooperation. After all, a good cooperator will only get their fair share. A person who resembles a cooperative person, but in fact acts treacherously in unexpected ways, might increase their chances of acquiring more than others. It is a dangerous game, because such a person runs a very high risk of being excluded from cooperation or even killed outright. But what works, works, and getting killed wasn't exactly unusual among perfectly honest cooperators either in less civilized environments.

I say that evolution plays a mixed strategy. It doesn’t always play cooperator, and it doesn’t always play cheater. It sustains a mix of both.

She also writes,

Through such a series of lucky strikes, Donald Trump climbed his way to the presidency of the United States. Countless people with the same kind of grandiose delusion instead become homeless and miserable. Grandiose delusions are a mental state with a great distribution: A few delusional individuals probably get so successful from believing that they are successful that they perpetuate the genes that predispose people for grandiose delusions.

And also,

the unusual thing with delusional people is not their low level of realism, but their relationship to what other people believe. Most people in most societies hold unrealistic and illogical beliefs to some degree. The unusual thing is to go against the crowd in one's unrealism. Ordinary people have two windows to reality, used in various proportions: What other people say and what they perceive with their own senses. People with delusional mental illnesses have a third window: Things they make up themselves.

Brian Chau writes,

boomer environmentalists are veritably some of the most vile, destructive, and selfish people alive. They have literally stolen my future and the future of those I love. They deserve all the insults I have to give and more. Boomer environmentalists deserve to be exiled from polite society. They have done more harm to this country than any number of twitter anons tweeting racial slurs.

But that his not his main point. His main point is

The worst thing Abundance-minded people on both sides of the aisle have done to themselves is to convince themselves of the marketplace of ideas. This is the fundamental contradiction of the Abundance Democrat movement — they’re already on the side of the 80%, yet they act like they have a problem with persuasion. They don’t. They have a power problem — a problem entirely located in their own hearts.

Leo Durocher said “Nice guys finish last.” Brian is too young to know to use that quote.

I think there is a law lurking in Chau’s post. Sort of a Gresham’s Law of political power: bad people outcompete good people in contests for power.

Greg Lukianoff and Angel Eduardo write,

Those who decried and dismissed the lab leak hypothesis showed an unwarranted level of certainty and arrogance. It’s not as if there had been a massive investigation, with the cooperation of the Chinese government, to get to the bottom of this and definitively establish the origins of the virus…

platitudes like “trust the science,” or signs saying, “In this house we believe…,” which were repeated like mantras and plastered everywhere, show themselves to be mere tribal signifiers — symbols of a group’s certainty and moral superiority. More than that, they betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what science actually is: the systematic application of doubt.

It’s difficult to overstate just how much damage our academic, scientific, and intellectual elites have done to our universe of shared facts, our institutions, and the public’s ability and willingness to believe them. There is a growing sense among people that trust and confidence in our experts and institutions is unwarranted — and particularly in the last ten years, there has been no shortage of behavior to justify this suspicion.

I think that it helps to focus on the difference between a prestige hierarchy and a dominance hierarchy. In a prestige hierarchy, people lower in the hierarchy willingly look up to those higher up. In a dominance hierarchy, people on top force those on the bottom to obey, against their will. The way that scientists went about dismissing the lab leak hypothesis was to use dominance moves, not prestige moves. A prestige move would have involved making a persuasive case against the lab leak hypothesis, not just bad-mouthing it.

Elites, when threatened, turn to dominance moves. This only lowers their status further, making them feel more threatened. It is a vicious cycle. The way out is for elites to behave better, working to try to earn prestige, rather than trying to win it through intimidation.

Lukianoff and Eduardo conclude,

Believable authority and good reputations are very hard to build and very easy to lose. Sadly, our expert class has damaged their credibility in the eyes of the public far more than they seem to actually understand. It’s going to take serious work to get it back, and it won’t happen overnight. As we continue to barrel our way into an uncertain future, we are going to need institutions to create, disseminate, and safeguard knowledge — and an expert class that shows itself to be worthy of our trust.

Dan Williams writes,

it somehow escaped their attention that ideological fragmentation and polarisation were far worse throughout much of pre-social media history.

To take only the most striking example, early-twentieth-century Europe involved intense ideological conflicts between a wide range of political movements, including literal fascists and communists. Tens of millions died as a result of such conflicts.

Historically, long periods of social peace are the exception rather than the rule. From that perspective, Williams would argue that we are putting too much blame on social media for the strife we experience currently.

What about the peculiar reward systems of social media, which get us to pay attention to the number of likes and the number of followers? Williams writes,

most people do not gamify their online communication. Nevertheless, a distinctive feature of social media is that it rewards and amplifies an extremely psychologically unusual segment of the population who do.

Viewed in this way—as a description of a selection effect, not a treatment effect—the gamification analysis is insightful.

Hmmm. Maybe social media selects people for the Dark Triad traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Like politics, then.

substacks referenced above: @

Social media isn't destroying society

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The misinformation crisis isn’t about truth, it’s about trust

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Abundance

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The game: How delusions can make people excellent players