The Relationship Between Cooperation And Feedback

[Xerographica]

Who is more useful?

Infected Mushroom $1
Xerographica $2

You can answer the same question with voting and/or donating*. To participate in the donating poll, make a donation to NS and reply to this thread how you want it divided between Infected Mushroom (IM) and myself. Please round your donation up (ie $2.99 -> $3) and make even dollar divisions (ie IM: $2 Xero: $1).

If you love this website, but needed a nice nudge to support it, then voila! Here it is! Plus, as an additional perk, you can use your donation to help judge the relative usefulness of IM and myself.

In case you were wondering, IM agreed beforehand to participate in this informal fundraiser. The reason why I chose him is because I personally find his thread topics to be useful. Basically, I see him as my closest competitor. So I figured it would be interesting to see how everyone ranks us by usefulness.

Naturally I’m especially interested to see how much difference there’s going to be between the voting poll and the donating poll. As some of you might already know, I believe that spending is better than voting at measuring usefulness. So I perceive that it’s a really big problem that we use voting to rank so many things… such as Youtube videos.

On Youtube I’ve recently been watching and enjoying the original Cosmos. In one episode Carl Sagan said that our “ancestors groped in darkness to make sense of their surroundings." This is certainly true, but not just of our ancestors. Prior to watching that episode I had been groping around Andrew Gelman’s blog where I discovered, thanks to a comment by Steve Sailer, a talk that Paul Krugman gave in 1996… What Economists Can Learn From Evolutionary Theorists. He said that…

[Evolution-minded economists] want to represent decisions as the result of some process of groping through alternatives, a process in which it may take a long time to get to a maximum - and in which the maximum you find may well be local rather than global.

Later in his talk he gave the example of how life solely consisted of unicellular organisms for several billion years. Why did it take so long for multicellular organisms to evolve and how, exactly, did they evolve? What if it had only taken them a billion years to evolve? How different would life now be? I’m guessing that we’d be much better gropers.

I sure wish that I was a much better groper… it took me over two decades to discover Krugman’s really enjoyable talk, which might be even more enjoyable than his 1997 article… In Praise of Cheap Labor. That article also took me way too long to discover. If you compare his article and/or talk to his recent articles then you’d notice that he really lost his loving feeling for markets. So from my perspective, Krugman went from being a terrific groper to being a terrible groper. His labor became a lot less useful to me personally. Does it matter how useful his labor is to me? Does it matter whether my labor is more, or less, useful to you than IM’s labor?

If it does matter how we perceive the usefulness of each other’s behavior, then it’s important to figure out whether voting or spending is a better form of feedback. My best guess is that spending is a much better form of feedback, so embracing it would transform us into a much better group of gropers, which would greatly improve our grasp of reality.

Here’s some useful reading…

10 Things You Don't Know about Yourself by Steve Ayan
A Hidden Promise in the Language Cells Use to Communicate by Carrie Arnold
A Marxist perspective on cancer by PZ Myers
Early Multicellularity by Brandon Keim
From Groups to Individuals: Evolution and Emerging Individuality by Johannes Martens
Homosexuality and evolution by PZ Myers
How Did Multicellular Life Evolve? by Charles Q. Choi
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution by Peter Kropotkin
The evolution of costly displays, cooperation and religion by Joseph Henrich
The False Allure of Group Selection by Steven Pinker
The Philosophy of Social Evolution by Jonathan Birch

And here are some useful passages from The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins...

The rivalry between individual organism and group of organisms for the vehicle role, being a real rivalry, can be settled. As it happens the outcome, in my view, is a decisive victory for the individual organism. The group is too wishy-washy an entity. A herd of deer, a pride of lions or a pack of wolves has a certain rudimentary coherence and unity of purpose. But this is paltry in comparison to the coherence and unity of purpose of the body of an individual lion, wolf, or deer. That this is true is now widely accepted, but why is it true? - Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

Colonies of genes they may be but, in their behaviour, bodies have undeniably acquired an individuality of their own. An animal moves as a coordinated whole, as a unit. Subjectively I feel like a unit, not a colony. This is to be expected. Selection has favoured genes that cooperate with others. In the fierce competition for scarce resources, in the relentless struggle to eat other survival machines, and to avoid being eaten, there must have been a premium on central coordination rather than anarchy within the communal body. Nowadays the intricate mutual co-evolution of genes has proceeded to such an extent that the communal nature of an individual survival machine is virtually unrecognizable. Indeed many biologists do not recognize it, and will disagree with me. - Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

What about the naked mole rats described in the previous note? They exemplify the going concern or 'hollow tree' principle to perfection, though their going concern does not literally involve a hollow tree. The key to their story is probably the patchy distribution of their food supply underneath the savannah. They feed mainly on underground tubers. These tubers can be very large and very deeply buried. A single tuber of one such species can outweigh 1000 mole rats and, once found, can last the colony for months or even years. But the problem is finding the tubers, for they are scattered randomly and sporadically throughout the savannah. For mole rats, a food source is difficult to find but well worth it once found. Robert Brett has calculated that a single mole rat, working on its own, would have to search so long to find a single tuber that it would wear its teeth out with digging. A large social colony, with its miles of busily patrolled burrows, is an efficient tuber-mine. Each individual is economically better off as part of a union of fellow miners. - Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

Please discuss the following:

1. Does it matter how useful you are to us?
2. Does feedback improve cooperation?
3. Is voting or spending a better form of feedback?
4. Should donating polls replace banner ads and pop-ups?

What say you NSG?

[The donation poll last updated to include Xero's input]

*Previous donations cannot be applied to current donating polls

[New Emeline]

Um, what is this?

[Xerographica]

I just became a Supporter! It only took me six years.

IM: $1
Xero: $2

[Mushet]

I'm sure I speak for much of NSG when I say we care little for either of you.

Both are certainly prolific though.

Also if you see NS posts as labor you're taking it too seriously for your own good.

And groping without consent is bad mmkay.

[Washington Resistance Army]

I demand a "Neither" option.

[Anywhere Else But Here]

Um, what is this?

Xero thread #462

[Anywhere Else But Here]

I demand a "Neither" option.

But are you willing to demonstrate your preference for a "Neither" option by spending money on it?

[Xerographica]

I'm sure I speak for much of NSG when I say we care little for either of you.

So who do you, and NSG, care the most for? And is voting or donating a better way to measure care?

[The Two Jerseys]

Um, what is this?

Xero thread #462

Which is just Xero Thread #1 with 460 new coats of paint.

[MERIZoC]

In case you were wondering, IM agreed beforehand to participate in this informal fundraiser. The reason why I chose him is because

you're both of a certain disposition

[Bombadil]

I hope Samantha the Bee makes an appearance.

[Xerographica]

I hope Samantha the Bee makes an appearance.

Here's Samantha the bee...

Research also shows that animal democracies, like human ones, can go awry. For instance, Seeley found that bees sometimes chose a mediocre—even terrible—site over an objectively better option. When this happened, it was invariably because they had “satisficed”—that is, settled for a plausible choice that came in early, rather than waiting for more options. Seeley told me he once saw several bees return to a hive and perform “unenthusiastic, lethargic” dances. With no great choices, they began coalescing around the best of the middling ones. At the last minute, though, “one bee came back, and she was so excited,” Seeley said. “She danced and danced and danced. She must have found something wonderful. But it was too late.” The bees had picked their candidate; momentum carried the day. - William Brennan, How to Sway a Baboon Despot

And here's Samantha the beer.

[Galloism]

In case you were wondering, IM agreed beforehand to participate in this informal fundraiser. The reason why I chose him is because I personally find his thread topics to be useful. Basically, I see him as my closest competitor.

Finally something I can agree with!

(The underlined)

[Infected Mushroom]

Now imagine if I put in 100 dollars to bolster my Lannister ties...

[Shofercia]

Erm, poll's biased. I value IM more than Xero. So why would I pay more for Xero? Makes no economic sense to me. Reverse the values, and I'll consider joining the thread.

[Vectrova]

Erm, poll's biased. I value IM more than Xero. So why would I pay more for Xero? Makes no economic sense to me. Reverse the values, and I'll consider joining the thread.

No good there, all of Xerographica's threads make no economic sense. Never have.

Edit - For the record: I find Infected Mushroom's posts more useful simply because they aren't just the same slog of insane breeds of logic every single time with only an intermediate gap between them. Would I spend money on either of you? Of course not, that's ridiculous and so is the entire thread premise.

[Xerographica]

Erm, poll's biased. I value IM more than Xero. So why would I pay more for Xero? Makes no economic sense to me. Reverse the values, and I'll consider joining the thread.

To which poll are you referring? This thread has two polls...

1. voting poll
2. donating poll

Participating in the voting poll is self-explanatory. To participate in the donating poll you first have to make a donation to this forum. Let's say that you donate $9.99 to this forum. You would round it up to $10 dollars and reply to this thread how you want it divided between IM and myself. For example...

IM: $10
Xero: $0

Then I'd edit the OP to update the donating poll. So far I'm the only person that has participated in the donating poll.

[Forsher]

Erm, poll's biased. I value IM more than Xero. So why would I pay more for Xero? Makes no economic sense to me. Reverse the values, and I'll consider joining the thread.

No good there, all of Xerographica's threads make no economic sense. Never have.

Edit - For the record: I find Infected Mushroom's posts more useful simply because they aren't just the same slog of insane breeds of logic every single time with only an intermediate gap between them. Would I spend money on either of you? Of course not, that's ridiculous and so is the entire thread premise.

The repetitive nature of Xero's threads aren't the problem, per se. The very niche subject matter isn't the problem either. The problem is that they don't change. A reasonably sized forum (e.g. NSG) should be able to sustain Xero's threads. It can't, though, because the way he thinks and responds doesn't change at all. This subject in the hands of anyone else? Well, it'd probably result in threads that behaved like the early Xero threads.

Infected Mushroom's very, very different. People just hate his threads for the meme; there's nothing wrong with them, they're just weird takes... it's not pages of golf puns, the Sibirsky school, trollnaming, anti-mod circlejerking, slembanana/silver medal/other instances of posters bullying other posters and crying foul at the suggestion you call what they did what it was or any other of a number of things that are or have been wrong on, in or about NSG. They're not even, as you say, like Xero's threads; IM isn't against all expectations no different, with each iteration he appears to grow rather than remain constant and unchanging even as the world around warps.

[Martian Alliance]

Look at these welfare queens.

[Dogmeat]

If I don't spend any money on you, will either of you stop posting?

[Xerographica]

Erm, poll's biased. I value IM more than Xero. So why would I pay more for Xero? Makes no economic sense to me. Reverse the values, and I'll consider joining the thread.

No good there, all of Xerographica's threads make no economic sense. Never have.

Edit - For the record: I find Infected Mushroom's posts more useful simply because they aren't just the same slog of insane breeds of logic every single time with only an intermediate gap between them. Would I spend money on either of you? Of course not, that's ridiculous and so is the entire thread premise.

To which premise are you referring?

1. Your perception of other people's usefulness matters.

Clearly you don't think that this premise is ridiculous, given that here you are sharing your perception that my threads are useless.

2. Voting and spending aren't equally effective at measuring usefulness.

Do you think that this premise is ridiculous? If so, why? If not, then perhaps you think the third premise is ridiculous...

3. Spending is better than voting at measuring usefulness.

Do you think that this premise is ridiculous? If so, why?

[Wine-loving Chimps]

Is- is this trying to make NSG into Patreon?

[Bombadil]

Is- is this trying to make NSG into Patreon?

It's succeeding in making NSG drink Patron.

[Bombadil]

No good there, all of Xerographica's threads make no economic sense. Never have.

Edit - For the record: I find Infected Mushroom's posts more useful simply because they aren't just the same slog of insane breeds of logic every single time with only an intermediate gap between them. Would I spend money on either of you? Of course not, that's ridiculous and so is the entire thread premise.

To which premise are you referring?

1. Your perception of other people's usefulness matters.

Clearly you don't think that this premise is ridiculous, given that here you are sharing your perception that my threads are useless.

2. Voting and spending aren't equally effective at measuring usefulness.

Do you think that this premise is ridiculous? If so, why? If not, then perhaps you think the third premise is ridiculous...

3. Spending is better than voting at measuring usefulness.

Do you think that this premise is ridiculous? If so, why?

No, the premise that everything should be valued by spending, it's horribly reductive and inherently unequal.

We're not amoebas. In fact we have evolved from that zero sum game of determining survival and worth.

..but.. you've heard this before and soon we'll have more bees.

I hereby vow to myself never to post in these threads again.. that's my vote.

[Xerographica]

The repetitive nature of Xero's threads aren't the problem, per se. The very niche subject matter isn't the problem either. The problem is that they don't change. A reasonably sized forum (e.g. NSG) should be able to sustain Xero's threads. It can't, though, because the way he thinks and responds doesn't change at all. This subject in the hands of anyone else? Well, it'd probably result in threads that behaved like the early Xero threads.

Infected Mushroom's very, very different. People just hate his threads for the meme; there's nothing wrong with them, they're just weird takes... it's not pages of golf puns, the Sibirsky school, trollnaming, anti-mod circlejerking, slembanana/silver medal/other instances of posters bullying other posters and crying foul at the suggestion you call what they did what it was or any other of a number of things that are or have been wrong on, in or about NSG. They're not even, as you say, like Xero's threads; IM isn't against all expectations no different, with each iteration he appears to grow rather than remain constant and unchanging even as the world around warps.

Of course I'm biased, but I feel like my OPs have all been pretty diverse. Admittedly, the threads themselves have tended to converge on the same economic issues... but I'm not sure if I can take all the responsibility for this. I'm pro-market, the rest of you are not. You feel in some circumstances the market isn't the best system for allocating society's resources. I disagree. So it's only natural that our discussions eventually converge on the same economic issues.