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I don't think I need to be convinced of any of this. Yes living in Germany is better than living in Greece. Obviously, grand-scale cooperation is better when you integrate the plot over time, and it is self-reinforcing just like how mass defection can create a negative feedback loop. Of course, it would be better if everyone acted like German than the Greeks or worse the Arabs.
But what if you literally live among Arabs like me? What if you find yourself in a job market where openings have 2000 applications in a day or two (I wish I was exaggerating, oh btw there are an order of magnitude less job openings per capita than NA and EU), what if you lived in a country with open borders such that wages for skilled entry-level technical work are depressed to less than 10k USD a year, once again this is true! What if you could drastically improve the station of you life with just a little bit of funny business? You are telling me you would rather take a job for 10k after 6 months of looking instead of lie a little and double or triple your salary to a grand 30k USD?
(Personally, I have gotten out my recent slump and have a good job lined up because I actually know what I am doing, this will take me well into the upper middle class, so there is some irony in what I am saying, but the experience of eating shit until I got this opportunity is still fresh in my mind (and always will be, not going to forget where I came from), I hate to be dramatic but it was positively traumatizing )
To Americans, cherish your fucking Economy where you can afford to have integrity.
I'm german, a good "hajnalbrain cooperatebot". I assumed you were talking about defecting, cheating, in the west. I have never lived in the arab world, if you exclude Köln. So I don't know. Maybe try to cooperate in some circles, on the margin?
I will copperate with those who cooperate with me and defect with those who defect against me. Simple as. Cooperarion is default.
In no normal world can I get a job offer where Id be in the upper middle class and the lower class in the same week, but thats what open borders and millions of poverty stricken third worlders at the door does. Employers will pretend some random Indian who is the same on paper can substitute you and expdct you to take the bait. I consider offering me a poverty job defecting against me, go hire some Indian from a village with a "cs degree", dont offer me this bullshit, I would spit on their faces if I could without landing a felony, it would be less disrespectful.
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Cooperating «in some circles» to survive the free-for-all defection equilibrium is exactly how they (and we Eastern Slavs, and frankly most everyone else) have got into that mess. Clannishness and familism are the other side of corruption.
I was thinking more of creating your own clan of sorts based on moral criteria. And generally cooperating when the proportion of defectors is less clear/more favourable than usual.
Oh, that's how they can start too... First protecting the garden of idealism, then naked clannish power struggle. The assabiyah route is inherently treacherous.
But ofc this is a natural idea. This, or more realistically moving to the West.
Yeah I didn't say I've thought this through, could be islam started as such a clan, and I hate it. I don't see why the clan would have to keep defecting outside when outside is cooperating, though. Other religions manage it, my own flavour of goldenrule-utilitarian-cooperate-thing manages it.
To be clear, I do not believe that Islam started in this way, in a way that matters, or that it proceeds this way. I think Arabs/Bedouins have been clannish since prehistory, in comparison with modern Europeans, but also Persians, Anatolians and other groups they've contacted; and they make such a big deal out of Islam and literal adherence to its precepts precisely because it's their best way to cope with their impulses, the rigid platform to maintain a semblance of a supraclannish high-trust society, which at some points in history worked rather well. Arabs dole out antisocial punishment despite Islam. Without Islam or another comparable totalizing faith they degenerate into pure defectbots who cannot be trusted to not backstab anyone outside of their small cliques and family groups, if even that.
What I was talking about is that if someone in that environment like zinker, who cerebrally recognizes the advantage of high-trust communities, begins to cooperate within a small group of like-minded people and maintain a honest, merit-based system in their limited domain of control (which seemed to be what you propose with your «in some circles», though I might have jumped to conclusions and you were still going on with the self-sacrificing do-gooder bullshit for the benefit of the broader society), there's a high chance that this degenerates into a yet another Machiavellian «clan» in a few iterations, when newcomers internalize only the help-allies-sink-strangers principle, and not the abstract project of getting to everyone-helps-everyone-else equilibrium.
That's a correct reading of my comment, although I take exception to 'self sacrificing do-gooder bullshit' - it's just a combination of "cerebrally recognizing the advantage of high-trust communities", and living in one. In an ideal high-trust society which punishes defectors, blind cooperation is the rational machiavellian way.
On whether islam helps or harms, the level of cooperation is terrible even within their garden. How low can they get in their natural state, really? I find it more plausible that islam enshrines terrible habits (muhammad was a deceiver, and so is his god, the religion comes down hard on the wrong side of the Euthyphro dilemma, etc) .
Anyway in defectbotland the temporary garden could work. Do you have any (other) examples of corruption to systematic outside-defection occuring?
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